A deal has been secured which will see Minecraft make its way onto the virtual reality platform Oculus Rift, the company has announced.
Due to its popularity, Minecraft will no doubt be a big pull in getting people to adapt virtual reality as soon as it is available next year. Doom co-creator John Carmack put in the hardwork however to make the deal possible by effectively creating the port himself.
Carmack had to sign a contract with Microsoft which stated that all of his work on the port belonged to Microsoft. Not only that, Carmack didn’t receive a single penny from Microsoft for his work but he believed enough in bringing Minecraft to the Rift and its importance to the platform that he went above and beyond to make sure it happened.
Minecraft was always a target Oculus Rift wanted to bring to VR, however with Facebook’s acquisition of Oculus and Microsoft purchasing Mojang, a deal became less likely. It took Carmack bugging Microsoft which eventually led to him being able to develop the prototype, however under a contract that Oculus’ laywers were unhappy with.
“I would just drive home this case about, ‘Look, we don’t want to ask anything from you, just let us try, let me try to build this and if you think it’s cool we’ll figure out what we want to do from there,” said Carmack.
“This is terrible, they own everything you do, we have no recourse, there’s no recourse any of this will happen,” said Carmack, speaking from the perspective of the companies lawyers. “John, you’re basically working for Microsoft when you’re working on this.”
Carmack’s hard work has paid off and he believes it is the single most important application that they could have done for virtual reality.
“I think [Minecraft is] the single most important application that we can do for virtual reality, to make sure that we have an army of fanatic, passionate supporters that will advocate why VR is great,” he said. “This is why you want to do some of it every single day. It’s part of this infinite playability that we’re currently lacking in our current set of titles. So this is a huge, huge win for me. Everybody that work on that at Oculus and Facebook, you all have my deepest thanks for making this happen.”
We’re thrilled to announce Minecraft for the #Rift! Tune in to the #OC2 keynotes: http://t.co/fmSRmeDvLh pic.twitter.com/Nk6gpwDmrC
— Oculus (@oculus) September 24, 2015