


“John, you’re basically working for Microsoft when you’re working on this.” “This is terrible, they own everything you do, there’s no recourse any of this will happen,” they said, according to Carmack. I am so confident that it’ll be cool that I’ll agree to just about anything here’.”Īnd Carmack did, working under a deal that horrified his lawyers. “I would just drive home this case about, ‘Look, we don’t want to ask anything from you, just let me try to build this and if you think it’s cool we’ll figure out what we want to do from there. Carmack, however, wouldn’t stop calling Mojang. By the time he’d come around, he was selling the game to Microsoft.

But then, famously, he felt betrayed by the Oculus Facebook acquisition and cancelled his plans. We already know what happened next: Notch was invited to Oculus, chatted to Carmack about “geeky programmer” stuff, and provisionally agreed to a Minecraft port. One aspect of that was purely technical – Carmack had watched his kids play the C++ Pocket Edition version of Minecraft for tablets and phones, and thought it would be perfect for Oculus’ mobile headset, the Gear VR.
