Millions do, and the game might have been a hit if that were all it offered.īut it isn’t destruction that makes Minecraft unique. True, if all you want from a game is the ability to wander around a kingdom slaughtering zombies with a sword, you can get that from Minecraft. This virtual Westeros may be exceptional in scale–more than 500 volunteers have participated in its creation so far–but it’s also utterly typical of Minecraft. And they happen to be creating all those castles, towers, farmhouses, shops and ships in Minecraft, the online game from a Swedish start-up named Mojang that’s inspiring millions of people of all ages to go on building sprees. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire books and the HBO series based upon them, Game of Thrones. Their undertaking happens to be a digital re-creation of Westeros, the fabled continent from George R.R. “I haven’t seen near everything, and I started the damn project,” says Granberry. It’s so sprawling and ambitious, though, that nobody knows for sure just what’s there. Covering more territory than the city of Los Angeles, it’s about 70% complete and already contains about 8,000 structures. Since December 2011, Jacob Granberry and Will Blew have been overseeing a land-development effort of truly epic proportions.
