Behold the Minecraft recreation of Reddit’s communal mural from r/place

During this year’s r/place, Reddit’s annual large-scale communal online mural project, all of the murals were completed by the end of October. It began on April 1, 2022, and brought together a varied collection of internet strangers who had a common goal: to fill a gigantic blank canvas with their masterpieces, pixel by pixel, starting with the first one. The usual outcome was a tremendous deal of squabbling over real estate for the sake of generating memes, logos, and other fan artwork. Unknown to the rest of the Reddit community, one Redditor chose to maintain track of the project by recreating it in Minecraft, which was a feat of coding and engineering in and of itself. As you can see in this video, the final outcome is both stunning and frightening.

In the current version of Minecraft, version 1.18.2, this artwork was made by Redditor NickG365 and given to life by the Minecraft team. It was done in real life on Reddit, and the result is exactly as it was done in this game – the incredibly tall stacks of pixels in the movie below tell the story of territorial conflicts over pixel territory.

To begin with, NickG365 constructed a flat version of the mural in Minecraft, which he then tweaked to his liking. As you watch, it appears to be similar to looking out the window of an aeroplane as it comes in to land and noticing farms and residential subdivisions in the distance.

For the first time, the r/place subreddit on Reddit was removed off the platform in 2017. Josh Wardle, the creator of the Wordle application, was the driving force behind the organization’s inception and development. Until a new version was launched this year, marking the end of the first, it was the only time a large-scale social experiment was conducted. As well as creating a live-updated version of the mural in Minecraft, which was released in 2017, NickG365 has also created a live-updated version of the mural in other games.