Minecraft

Millions of Minecrafters around the world just got a great reason to buy Facebook’s Oculus Rift virtual reality headset.

Microsoft Monday announced the debut of Minecraft, which it acquired along with developer Mojang two years ago, on the Oculus VR headset. The VR experience will let players explore their pixelated worlds as if they were actually there. Players can get the virtual reality version of the game as part of a free update to the Minecraft Windows 10 Beta edition.

Minecraft’s foray into virtual reality began earlier this year when it announced the game would come to Oculus Rift headsets. A virtual reality version of the game for Gear VR headsets came out in April.

“Since then, in exchange for scraps of old meat dropped from an overhead grill, our heroic team have worked relentlessly to further tweak and refine the experience, making our Oculus Rift feature-set even more impressive,” Marsh Davies of Mojang wrote in a blog post Monday morning.

Microsoft grabbed a lot of attention last year when it released a demo of Minecraft using the HoloLens to display elements of the pixelated world within the real world. But that is still a ways out, and in the meantime, Microsoft didn’t want to miss out on bringing one of the most popular games in the world to virtual reality.

Players will be able to peer around the expansive world they’ve created while on the headset, and movement is controlled using an Xbox One controller. Since there’s much less processing power needed to render the low-def Minecraft world, there’s no blur or lag. But since you’re still using a controller to move around, your brain can get a little confused by the lack of movement that your eyes say should be happening.

“Decades of training have taught people to sit still when they play games, but that’s all about to change,” Saxs Persson of Microsoft’s Minecraft team said in a video introducing the new virtual reality version of the game.

If all of this is too much, gamers have the ability to step back into a “Minecraft living room” where they can play the game on a screen, still within the virtual reality experience.

Microsoft already has a connection to Oculus, with an Xbox controller included in each Rift kit. But this new Minecraft announcement shows that Microsoft isn’t shying away from virtual reality just because it’s working on augmented reality, and reinforces Xbox’s goal of making games playable on more Microsoft devices.

In June, Microsoft announced that Minecraft had surpassed 100 million copies sold, making it the second best-selling game of all time, after the omnipresent Tetris.

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