Mike Tomlin's 12‑Year Minecraft City: Everything We Know

On September 30, 2026, at 8pm Eastern, Mike Tomlin posted a 19-minute video tour of a city he has been building in Minecraft for about 12 years. The first stop is a boutique hotel on a bay, with an executive spa, therapy rooms, and a basement speakeasy whose bar has a window into the pool. "I was always really conscious of appropriate amenities," Tomlin says over the footage, before showing the men's restroom.

Tomlin coached the Pittsburgh Steelers for 19 seasons and stepped down on January 13, 2026. He now works as a studio analyst on NBC's Football Night in America.

Strange Route maps strange places people can visit, and Tomlin's city is a digital one. It belongs beside one-person builds like the Watts Towers, where Simon Rodia spent 33 years raising 17 structures in a Los Angeles backyard. The difference is that Tomlin's city has no address to drive to.

Where he first mentioned it

TODAY posted Craig Melvin's full interview with Tomlin on September 8, 2026, as an episode of the podcast Glass Half Full. Near the end, in a quick round about what he watches, Tomlin admitted he was "a big Jersey Shore guy." A few seconds later: "I'm a big Minecrafter."

"I started playing Minecraft, man, when my kids were young," he said. "I have a Minecraft city, I'm creative, man, that I've been working on for like 12 years." Creative is the Minecraft mode he builds in.

His kids, he said, have "taken it from PS3 to PS4 to PS5." They look after the file because, in his words, "they know I don't have the technical knowledge." His oldest son had been telling him he had to share it with the world. The exchange runs about a minute and a half, and it starts at 39:08 on TODAY's YouTube channel.

One line from that exchange keeps getting pinned on the wrong person. "It would break the internet" was Melvin talking, not Tomlin or his son.

What the first episode shows

The tour went up 22 days later on Tomlin's own YouTube channel, after a short teaser on September 25. His son Dino films and edits it. Episode 1, "Rooftops, Penthouses, and Urban Living," had about 2.77 million views by October 3. Minecraft's official YouTube account left a comment: "i'm honored to be here coach."

About 12 or 13 years ago, Tomlin says, his kids, then in middle school, "were obsessed with playing this game Minecraft that I knew nothing about." He watched them for a while, then tried it. He chose Creative mode because he never had "the stick control" for anything harder, and because "I like to build. I've always had an interest in architecture." When he describes the mode his kids played as "adventure or whatever," Dino's edit puts a correction on screen: "SURVIVAL*."

All of his kids have buildings in the city. They lost interest in high school and college, and he kept going. "It was therapeutic for me," he says. "It allowed me to detach from the realities and the pressures of life." In the same breath, he calls it "some mindless entertainment" and says he is not a big TV watcher, three weeks after the TODAY interview in which he called himself a big Jersey Shore guy.

The hotel was the first building, and Tomlin talks about it the way a developer talks about a property. Lighting was a challenge 12 years ago, so he put in glass ceilings where they made sense. He also used a lot of glowstone, a block that gives off light. "Not because I like the glowstone," he says. "I really didn't."

Across the street from the city's aquarium stands an apartment tower with an aquarium in every unit. Getting the water in was, in his word, "a nightmare." Another complex, The View, is a set of green, yellow, and red buildings with identical floor plans, inspired by the off-campus housing Dino lived in at college. Signs for PNC, Walmart, and Verizon are visible in the footage. CVS commented on the video, "Glad the villagers have a place to get all their essentials," and several outlets reported a CVS in the city.

"I really got obsessed with like rooftop penthouses," Tomlin says. His favorite sits on one of the taller buildings in town, and the front of that building is lettered TRUMP TOWER in stone blocks. Dino's edit flashes three captions over it in turn: "NOT AN ENDORSEMENT," "THIS BUILD IS C.2015... WE DIDN'T THINK HE WOULD WIN," and "TWICE." Tomlin never says the name aloud.

The city reaches past downtown, with riverfront homes and suburbs of single-family houses, and it is not all finished. When the generated terrain got in his way, Tomlin says, he would "blow up mountains and hills" and rebuild the land around a building. That part was "at times tedious work and not fun." Over 12 years, he says, "you'll see like incomplete things like that around."

His younger son, Mayce, posted a footnote on X the night the episode went up: "Bro I used to come home sometimes and my PlayStation would just be gone. And I wasn't in trouble."

What Minecraft is

Minecraft is a game made of blocks, each one roughly a cubic meter of game space. Players dig them up or place them to build anything from a dirt hut to a working computer wired with redstone, the game's version of electrical circuitry. Markus Persson, known as Notch, started it in May 2009. The full release came on November 18, 2011. Microsoft announced on September 15, 2014, that it would buy Mojang, the studio behind it, for $2.5 billion. A Minecraft Movie, released in April 2025, took about $960 million worldwide, and a sequel is set for July 23, 2027.

In Survival mode, you mine every block yourself, eat to stay alive, and get attacked at night. In Creative, Minecraft.net promises "limitless resources, immunity to damage, and the ability to fly."

His city has also moved across three consoles. A world started on the PS3 had to be converted to the PS4 Edition before April 15, 2020, and converted worlds could then be carried into the current version of the game. A native PS5 version followed on October 22, 2024. The family has not said which route the city took.

Will anyone be able to visit it?

Not as things stand. On September 8, a fan posted "RELEASE THE MIKE T WORLD," and Dino replied that his father wanted him to record a tour, which would have to be split into sections or run 2 hours. He asked his followers whether they wanted it. He also wrote, with a laughing emoji, that the family couldn't just release a copy of the world because of some of what is in it.

As of October 3, 2026, the video is the only way in. Tomlin's channel has the teaser and Episode 1, and nothing else. He has promised episodes on the aquarium, a baseball stadium, and an MLS-style soccer stadium, without dates. No public download, server, Realm, or Steelers or NFL project has been announced, and the city is not on the Minecraft Marketplace.

If the family ever wanted visitors without handing over the file, Minecraft has a standard way to do it. A Realm is a private server run by Mojang. It costs $3.99 or $7.99 a month and stays online when the owner is away. A Bedrock Realm can be joined from PlayStation, Xbox, Switch, PC, and phones, and an owner can invite up to 10,000 accounts, but only 3 or 11 players can be inside at once, depending on the plan. The Marketplace is not an option for a private player, because only approved partners sell maps there.

Mayce has raised a different question. "IM SEEING A LOT OF PEOPLE SAY THEY WANNA LIVE IN MIKE TOMLIN'S MINECRAFT CITY," he posted the same night. "WHAT IM NOT SEEING IS ANYONE ASKING WHAT HAPPENED TO THE VILLAGERS THAT USED TO LIVE THERE."

How to build your own

Minecraft runs on PC, Xbox, PlayStation, Switch, and phones. On the official stores in October 2026, it cost $29.99 on PC, $19.99 on Xbox, $29.99 on Switch, and $6.99 on iOS and Android, and Minecraft.net offers a free trial. A city starts the way Tomlin's did, with a new world set to Creative. A superflat world, where the ground is completely flat, spares a builder the mountain-clearing Tomlin describes. For building with friends, a Realm keeps the world online for everyone. Minecraft Education has a City Planning lesson built around the question "If we could build an ideal city, what would be in the city plans?"

Three projects show how far a city can go:

• Titan City is the nearest match to Tomlin's project. Duncan Parcells built it alone, in Creative mode, on an Xbox 360, starting in October 2012. Guinness recognized it in October 2014 as the largest Minecraft city on that console, at 4.5 million blocks.
• Greenfield holds the Guinness record for the largest city in Minecraft, at 38 square kilometers (about 15 square miles). It is a fictional city inspired by Los Angeles, built at real-world size by more than 500 builders since 2011, and it is a free download on Planet Minecraft.
• Build the Earth is recreating the whole planet at real-world size. Guinness counted more than 8,000 participants in June 2025, and the project's own site now counts more than 17,600 builders. Its servers are free to explore on Minecraft Java Edition at buildtheearth.net, and the project notes that many builders start with their own house, school, or neighborhood.

Tomlin has not said when the next episode is coming. At the end of Episode 1, he says only, "In the next episode we'll take a look at something that I think you're going to find interesting."

We wanted to put Tomlin's city on the Mystery Map. One guy, 12 years, a hotel spa with therapy rooms, a tower with an aquarium in every apartment: That's a Strange Route if we ever knew one. The problem is there's nowhere to send you yet. The world lives on his PlayStation, and his son says they can't just put it online. If that changes, it goes on the map as our first digital roadside oddity. Until then, we'll keep reporting on it, along with a few other digital routes we've been wanting to explore, so stay tuned.