Football coaches have the freedom to create their own worlds on the playing field. But retired Steelers legend Mike Tomlin took a different route — manifesting his vision block by block within a massive Minecraft city. What started as a shared family project with his children evolved into a solitary, 12-year labor of love. Now, the sheer depth of Tomlin’s digital city is capturing widespread attention online.
Tomlin served as the Steelers’ head coach for 19 seasons before resigning in January, having never finished with a losing record.
His video was released Oct. 1 and received more than 3 million views in less than two weeks. In the video, Tomlin shows off an expansive Minecraft city, complete with sports stadiums, high-rise apartments, homes and other buildings. He began working on the city about 12 years ago after watching his kids and their friends play Minecraft when they were in middle school, building it in the game’s creative mode with their help.
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“I was mesmerized by what could occupy their attention for such large periods of time,” Tomlin says in the video. “I’m certainly not skilled enough in video game play or have the stick control to [play the game’s survival mode], so I got interested in this creative mode. I like to build, I’ve always had an interest in architecture, and so I started doing this creative city as a means to spend time with them.”
His kids eventually outgrew the game and moved on to different ones, high school and eventually college. That left Tomlin to work on the city by himself, which he did off and on for years while still coaching the Steelers.
“More than anything, it was therapeutic for me, some mindless entertainment,” Tomlin says. “I’m not a big TV watcher. It allowed me to detach from the realities and pressures of life.”
Tomlin spends the rest of the video showing viewers around the place, focusing on his basic, early-days architecture, penthouses, apartments and how he tried to design a solid urban space. He plans to release more videos to discuss different buildings, the city’s design and other elements of his sprawling city.
How wonderfully weird
Leading up to the video’s release, there was no indication whatsoever that Mike Tomlin played computer games. That helped make his big Minecraft debut all the more delightful. The 54-year-old coach showed off thousands of hours of playtime in a 19-minute video, and no one could believe it.
“12 years of Minecraft? Didn’t you know this? Did nobody know this?” asked a shocked Ty Schmidt, producer and on-air personality of the Pat McAfee show, on an episode of the show.
The sports world finally saw what some Minecraft fans already knew: Tomlin’s dedication to the game is unmatched.
“We’re talking block by block,” McAfee said. “He had 14 30-story buildings around a body of water that he wanted to build his city around — one block at a time! They all got patios! He had a penthouse with a shark aquarium. It was unbelievable.”
Minecraft fans, too, showed up to explore the coach’s dazzling feat. Many were surprised to learn that he built this on the Bedrock edition of the game using a video game console, beginning with PlayStation 3 before moving on to PlayStation 4 and 5. That means Tomlin didn’t have access to the mods that many builders use in the Java version of the game on PC, or the freedom that a mouse and keyboard provide. He built his city one brick at a time on a PlayStation controller.
Tomlin was initially unaware of his viral fame. In an interview on Late Night with Seth Meyers, Tomlin said he was at a gala with his phone off when the video went live, and it wasn’t until later that his kids told him about the massive response. Tomlin had caught up by the time he appeared on Football Night in America with NBC on Sunday night.
“I’m appreciating all of this, to be quite honest with you,” Tomlin said during the broadcast.
How good are Tomlin’s designs?
The spectacle of Tomlin’s Minecraft city is one of those wholesome events that had viewers smiling all weekend, except a few Steelers fans who were probably already pretty mad about losing to the Cleveland Browns less than 24 hours after the video was released. That didn’t stop a lot of people from wondering whether Tomlin’s city is actually as good as it looks. It turns out that most of the Internet agrees that it lives up to the hype.
“From my understanding, [it’s a] phenomenal Minecraft city,” McAfee said. “Like, as I was watching it, I was like, man, the attention to detail [is outstanding].”
Noted Minecraft city builder Alpine1 was one of the first to create his own video on the topic, and he was impressed. He had some suggestions for Tomlin, recommending that the coach consider using glass panes instead of glass blocks and more sophisticated floor designs, such as installing tile floors in showers. But Alpine1 did note that Tomlin likely started building the city before many modern building tools were available to Minecraft players.
“This is really awesome to see,” Alpine1 said in the video. “I’ve been advocating for people to build Minecraft cities for years because there’s so much you can do… and I think Mike has really captured this.”
Zach Nagel, an architecture student from the University of Cincinnati’s School of Architecture and Interior Design, also took a stab at analyzing Tomlin’s city in a separate video. He noted that Tomlin used some concepts that are actually practiced in architecture, specifically adding a penthouse with an aquarium right across the street from a full-sized aquarium.
“Now, what Coach Tomlin is talking about here, having a central theme to the building, is a term that we use in architecture as well, the parti,” Nagel says. “If you talk to 20 architects and ask them to give a definition of a parti, you might get 20 pretty different answers. At its [simplest], a parti is a single idea or scheme that drives all of the decisions you make in a building.”
Nagel goes on to praise Tomlin for not only considering the building’s exterior appearance but also its interior design and the functional needs of the city’s fictional residents. He says that a lot of Tomlin’s design choices and approach are in line with what some architects use.
“In another world, he could’ve totally gone down this career path had he wanted to,” Nagel says. “And I’m glad to see that Minecraft remains such an accessible tool for those who want to shape the environment around them.”