14 DAY TRIAL // It appears that Nintendo is considering bringing Minecraft, the popular sandbox building game, to the Wii U and 3DS systems, in order to further cement its grasp over the gaming world.
In a way, it never made sense for Minecraft to be on every other platform out there except for the two Nintendo ones, and according to some execs at the Japanese corporation, Nintendo is also well aware of this.
Shigeru Miyamoto and Shinya Takahashi, leaders of two of Nintendo's internal development teams, have expressed their belief that Mojang's popular crafting and survival game is a good fit for both the 3DS and Wii U platforms, as the touch controls on the devices would allow Minecraft to be even more accessible to gamers.
"We've always thought internally that using the GamePad would probably make for a Minecraft that's very easy to play. And, of course, if we were to do something with Minecraft on the 3DS, similarly we would probably do it where it would be easier to play and could probably reach a lot of kids," Takahashi says in an interview with Kotaku.
"What's interesting is that, in Japan, Minecraft is not popular in the way it is in the U.S. and Europe. So we've also thought that, if we were able to do a partnership like that, it might bring opportunity to help make Minecraft more popular in Japan," he further explains.
Miyamoto says that, although he himself has never played the game, he is confident that Nintendo's hardware is the only one able to capitalize on the widespread appeal of the touch-based mobile version of Minecraft, while at the same time providing the rigorous control scheme that affords players precision while playing.
Minecraft has currently sold over 50 million copies worldwide, and its players have managed to pull off many incredible feats so far, from a 1:1 recreation of Manhattan to a similar one of the entirety of Denmark, in addition to the usual pop culture ones like King's Landing from Game of Thrones and The Shire from Tolkien's Lord of the Rings saga.
In a way, Minecraft is sort of like Mario, another young generation's ubiquitous go-to game, and given the amount of Mario and Zelda-related stuff that fans of Nintendo have created over the years, it's astounding that the Japanese company seems so lax about porting it over to its platforms.
Minecraft is currently available on PC, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and mobile devices, with Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita ports scheduled to come this August.
