One of the biggest pieces of news to come out of the Oculus Connect 2 event in California this week was the announcement that Minecraft would officially be coming to Oculus Rift when it launches, and Oculus CTO John Carmack admitted on stage afterward that he had a difficult time waiting until the announcement to talk about it.

“Minecraft was my quest really for the last year and a half,” Carmack said during his keynote. “Really before [Samsung] Gear VR even existed, Minecraft was something I was desperate to get into virtual reality because I thought it would be critically important.”

Carmack explained that he had been working with Minecraft in virtual reality before an official agreement to release the game on Oculus even existed, saying that the gameplay and code structure of Minecraft made it a good proof of concept to test out Oculus hardware and software. He also noted that first-person games like Minecraft are automatically more immersive experiences than something played on a tabletop, perhaps a subtle dig at Microsoft’s HoloLens Minecraft demonstration.

“One of the core lessons from first-person games all the way back to Wolfenstein was that taking a game that you look at and you look at the small characters down there, it becomes so much more powerful when you are inside it and they’re happening at your scale,” Carmack said. Carmack is one of the co-founders of Id Software and was the lead programmer on early first-person games like Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake. “I always said that Wolfenstein 3D was basically just Gauntlet with a new perspective.”

“I have memories of being in [Minecraft in VR], and that’s noteworthy,” he added. “I mean, everybody has memories of playing games, but I have memories of actually being inside there, about coming up to a shoreline or being lost deep underground, running low on supplies … As far as my brain is concerned, that’s something that happened to me and I was there.”

Carmack admitted that while he believes gaming will eventually represent less than half of the virtual reality market once it is mature, he recognizes that “it’s clearly kind of the leading, sharp end of the spear right now that’s getting people excited and enthusiastic about [virtual reality].”

You can watch all of the keynote talks from Oculus Connect 2 on the company’s official Twitch page. Carmack’s talk begins at roughly 3:31:00 on the video, but Oculus Chief Scientist Michael Abrash’s talk is also worth watching, which begins at roughly 1:35:30.

Screenshot via Oculus | Twitch