The museum plans to maintain the map as part of its holdings and (I hear) is readying a future release with murals and art objects in situ. The experience left me less excited for a museum show and much more excited about the idea of planning a trip to see the ruins in person. Using Minecraft to map Teotihuacán was a great idea and I genuinely felt like I was in the city. What temple did I start on? What did they burn in the fire pits? What were the pools for? But … there wasn’t anything to do beyond that.

I punched it just before turning off Minecraft, and it became a painting in my inventory. The only place to interact with the environment (that I found, anyway) was with the show title and museum name on the wall. Alcoves and torches and flowers and trees appear ad nauseum. Inside one of the temples is a small pool that my character appeared to swim through, but it was difficult to tell. I was basically turned around and directionless after running in and out of a few temples. I think I started on the Pyramid of the Sun and walked along the Avenue of the Dead, but those are just guesses. Robb, “Hopefully that leads to a greater appreciation for the achievements of the people who built in ancient times.”īeyond a couple nice vantage points for screenshots, there wasn’t much to see. In the words of the show’s curator Matthew H.

The map allows anyone with an internet connection (and $27 for a Minecraft account) to dive in and run around amid and within the unblemished splendor of the temples. To build some buzz and expose more people to the show’s themes, the museum concurrently released a scale Minecraft map of the city. Objects form recent excavations are leveraged as a starting point to examine how the modern conception of the city is formed by surviving artworks.

Who built it, what was their language, why did their great metropolis fail? The de Young Museum in San Francisco recently opened a show about the city titled Teotihuacán: City of Water, City of Fire. We know that Teotihuacán was the largest city in the Americas and one of the most populous on Earth in its heyday, but nearly everything else is a mystery. The ruined city was built in a hill-enveloped valley 2,000d years ago and collapsed around 550 CE. The word Teotihuacán comes from the Aztecs and translates to birthplace of the gods. Scene from the Minecraft map of Teotihuacán (all images by the author for Hyperallergic)

Minecraft ruined city maps