New Minecraft Interstate: Nearly 9 Miles of Virtual Highway Caps a Year of Innovative Minecraft Machinima

This is the latest Minecraft highway machinima from Brett, whose original version became a viral hit in 2010, with over a million views. Version four of his Minecart Interstate is about a mile longer than the original (which was 7.67 miles long), and features a hair-raising passage through the Nether, the fiery underground of this year's hit indie sandbox building game from Markus "Notch" Persson. Shooting and making the Nether passage was among the most difficult challenges for this version, because, well, Brett's Minecraft character kept getting burnt up like a barbecue chicken:

"[B]ecause in the Nether there is lava and fire everywhere," as he notes to me wryly, which meant "dying constantly and having issues placing the track while over a vast lava ocean.”

An art student in Florida, Brett tells me that since making his Minecraft videos, "My life and career have changed, but only in a more focused manner." They've given him a new avenue for turning his passions into a paying hobby, and he submitted the first video in a design class he was taking, and received an A. "The other students enjoyed it a lot, and in real life people ask me about my videos and projects," Brett tells me. "It's kind of weird, but exciting to experience something like that, when you keep both your internet and actual life separate." Now, however, he'll likely be remembered as the man who was first to make beautiful Minecraft machinima like this one -- especially as Minecraft nears 1 million paying customers, and keeps growing.

 

Got Minecraft news you want to share? Contact me, part-time Minecraft reporter Wagner James Au at wjamesau at well dot com. (My Minecraft avatar was made by Bone Mosten of Punching Trees).

Comments

[Arcadia Codesmith]

What I love about Minecraft is that 9 miles is NOTHING. The maximum practical world size is eight times the surface area of Earth.

All for a small, one-time payment.

What's the price and tier fees for that much land in SL? My calculator doesn't have that many digits.

All I really want is Minecraft's vast buildable space, WoW's performance and physics, the editors from City of Heroes and Spore, SL's flexibility and graphic detail, and AutoDesk's complete suite of tools integrated into the client. For cheap.

Is that too much to ask?

Don't make me build it myself. I'll kick the industry's butt and get filthy rich, and I don't think anybody wants that.