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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