Notch, creator of Minecraft, founder of Mojang and slayer of mutant, demonic babies* (it has not been confirmed or denied Notchs participation in the slaying of mutant, demonic babies) has-for as long as I’ve known about him, worn this hat. In fact, he’s rarely seen without it apparently, thus leading to the ever standing question...

What power does this hat weild? Is the hat sentient, and evil, and has plans for world domination through video games and has fused itself to Notchs head after he tried it on at some guys garage sale for his dead grandpa, thus giving him complete and total access to Notchs brain to send him waves of telepathic messages? Hmm, if not, I think I just wrote a new Troma film.

Or, is Notch--like so many of the people who play Minecraft--a neckbeard who sits in his moms basement and screams “meme!” at his computer screen all day while sending funny cat gifs to everyone. That’s probably the more logical conclusion, but for the sake of this article and me not getting the pants sued off of me (it’s really hard for me to shop for new pants, so I need these). I’m gonna go with the way more entertaining demon hat monster theory. Because screw it. The hat clearly is an icon of Notch as much as he himself is an icon of himself. When you think of Notch, you think “hat”. It’s word association. Seeing Notch without his hat is the hat's clever way of staying incognito to make sure that he doesn’t raise too much suspicion upon himself. See, if Notch wore him everywhere they went, people would start to wonder, “Hmmm…what’s under that hat?”

Anyway, because video games are so “in” these days, along with superheroes and having your intestines ripped out by a fat swedish woman named Helga, the hat probably realized it was an easy in to get people to mindlessly obey him, but not without a host. So he used Notch and his supreme wizard programming skills to create Minecraft, which then has subliminal messages embedded deep within the game which when flashed at the correct moment make the player drop the game and join the hats army.

Perhaps now, with his loyal fanbase of rabid teenage angst and young adult disinterest, the hat and Notch could finally taking over the world, but Notch doesn’t agree to his iron fisted ways, resulting in a TOTALLY KICKASS WICKED AWESOME fight on top of something called like, the Wizard Cliff whereupon the hat gains an actual body and Notch has to defeat it and the hat’s like “HAHAHA! MUAHAHAHA! DEAR FRIEND, DO YOU REALLY THINK YOU CAN WIN THIS?!” and lightning strikes and Notch grins and he’s all like “…let’s kick it up a Notch” and the hat groans cause that’s a terrible pun and then Notch kicks the hat down the cliff where it gets eaten by sharks and Notch grabs the mighty sword of Berukatal and he’s all like raising it in the air while wicked guitar solos play all like biddly widdly widdly waaaaaah and he’s like “I AM NOTCH, SLAYER OF HEADWARE!” and then cue end credits.

Or Notch just bought a cool hat. That…that’s totally a possible theory too. I just wanted to write silly hat jokes.