When I happened across this hilarious video the other day, I realized it was just too good not to share. But a warning, it helps if you’re into black humour.
In the classic 1980 movie The Shining, there is a very suspenseful point in the film when Jack Nicholson’s character has become completely possessed by the evil presence in the Overlook Hotel. Completely under the control of the presence, the once-loving father tries to kill his family. Meanwhile his wife, played by Shelly Duvall, desperately tries to save their son, but encounters an obstacle of sorts.
Whoever edited this YouTube video, did a fabulous job of putting together the salient parts of the chase scenes; speeding them up; and adding a Benny Hill soundtrack. Yakety Sax really does have the potential to make murder and mayhem—at least the Hollywood kind—funny.
Spoiler alert: Oh, and if you’re one of those 10 people on the planet who hasn’t seen the movie, Shelly Duvall’s character doesn’t die in this scene.
It is a block-by-block construction, unless you cheat and use some sort of map editor. (Admittedly we used a map editor to make the background mountains so high, but not on the hotel itself.) As for how long it took… many hours (more like days) spread across a few months. Part of it was trying to work from blueprints for the Timberline Lodge (which is the actual building used for the location shots) while combining it with the interior of the Overlook Hotel (which was a sound stage). The rooms don’t match up with the actual layout of the Timberline — for one thing, the Timberline has no room 237. This is deliberate. Stephen King originally wrote it as being room 217, which DOES exist, and the folks at the Timberline asked Kubrick to change it to a room number that does not exist, out of fear that people would refuse to rent “that room”. Also, since the walls are a meter thick, I was forced to subdivide the interior into fewer rooms than actually exist. There are no elevators (only stairs) because while elevators CAN be built in Minecraft, they take up a great deal of space which we can’t afford in the Overlook.
It’s not even completely finished to this day. Some of the front facade is missing, and the short wing on the second floor doesn’t have the rooms installed — it’s just an open floor with lines showing where the walls should go. I justified this by marking it “closed for the season”. We also took liberties with the interior, for example adding a bar and grill, and a nightclub.
We have tons of other constructions of various difficulty levels as well, but this was probably the hardest (though not the largest — the subway system spanning an area 11 km on a side is definitely the largest thing I’ve ever made [tedious but not particularly difficult]). Even the full-scale aircraft carrier was easier than this. Yesterday I installed two movie theaters. Admittedly all they play are random patterns of light and equally random “music”, but at least they show SOMETHING. My cousin wanted one for his house, so I installed a slightly smaller version for him there as well.
The primary purpose of the game, at least for me and my friends, is to have a world of our own where we can hang out and do what we please. There are ways to create mini-games within the larger game which we can compete at. For example, there is SPLEEF (http://www.minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Spleef), and we have archery tournaments and occasionally turn off the safeties and beat the stuffing out of one another. Mostly though, we try to out-build one another. We have our specialties — there are better architects than me, but I do interiors very well. Also, there are ways of making machinery in-game (for example, a combination lock that drops you in a pit of lava if you get it wrong) which I have gotten quite good at and I frequently get called in to implement someone else’s design when they can’t quite figure out why it doesn’t work the way they intended. I also like to make music boxes, like one that plays “A Whiter Shade of Pale”, and another that plays “Let It Snow”.
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy…
It so happens we’ve built the Overlook Hotel from that movie… in Minecraft. The blacked-out windows are room 237 (http://mal-2.com/mc/2012-04-10_10.39.38.png), and you can see the hedge maze and snow cat in the foreground. I also did the Gold Ballroom, complete with Lloyd’s bar (http://mal-2.com/mc/2012-04-10_10.40.25.png).
There’s no old lady’s body in the bathtub, but there are occasionally squid.
I have to admit ignorance. I had heard of Minecraft, but never looked into it. I had to Google it to find out what it really is. Turns out, according to the Minecraft website, it’s not at all what I thought.
How many hours go into creating one of these images? It looks like a crazy amount of work. It looks likes it’s a block by block construction—almost like virtual Lego—process that goes into these scene designs.