Nintendo have expressed, openly, their admiration and respect for Minecraft before. And now, in an interview with Glixel, Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto took the time to express his respect for the game and its creators yet again, noting that the idea was always something that Nintendo had experimented with in the past, but unable to get to work.
“I do like Minecraft, but really more from the perspective of the fact that I really feel like that’s something we should have made,” Miyamoto said. “We had actually done a lot of experiments that were similar to that back in the N64 days and we had some designs that were very similar. It’s really impressive to me to see how they’ve been able to take that idea and turn it into a product.”
I think in the end, it turned out for the best that Nintendo didn’t do something like Minecraft– one of the reasons that game took off like it did was because of its open, early access style development, its embracing of the internet, and the amount of control it gave players. It also took off because it became available on just about every system known to man on the planet. Under Nintendo, none of that would have happened, and chances are Minecraft would never have become the phenomenon that it is today.
