John Carmack revealed that he had a version of Minecraft running on Oculus Quest with full positional tracking at one point, but said Facebook and Microsoft would never be able to align “schedules” to send the game to production suitable for mobile headsets.
New tweets from the Facebook Virtual Reality Tech Guide provide the latest details on attempts made to bring Minecraft to Facebook’s standalone Oculus Quest headphones. While there were clearly discussions between Microsoft and Facebook, there have been no recent news of the game reaching Quest, and Carmack’s latest tweets give a little more context.
No decision or event in the gaming fandom is without controversy, but as a mostly outsider, it seems that Microsoft has turned out to be quite a good steward of the Minecraft legacy. I’m still sad that I don’t have a VR version on Go / Quest, but I can’t really discuss your priorities.
Then, replying to a user who said that Minecraft in Quest would be amazing, Carmack wrote:
I had it running with full position tracking, but we never lined up schedules to get it into production. You could still get sick hanging around the terrain, but walking was great.
Minecraft is available for Gear VR and Rift, but it has yet to debut in independent virtual reality headsets like Go or Quest despite strong community support and some efforts to bring in unofficial versions of the software. Microsoft’s last update was in September 2019, when it flagged the issue as ‘under review’ in the company’s comment tracker.
Carmack now works at Oculus for Facebook in limited capacity, after she transitioned to a consulting role in November last year.
