Owen Campbell, Mt. Lebanon Class of 2023, is chipping away at a somewhat unusual feat of engineering — building the city of Pittsburgh to scale inside the virtual world of Minecraft.
Minecraft is a virtual three-dimensional video game, first released in 2009, where players lay out cubes on a grid. Creative mode allows players to use unlimited resources or different colored blocks, scaled by meter, to build any structure in their imaginations. The game features monsters to fight as well, but Campbell is more focused on building.
So far, Campbell has built five blocks of downtown Pittsburgh within the game, which he started in 2024.
A resident of Newburn Drive, Campbell attended Jefferson Middle School. During eighth grade, he took an engineering enrichment class offered by Roland Campion, whom he partially credits for inspiring the project.
Campbell explained, “that class gave me the resources with an end goal in mind.” It was a unique opportunity that most kids in other districts would not get to experience until college.
Exposure to engineering at such a young age, matched with a natural inclination towards the field, led Campbell to major in civil engineering at Virginia Tech. Now a rising junior, he acknowledges the role that Minecraft played in his development.
“Understanding of a 3D space,” said Campbell about Minecraft, “translated relatively well to CAD.” CAD is the acronym for computer-aided design, a type of software frequently used in engineering.
Growing up in the Greater Pittsburgh region, Campbell holds a deep appreciation for the city’s infrastructure. “Pittsburgh is a really unique city,” he said. “I used to replicate it with toys as a child.” He no longer uses children’s toys, but his fascination with the Steel City’s infrastructure has only grown with time.
To Campbell, the most interesting pieces of infrastructure are bridges. Soon, he will begin building the Smithfield Street Bridge, which he described as “easily translatable to the world of Minecraft.”
Serendipitously, Campbell is building an even bigger bridge than Smithfield Street — a bridge between the worldwide gaming community and the city of Pittsburgh.
At any point, he could upload his world to the internet, but Campbell said, “I’m holding off until I build some more recognizable landmarks.”
Once those landmarks are constructed, anyone, anywhere in the world, with access to Minecraft will be able to download Pittsburgh.