When former Pittsburgh Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin revealed that he had been working on a Minecraft city for 12 years, I brushed it off. The idea of an NFL coach—a Super Bowl-winning coach who never had a losing season—taking time over a decade-plus to truly lock into Minecraft city-planning just didn't seem realistic, or like the result would be particularly interesting. I doubted Tomlin's gamer credentials.
Well, joke's on me:
Over 19 minutes of what Tomlin's son, Dino, says might end up being over two hours of content, the elder Tomlin took viewers on a guided tour of what appears to be the central downtown hub of his city. Even though this is only a part of the entire city, a lot of Tomlin's interests and design fixations, to use a term he returns to often, shine through pretty clearly, and it's obvious that he has put a lot of care into the city, and that he has priorities unique to his tastes.
A good example comes early on in the video, as Tomlin is showing the first building he ever constructed. It's a relatively plain building, with various areas that are mostly empty and not designed, but Tomlin also built a "spa" on the ground floor and noted that he always wanted to represent a realistic number of bathrooms in public spaces. He extends the same level of planning care and design work to various other segments of his buildings, mainly bedrooms and rooftops, while others, like kitchens and living spaces, tend to go ignored.
That detail is what makes me think that this whole exercise isn't in any way dubious or fabricated. Maybe it's cynical to have thought this, but I had two assumptions heading into this first episode: Either Tomlin would have a bare-bones city that was more a curiosity than anything, or the city would be so good that I'd have to just assume someone helped set it up throughout the years. The reality, both in terms of what the city consists of and how Tomlin talks about it, is in the perfect sweet spot between those two extremes. It's clear that Tomlin is not a skilled gamer; he admits that himself, and he spends a decent bit of the video navigating the city by running into walls and spinning the camera around a bit more than necessary.
But Minecraft doesn't require "stick skills" and moment-to-moment gameplay, and so anyone with patience and time can make magic happen over a long enough timeline. All it takes is passion for the project, and Tomlin clearly has that. When he shows a building that has an aquarium centerpiece on each floor (pictured above), he lights up—OK, that might be overstating it, as he is a rather monotone narrator, but you can still feel his excitement. When he talks about an indoor-outdoor rooftop entertainment area in another building, it becomes evident that he thought about urban planning more than on just a "what looks cool?" level.
Early on in the video, he calls Minecraft "therapeutic for me, mindless entertainment" that allowed him to "detach from the realities and pressures of life." It's funny to think about Tomlin at a press conference after a tough loss, and knowing that at least some part of him was hoping to be at the sticks, working on his city. He also says that he often thought about his city while out and about in the real world, saying that he'd get inspired by something and then try to build it (or something similar) in game. As an example, he says that he built a complex with a view of a hill after dropping Dino off at college and seeing the housing complex there. It all combines together to give a revealing look into a coach that was always successful and always private; I feel like I learned more about Tomlin as a person in 19 minutes than I ever did when he was coaching the Steelers.
Tomlin also shows that he does have a gamer's heart by complaining about a tiresome task that stood in the way of getting his city to look the way he wanted. No one loves to complain about games more than gamers, so when Tomlin says that he found the task of reshaping the topography that the game created for him "tedious work and not fun," that's not a soundbite, but a true manifestation of a problem he's found with this project.
There's also a clear passage of time in the city, both from how his design work evolved throughout the years, and an early tower with a recognizable name that Dino, the video's editor, makes clear did not come from a post-2016 election era:
I'm not sure what the rest of the video series will contain, though Tomlin does a decent enough job of hinting at other aspects of it throughout the video—there's a baseball stadium, an aquarium, and various stores and restaurants visible throughout—that I will be sure to check it out. It's always a thrill to see someone speak to something they are passionate about, whether that's theater or sailing, and seeing an NFL head coach talk about virtual penthouses and floor plans is right up that alley.
