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INTERVIEW LOG R-2026-06-25

micInterview / Interviews / Jun 25, 2026<br>“For most people, this path would be a very dumb decision.” – the creator of Voxile on the game’s turbulent and atypical genesis<br>Game industry legend Wouter van Oortmerssen on surviving in Early Access and the difficult task of standing apart from Minecraft.

Article by Ben Maxwell 31 MIN READ

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Written Jun 25, 2026<br>Developer VoxRay Games<br>Release Mar 10, 2025<br>Played on PC

While other industry names might come more readily to mind, few developers can claim to have shaped both the tools and philosophy of programming to the extent that Wouter van Oortmerssen has. A hugely influential figure during the Amiga-era, he crafted Amiga E and then went on to create at least nine more programming languages – alongside many smaller projects – over the course of a career that spans the past 35 years. He also worked at Crytek (Far Cry), Gearbox (Borderlands), and EA Maxis (Sim City), and was the primary author of FlatBuffers (a widely used cross-platform serialisation library) during his time at Google.<br>His most recent language, Lobster, is the basis for RPG and sandbox survival hybrid Voxile. It’s the debut release from VoxRay Games, a development studio founded by Van Oortmerssen, and currently in Early Access. But even with such a storied career, launching games is hard. In this interview we discuss the turbulent reality of being an indie studio with limited resources, finding an audience while trying to escape from Minecraft’s increasingly long shadow, the risks and rewards of building bespoke tools on a budget, and why there might just be a light at the end of the AI tunnel.<br>Voxray’s Wouter van Oortmerssen<br>01&sect; 01Why did you decide to start VoxRay Games?

Wouter van Oortmerssen: I was at Google at the time that I started experimenting with ray-traced graphics. I want beautiful graphics, but I don’t want to deal with the complexity of the modern graphics pipeline as you find them in most engines because it’s usually a lot of work to make. I wanted to see if we could do ray tracing, and to my surprise, it was actually fast enough. So I was like, ‘okay, I’m going to build a whole game on this’. What you’re seeing in Voxile is the first thing that I was researching.<br>At the same time I was thinking about what I want to spend the rest of my days doing. I enjoyed working with Google, but I was like, ‘okay, let’s just go build a game company because that’s really where my passion lies’. And so I started that with the idea to base it around this ray-tracing engine, and was able to attract some funding and hire some people.<br>So we started building this game around my vision of the future that, when I play a regular triple-A game or whatever, that I want a game where everything is modifiable, breakable, or buildable. In most triple-A games I can walk around and shoot all the scenery as much as I want, but nothing even budges. And I feel that, with today’s technologies, why do we still have that? Why can I not destroy the entire world if I so choose? Why can’t I dig a hole anywhere? Of course, that sounds familiar for games like Minecraft, but for all other games it’s not a thing. I wanted to make a game that’s a little bit more of a ‘traditional’ game, but that also has this layer of ‘everything is breakable’. And building with voxels is a great fit for that.<br>I didn’t want to make a Minecraft clone. I was more thinking in the direction of big open-world games like Skyrim and Fallout – that’s too much for an indie team, of course, but at least going that direction a little bit more. So we started building that. And at some point we came into Early Access.<br>02&sect; 02How did that go?

WVO: Our Early Access launch didn’t work so well for a couple of reasons. We were probably a bit on the early side, and we probably underestimated the amount of content and polish we needed to release. But in general, there were some bigger problems. I think the biggest one was player expectations. Like, the visuals we have, we can say all day long that our worlds are designed rather than procedurally generated, and that they have quests and guns and all these things that Minecraft doesn’t have. But 99% of the gamers that look at our game go, ‘it’s a prettier Minecraft’. And a lot of those people don’t care because they don’t necessarily want a prettier Minecraft, while the ones that do want that play our game and instead of finding Minecraft-style gameplay, they run up against all these quests and things like that. They’re like, ‘what the hell is this? I just want to build a base in the mountains’. [Laughs]<br>We had some other problems that were self-inflicted, too. For example, we released with really bad translations – we thought we...