This virtual Minneapolis took a local high school teacher 770 hours to build – WCCO

MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) – Rome was not built in a day, is the old saying. What about Minneapolis?

For high school Matthew Ye, it took 770 hours. This is how he has spent the last year recreate Minnesota’s largest city in the video game Cities: Skylines. Think of it as a modern SimCity. Players create the infrastructure of a city – imagined or in the case of Yes genuine. Everything from the buildings to the roads to the traffic lights.

Matthew Yes Virtual Minneapolis (Credit: Matthew Ye)

You said that before this project, he made the most fictional cities in the game, which he has been playing for about four years. He likes that the game lets you “design everything you like.”

“Eventually, I decided to try to recreate a city in the real world after being inspired by it by another player who made a recreation of Philadelphia,” Ye said, “and I chose my hometown, Minneapolis.”

Cities: Skylines records how many hours players spend on a project, and Yes 770 hours equals approximately 32 days or 9% of a year. Using his own images of the city, maps and Google Earth, he has created a dizzyingly accurate simulacrum.

A pain point for the virtual Minneapolis is also a common thorn in the side of the city’s real residents.

“The footage in the video was taken literally a day before Interstate 35’s new headquarters was opened to the public,” he said. “I’m currently working on building this newer version of Interchange.”

Aside from that hiccup, Yes Recreation is amazingly complete. Had the game been a little more graphic fidelity, you might think you were looking at drone footage of the real thing.

“Currently, I have completed most of downtown, and I plan to expand to the suburbs and toward St. Paul, starting with the Stadium Village area,” he said.

He works mostly on the project “during breaks from school,” he said, so his vision is only hampered by his free time.

The City in Progress (Credit: Matthew Ye)

And while the project looks far from impressive, the details in the close-ups are just as amazing. You have carefully recreated the most iconic parts of the Minneapolis skyline.

“The most challenging part of the project was to make the central buildings in the city center look right. As the crucial feature of the skyline, it was very important that the buildings look very much like their real counterparts, ”said Ye. “One of the most difficult buildings to create in the game was the Wells Fargo Center because of its complexity. This building has many edges and corners and the orange lighting of the building was also very difficult to achieve using the tools available. This building alone took about 6 hours to get it right. ”

The restored Wells Fargo Center (credit: Matthew Ye)

However, it was not all hard work. You said the funniest part of the project was recreating the city’s light rail and NorthStar commuter trains.

“I researched information on both railways and was able to learn more about their history as well as their future expansion plans,” he said.

You said that the game is mostly made for city building, but there are other gameplay elements.

“After completing the city, you can run traffic simulations at various intersections to test the flow of traffic as well as simulate population growth / decline,” he said.

He plans to share his virtual city with other players, but like SimCity, there are also… less productive paths when a city is finished.

“You can also shoot meteors and start earthquakes,” Ye said, “if that’s what you like to do.”

.