Instead of trying to sue the pants off developer Mojang for making Minecraft—a world-fiddling game involving random realms constructed from textured cubes—it sounds like Danish toymaker LEGO is joining forces to release a physical set of toys based on the multimillions selling sandbox builder.
“Seeing LEGO Minecraft sets is also our dream, so we linked to one of the projects,” writes Mojang on a LEGO-related site. “It’s clear to us that there are many creative people with good ideas for this and we want to throw our own hat into the ring and start this project to bring the best LEGO Minecraft builders together.”
Since Minecraft is about building stuff with blocks in a virtutal world, and you can do similar things with LEGO bricks in the real world, Mojang reasons “Minecraft and LEGO were meant to be together.”
But wait, isn’t Minecraft infinitely complex and random? How do you build a popular toy-set off that? By involving the Minecraft community, of course. Mojang says it’s working with a couple longstanding LEGO Minecraft fans, but that it’ll also survey the community for “the best LEGO Minecraft models to also join [its] efforts.”
The deal isn’t officially done yet—Mojang says it’s still working “to secure a licensing agreement,” but Mojang’s business guy, Daniel Kaplan, tweeted that the company was “working directly with LEGO to make this happen.” Assuming it does, Mojang says it will donate its one percent royalty from LEGO CUUSOO to charity.
We love Minecraft here at PCWorld—it made our top 10 games of 2011 and came close to snatching our game-of-the-year spot—so fingers crossed this happens, and soon.
Interact with Game On: Twitter – Facebook – Get in touch, and sign up to have the Game On newsletter e-mailed to you each week.