Talk about a crossover: a crown jewel of Los Angeles has found a home in the world's best-selling video game.
In 1935, Griffith Observatory was built above the city with the decreed purpose to make astronomy and science accessible to everyone. In the decades since, more than 8.5 million people have visited the site, making it the most visited public observatory in the world.
But as of recently, Griffith Observatory has taken up residence in Minecraft — a hugely popular virtual world-building game — thanks to a worldwide network of devoted players who are attempting replicate the entire Earth.
"Think virtual Legos," said Jacob Sherman, a player and the public relations manager of the Build the Earth (BTE) project. "And you build into these blocks, and one block is one cubic meter, so essentially we're trying to recreate that scale in Minecraft, like with the entire planet."
The idea was launched in March 2020 by a YouTuber shortly after the start of the pandemic. Quickly, it inspired an army of ready "builders" around the globe, oftentimes operating in smaller regional or country-specific groups dedicated to remaking their portions of planet Earth.
As "builders, we seek to recreate real-life structures, buildings, landscaping," said Sherman, who is also one of the leads of the builder group BTE South & West US, which includes Southern California.
He said that they frequently rely on a range of available data, including from Google Maps, Google Earth and LiDAR, to start the building process in Minecraft. Then it's about the fine tuning.
Construction of the Minecraft version of Griffith Observatory was started one to two years ago by a fellow member of Sherman's group.
"The dome shape can be hard to get right. He had a lot of problems at first with making the shape itself," Sherman recalled. "Some of the natural terrain right around Griffith Observatory — even some of the road detailing where you can see some of the wear and tear, we just do our best to replicate all of that, even like some of the lines in the asphalt."
The entire build, which was recently finished, took as many as 200 hours, Sherman estimated.
While the observatory is a marquee landmark, being famous is in no way a prerequisite for being part of this virtual world.
"One of the big things that a lot of people do is build their own hometowns," said Sherman, who grew up in California's Central Valley. "It's a way that they can remember places that they've been to and experience them in a different way."
Recreating these places is also a way to memorialize them.
"The BT Ukraine team [is] recreating buildings that were destroyed in the war," Sherman said. "In America, people are recreating businesses [that were] shut down."
Sherman is always on the lookout for more builders (hit his group up here to get the details) — and promises the process is much easier than you might imagine. As to what's next for him and his team after building the observatory, the options are wide open.
"There's so many different things that are in the works, so many places," he said. "Who knows, only the world can tell."
