As much as Nintendo's very own Shigeru Miyamoto admires the gameplay handiwork and creativity of Mojang's "Minecraft," he actually confessed that the studio was supposed to make their own version of the game.
In an interview with Glixel, the games industry legend behind the classics like "Mario" and "The Legend of Zelda" stated that: "I do like Minecraft, but really more from the perspective of the fact that I really feel like that's something we should have made. 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. It's really impressive to me to see how they've been able to take that idea and turn it into a product."
"Minecraft" was developed in 2011 by indie company Mojang, and it still is doing exceptionally well until now, even to the point of having numerous fan videos in YouTube, having its own story by Telltale Games, and having its own movie coming in 2019. Sometime in 2014, Microsoft was able to acquire both Mojang and "Minecraft."
Nintendo had its own attempt in doing so by creating a similar game called "Super Mario Maker," launched in 2015 on Wii U and also got a 3DS re-release just recently this month. The game still had the side scrolling feature of the classic "Super Mario" games but, here, players will have the ability to create and play their own custom levels, based on "Super Mario Bros.," "Super Mario Bros. 3," "Super Mario World" and "New Super Mario Bros. U," and share them online with friends.
Super Mario Maker was well-received upon its release, with its user interface and course editing tools praised by game critics. In May 2016, it was reported by Nintendo that over 7.2 million courses had been created worldwide, with a record of being played over 600 million times.