Minecraft is no stranger to unusual fan-created content. For years now, dedicated and creative players have painstakingly pieced together everything from custom texture packs to replicas of real-world places like the Hawaiian Islands and recursive instances of Minecraft itself running within its own engine. One of the latest offerings from the community takes the form of a fully functional arcade cabinet that players can set up in their own virtual home.
Redditor spacegame202 took on the task of making a working arcade game in Minecraft, eventually ending up with their debut cabinet, Billy. Mechanically, the game is fairly straightforward: it functions like a standard side-scrolling endless runner, with the only button making the eponymous Billy jump in the air to collect coins or avoid obstacles. Simplistic as the idea is, though, it's still an impressive feat to pull off in another game's engine, and testament to both the creator's ingenuity and the flexibility of the game's systems.
The entire project took around 12 hours to complete, according to spacegame202, including the model and sound design. The main tool used was 3D editor Blockbench for the asset design and animation, along with VSCode for behavior editing and FL Studio for sound effects. Perhaps even more impressively, Billy was created entirely for Minecraft's Bedrock edition, noted within the community for being less flexible and customizable than the Java edition of the game.
There must be something about the visual style of Minecraft's aesthetic that inspires retro content, as another player recently recreated the entirety of Super Mario Bros.' first level in the game. This particular endeavor lacks the full interactivity of Billy, but is certainly still something to behold as the level is created at a 1:1 scale and in 3D, and took the creator a few weeks to put together. The jury is still out on whether they intend to go back and create the remaining 31 levels of the original game.
Other users have gone even further, though, such as Pokemon fan bubsy200, who began recreating the world of Pokemon Diamond and Pearl in Minecraft shortly before the announcement of their upcoming Switch remakes. It's still a work in progress and currently unavailable for other players to access, but bubsy200 intends to update followers on Reddit every few towns or so with a full tour once the project is complete.
One would be forgiven in thinking that Minecraft fans had surely wrung all the possible content out of the game by this stage in its life, but the community seems set to keep proving the naysayers wrong. Between the seemingly limitless creativity of its player base and the frequently updated and augmented tools that the developers are only too happy to provide, don't be too surprised to see yet more weird and wonderful things find their way into the charmingly cubic confines of the game in the years to come.
Minecraft is available now for Mobile, PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.