Nintendo considered making a game not too dissimilar to indie hit, Minecraft, way back in the era of the Nintendo 64. While it ultimately never came to light, it's one that Donkey Kong creator, Shigeru Miyamoto still regrets to this day.
This news came to light during an interview with Glixel, where Miyamoto said that he was a big fan of Minecraft, but still lamented the fact that Nintendo was never the one to create it.
"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," he said.
"It’s really impressive to me to see how they’ve been able to take that idea and turn it into a product," he continued, perhaps suggesting why Nintendo didn't move forward with its prototypes. It is indeed sometimes difficult for people to understand why a sandbox that lets you build using blocks might be fun, but it could be that those people (and indeed Nintendo at the time) couldn't put such an experience in the same context as a game, when shooters and platformers ruled the roost.
As VG247 points out too, it's certainly possible that Nintendo ran into the problem of players building penises and other adult material out of the blocks - though that perhaps would be less of an issue in a time where consoles weren't online - save for the wonderful, ill-fated Dreamcast.
Perhaps in reality, Nintendo knew that without the ability for larger scale multiplayer an experience like Minecraft just wouldn't work.
What do you guys think?
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