Carmack: I was desperate to get Minecraft into virtual reality

Industry veteran and Oculus VR chief tech officer John Carmack has explained the lengths he went to to secure a virtual reality version of Minecraft.

The game was announced by Oculus for Gear VR last night.

“Minecraft was my quest, really, for the last year and a half,” Carmack told VentureBeat. “Before Gear VR even existed, Minecraft was something I was desperate to get into virtual reality because I thought it would be critically important."

“We had [Minecraft creator Markus Persson] Notch over and we showed him early prototype stuff, and I talked with him about geeky programmer stuff for a long time. We were trying to get into a situation where he would let us try to put the [mobile] game on Gear VR — if it’s great, then we’ll see where we can go from there.”

However, Facebook’s acquisition of Oculus threw a spanner in the works, with Notch publicly criticising the move and cancelling the then in-development VR version of his hit title. “Notch eventually got over that,” Carmack added, only to then encounter the potential road block that was Microsoft’s Mojang acquisition.

Our sister-site MCV has the full story.