It seems that legendary developer and CTO at Oculus Consulting, John Carmack, has tried to bring Minecraft to all Oculus headsets out there. That includes Oculus Quest, and while we don’t have a proper port yet, it certainly wasn’t for lack of trying.
Answering a question about why there is not yet Minecraft To Quest, Carmack replied that he had actually already implemented a version on the separate 6DOF headphones, but for some reason it just didn’t work.
“I had it running with full position tracking, but we never lined up schedules to get it into production,” Carmack says in a recent tweet. “You could still get sick hanging around the terrain, but walking was great.
Since 2015, Carmack has considered Minecraft in virtual reality, your “search”. Putting the unfortunate wording aside, it appears that the internal conflict reversed any chance of the block-based sandbox game reaching the independent 6DOF.
It’s a shame, considering that even the now largely outdated Samsung Gear VR has its own custom version of the game, which launched in the 2016 heyday of mobile 3DOF VR headsets.
Even Oculus Go, which benefits from many games in the Gear VR library, doesn’t have its own version of Minecraft. This, according to the findings of VR Scout, was based on technical issues at the time. This is what a Minecraft The developer had to say about Go and Quest support in October 2019:
“One of the main things that delayed Go was a dependency on the library that my team has added for the next update 1.14. That’s necessary but not enough: When we add a new platform, we have to fully support it in our daily tests, both with hardware and, most importantly, with the time of everyone who works on it. The Quest will be an additional engineering job beyond Go. I can’t promise either version until they are officially greenlit. “
There may still be a ray of hope for Quest users, despite Carmack’s discontinued implementations. As the platform matures, Oculus should continue to channel games that move the system to the Oculus Store.
It may well have come down to the company’s need to maintain tight control over Quest’s official content library when it was first released in May 2019. The company’s recent offering to allow Quest developers Publish your apps through an upcoming alternative app distribution channel, which can function as an early access store or Oculus Share-style platform, is an interesting proposition. Perhaps a possible ‘experimental’ version of Minecraft it could land there, eliminating the need for the high bar for comfort that Oculus has exercised as a content gatekeeper.
Of course, we are not holding our collective breaths, but at least we know that there is a version in the Oculus offices ready to use now.
