EDMONTON -- Philip Mitchell’s favourite video game is Minecraft and he wanted to use it to give Edmonton some representation in the virtual world.
“In the past I've always searched up Edmonton in any sort of game, but I never found much results. So around July of this year I decided to give the city a bit of representation in games such as Minecraft,” said Mitchell.
Mitchell has been playing Minecraft since 2016. He started building this project on Nov. 22 and has been regularly working on it for three to four hours a day.
“The map consists of the downtown core, the quarters, the southern part of the river valley, and north ending just before the Royal Alexandra hospital.”
In addition to the buildings downtown, he also plans to add historic buildings, famous landmarks and proposed skyscrapers for educational purposes.
“I feel that there's a lot of great things about the city that not many people may know, and one of my goals is to share some of what is hidden with others.”
So far he has built 26 structures – including three bridges, nine skyscrapers and 14 smaller buildings – with each one taking between one to two hours to build “if I'm really into it.”
“The pandemic definitely made me do what I'm doing now… the amount of time I had motivated me to pursue this idea.”
Mitchell said he has been receiving a lot of positive messages online from others in Edmonton.
“It’s been great so far. I never expected to get so much support from others and to have people always waiting for the next post.”
His project is similar to the Build the Earth initiative, which seeks to recreate the entire world block by block in Minecraft. Many Canadian cities including Edmonton, Regina, and Montreal are currently being built in this by their users.
Mitchell said that he might try his hand at Build the Earth when he is done with his project.
He also wants to try creating something like this again, on a smaller scale, in other games like Roblox.
Mitchell expects to be finished building in April or May of 2021.
Minecraft came out in 2011 and is the best-selling video game of all time, with over 200 million copies sold around the world on multiple platforms.
