Someone Created An Actual, Playable Sonic Level In Minecraft

I am a card-carrying member of r/minecraftbuilds for moments just like this.

A Reddit user named C1OUSER has recreated the first level of Sonic the Hedgehog, Green Hill Zone, in Minecraft. I don’t mean you take a first-person walking tour and see it from ground level. I mean, they recreated it in the sidescrolling perspective of the original Mega Drive game, complete with Sonic sprite, enemies, sounds, music, physics and locomotion. They even recreated the on-screen end-of-level graphics. They went to the trouble of arranging the mountains in the background, so they have a parallax scroll when Sonic moves. Not only is this creation fully playable, but its creator used no mods to build it, and you don’t need any mods to run it. It’s fucking astounding.

Here, look:

C1OUSER goes into detail on the level’s conception, construction, and execution in a short video on YouTube. A central pillar of its creation is an app called Blockbuild, which allows for the creation of complex Minecraft models, mod-free.

Getting Sonic to navigate the level’s sloped architecture proved a challenge, as Minecraft‘s blocky design doesn’t really factor slope traversal into its thinking. C1OUSER solved this problem by using snow layers, which treat collision differently, allowing Sonic to skate over them. He even got the tunnels to work, with the correct physics and momentum they produce, flinging Sonic into the air as he exits at speed.

Anyway, there’s so much attention to detail at work here. I’m blown away by the creativity on display. The imagination, ingenuity, and can-do spirit of the Minecraft community remains absolutely unmatched. In the last six months, I’ve watched the community construct insane fantasies, like this maniac who painstakingly built a three-dimensional recreation of Van Gogh’s Starry Night over a period of months.