Drawn by the prospect of rebuilding an architectural mecca, he decided to put off building his hometown in Germany and switch to the city. “The quality was so much better than in Frankfurt because the open-street map data is so good in New York City,” he said. On a whim, he tested the program on New York City, and entire neighborhoods rose in gray scale across his screen.

He originally wanted to build his neighborhood in Frankfurt using a generator he developed in late 2019, which creates rough outlines of buildings inside the game using Google Maps data. The leader of the New York City team is a 21-year-old coder from Frankfurt, who goes by the username Minefact. In this project, called Build the Earth, the largest team has 2,731 members around the world, who are dedicated to a single goal: Reconstructing New York City on a 1:1 scale, with each Minecraft building block representing one cubic meter of the real world. It wasn’t until the upheaval of the past two years and a simultaneous coding breakthrough that the dream of constructing the entire Earth finally felt achievable, or at least worth attempting.

They have re-created all of Westeros from Game of Thrones, an imagined version of the ancient city of Babylon, and complex structures like France’s Orleans Cathedral. With an array of simple, three-dimensional blocks at their disposal, players can fashion almost anything. This was especially true for Minecraft, the best-selling game of all time, which saw 141 million active monthly users during 2021. It’s not surprising that video games - a reliable vehicle for escapism and stress relief - experienced a pandemic popularity boom.

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