Microsoft bought Minecraft for $2.5 billion last week, despite the fact that they dismissed it as "rubbish" when it was first released.
Currently the head of 22Cans, Peter Molyneux has worked with Microsoft for half a decade as chief of Lionhead Studios. In his version of the story, Molyneux was an avid fan of Minecraft when "you could only chip out blocks pretty much and that was all" and Microsoft "thought it was rubbish."
"You know, it didn't have a character, it didn't have a story, it didn't have a tutorial, the graphics were, you know, like 1980s graphics and they totally, totally missed that," Molyneux justified Microsoft's position. "To consumers... they didn't care."
Xbox boss Phil Spencer previously admitted that Microsoft "really didn't know what we were getting into" when it started working with Mojang on the Xbox 360 version of Minecraft in 2011.
"The next year we shipped it and it became the best-selling online game of all-time for us on Xbox 360, and if you've looked over the years it's always stayed at the top of Xbox Live usage," he admitted.