Minecraft Déjà vu – Haven’t we been here before??

Waaaay back in 2011, I got started playing this fascinating game, Minecraft. And it didn’t take long for me to decide to do a build that looked like a giant Apple II Plus (see the link at the end of this article).

With time, the game evolved and improved, and more diverse blocks were added. But for the longest time, I didn’t really do anything with my Apple II. Then in 2014 I decided to attack the project again, this time with a larger scale Apple IIe. I did the entire computer, an Apple Modem 1200, and a telephone, all built in Survival mode; for those who have not played the game, that’s where you have to obtain the blocks you build with manually, but mining them and crafting them. I set the project aside for another three years, and then earlier this year I went back to it, but decided to complete it by using Creative mode, where you can just give yourself all the blocks you want; it makes the process faster.

The result is the above video, which includes not just the computer, modem, and telephone, but also an ImageWriter I printer (producing a Print Shop-style banner), a joystick, a DuoDisk drive, and a Monitor II, with blocky lo-res-style graphics displayed. And to complete the project, I built my old favorite stereo system from college in the 1970s.

Why did I do it? I don’t know, except that it was satisfying to complete the project I’d started long ago, and do it better than the old one I did back in the early days of Minecraft. I may not be doing any programming on the Apple II these days, but this game gave me a chance to be creative in a different fashion.

BTW, here is the link to the original 2011 video. If you live in a part of the world that doesn’t allow the background music I picked back then, which was copyrighted music, you may not be allowed to view this.