Markus “Notch” Persson was one of the most vocal critics of the recent Facebook acquisition of Oculus VR, recently stating that he’d cancelled a proposed Oculus Rift version of Minecraft after news of the buyout emerged.
After Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey played down the cancellation, suggesting Notch hadn’t done much work on the project anyway, the developer responded by claiming the planned version would have been a free version designed to promote the VR concept.
Here’s Notch’s full statement, provided to Kotaku.
I haven’t done any Minecraft development at all for a long time, but I’ve built several prototypes of games for the Oculus Rift. I never play ANY mods for Minecraft because they make me feel weird feelings about second guessing my work. A lot of the mods do things better than I ever could.
Other developers at Mojang have played the mod, and the mobile Minecraft development team has worked on an Oculus Rift prototype of the game. The last thing I said to the oculus people before I left was that I would love for us to make a free version of Minecraft (“Minecraft VR Edition” perhaps?) to help promote VR, even if I don’t think a game with as much GUI as Minecraft is ideal for VR.
He also tweeted the following in a conversation with developer Cliff Bleszinski.
@therealcliffyb also, the "ball i'm taking home" was a potential free version of Minecraft designed to promote VR.
— Markus Persson (@notch) March 27, 2014Seems like fans hoping to see Minecraft on VR systems will have to settle for fan-made mods.
