When Mike Tomlin started trending in October, you might have assumed it had something to do with the Pittsburgh Steelers, the football team he coached for nineteen years. But to the surprise of people all over the internet, Tomlin was trending for something completely different: the Minecraft city he’s spent the last twelve years building.
Yes, twelve years.
Tomlin has been quietly constructing an elaborate virtual city complete with high-rise apartments, a boutique hotel, a stadium, and even a multi-level aquarium. What started as a way to connect with his kids eventually became a passion project of its own. Tomlin has described the game as therapeutic, giving him a way to detach from the pressures of coaching.
The internet, understandably, had thoughts. One viral post summed it up perfectly: “Mike Tomlin was a Super Bowl-winning coach and yet his heart truly belonged to urban planning in a midsized, sustainable city.”
Honestly, it makes sense.
If you grew up playing The Sims, RollerCoaster Tycoon, SimCity, or, more recently, Minecraft and Roblox, there’s a good chance you’ve pretended to be an urban planner, too.
Maybe you spent hours designing your dream home in Club Penguin, figuring out the perfect layout for your amusement park in RollerCoaster Tycoon, or building an entire metropolis in SimCity. These games gave us the freedom to create our own little worlds, but they also got us thinking about what makes a place work.
Where should the houses go? Do we need more parks? How do people get around? Where should we place Town Hall? And how can we keep traffic from taking over the whole city?
Without realizing it, we were experimenting with some of the same questions architects and urban planners consider when designing the places where people live, work, and gather, and those little decisions can have real-world implications. Even in a virtual world, the way we design a place affects how people move through it and interact with it.
You might recreate a city you love, build the hometown you wish existed, or start completely from scratch. No matter how you approach it, there’s something satisfying about imagining a place and having the freedom to make it your own.
Of course, designing a city in a video game isn’t the same as planning a real one. Actual communities must account for housing affordability, infrastructure, accessibility, and environmental impact. But games offer a fun starting point for thinking about what works, what doesn’t, and what we’d change. They can even inspire us to take those ideas offline and into our own communities, asking ourselves: What would our dream city look like, and what would it take to bring that vision to life?
Maybe you’d recreate the kind of town you spent hours exploring in Toontown as a kid. Or maybe your priorities have changed, and your dream city now includes shadier streets, more bike lanes, and public spaces that bring people together. Either way, those virtual worlds might inspire us to see our real one a little differently.
Tomlin might have taken his city-building hobby to another level, but the impulse behind it is relatable. We all have ideas about what makes a place feel like home, what’s missing from our communities, and how we’d design the world if we had the chance.
So, the next time you find yourself perfecting your Sims floor plan or spending hours on a Minecraft build, consider this your sign: there’s a little urban planner in all of us.