One of the perks of having a pre-teen child is that you ultimately get to enjoy whatever toys you convince your kids they want for Christmas. Or, in my case, whatever toys your kid sees his fellows in school actually have.

VR headsets. Steam Decks. Gaming computer upgrades. Laptops. All sorts of premium controllers and an infinite amount of games, all going through without budget reviews or actual grownup planning. Emotional purchases that literally drain the pockets of a working adult. And all this tech lies around at your fingertips once the clock hits 10PM and your kid gets to bed. God this sounds amazing.

I’ve spent several years playing Minecraft with my kid and his friends (even built him a dedicated server from spare parts to keep his world safe and lag-free), so naturally I was curious – what would our beloved blocky universe feel like from the inside, in VR?

Turns out, it’s absolutely mind-blowing. The sense of scale was the first shock. A stack of five blocks is suddenly a towering wall. My modest PC-built house? In VR, it’s a literal cottage. Hills roll into the distance. Trees loom overhead. Oceans stretch wider than anything I’ve ever seen (and that’s because my render distance sucks on a nVidia RTX 1080 GPU). Everything is pumped up to the point where you feel small — and that’s insanely overwhelming.

Then there’s the immersion. Looking an Enderman in the eyes in flat mode is unnerving. Doing it in VR? It’s a full-on once-in-a-lifetime experience. The thing towers over you. Even pigs are intimidating. And turning your head to see behind you—actually see, not analog-stick see—feels like discovering a sixth sense. If you’ve never ducked in real life because a bat flapped at your face in a virtual cave, have you even lived?

And thank the pixels above, Minecraft VR doesn’t make you flail around like a deranged toddler just to walk. Unlike other VR titles that expect me to paddle through virtual space like I’m trying to dry-swim across the floor, Minecraft VR lets me use normal controls. My wrists approve. So does my furniture.

You’d think that Microsoft, the self-proclaimed world builder, would be doubling down on this kind of experience. After all, they own Mojang. They acquired Activision-Blizzard. Bethesda. Their gaming empire is basically the MCU of digital worlds. And yet… Minecraft VR? Dead. Buried. Canceled. Yeeted from orbit.

Let’s be fair: they did try. VR support came to Gear VR in 2016, Oculus Rift later that year, and even Windows Mixed Reality. PSVR got a version in 2020. There was even a “Living Room Mode” where you could pretend to sit in a Minecraft-themed armchair and play the game on a giant floating screen. Cute. But I did not have a VR headset laying around back in 2016. Now I do.

But now it all quietly faded, Gear VR got deprecated. Updates slowed. And by 2023, Microsoft and Mojang began quietly removing VR support. Like a magician trying to sneak the rabbit back into the hat. By 2025, Minecraft VR was officially out. Gone from PC. Gone from PlayStation. If you updated, you lost it. If you wanted to play it again, tough blocks.

Meanwhile, Microsoft’s VR efforts haven’t vanished. Oh no. They’ve just… pivoted. To business. Because apparently the future of virtual reality is not slaying the Ender Dragon with your kid, it’s sitting in a cartoon boardroom talking to Bob from Accounting while roasting virtual marshmallows.

Yes, Microsoft is all-in on VR for Teams. They call it Mesh. It’s a thing. You can join meetings as a floating torso. High-five avatars. Sit in beach-themed offices. Toss beanbags in a VR retreat while your manager watches silently from a holographic projection. It’s like Minecraft, but with much more Creepers and an infinitely more number of performance reviews.

I genuinely wish this was satire.

To recap: they nuked Minecraft VR, one of the most logical, imaginative uses for VR, in favor of cartoon corporate campfires. They had a good thing. They killed the good thing. Then they built a worse thing and gave it PowerPoint support.

There is still community effort going on. Enter Vivecraft, a mod built by people who actually play Minecraft and want to see it thrive in VR. It’s for Java Edition. It works beautifully. Motion controls, room-scale support, full immersion. You can duel with skeletons like a proper warrior, not a detached head clicking a mouse. It’s smoother than anything official ever was. And the modders (still) keep it updated. Because they care.

Microsoft, if you’re reading this—and I know your monitoring tools are top-notch—you had the golden goose and decided to pivot to goose-themed quarterly team-building VR events instead.

We could’ve had dragons. Instead, we got PowerBI dashboards and these are frighening enough on their own.

Born too early to explore Minecraft in VR, indeed. But hey, I’m just in time for my 10 AM Mesh meeting. I’ll be the floating avatar with dead eyes and a soul that longs for pickaxes and pixelated sunsets.

See you in the (modded) blocky metaverse. I’ll be the one wearing Netherite.