2 Buckeyes build Ohio State in Minecraft and Legos

TBDBITL, toy edition

As a longtime Lego fan, Ohio State student Jacob English owns a hefty collection of bricks. These came in handy when the TBDBITL baritone player dreamed up the idea of building his own Lego marching band member.

A senior in mechanical engineering, English first pieced together a baritone player, of course. Then he designed a trumpet player and bass drummer, and after pressure from sousaphone players in the band, he added one of those, too.

A glance at English’s intricate builds might lead you to assume he somehow made custom Lego bricks, but he actually fished around in his collection of standard blocks to recombine them for just the right look. It’s taken years—he fiddled a lot with piece combinations to provide, for example, the right range of motion for elbows.

He submitted his band members to Lego Ideas, a website where 10,000 votes earn a review by Lego experts who decide whether projects are good enough to sell. English’s prototype already has more than 8,840 votes, thanks in part to TBDBITL fans. “I was kind of shocked with just how fast it grew,” English says.

His dream for the project: To win enough votes for his creations to end up becoming a commercially available Lego set.

Ohio State, cube edition

Zach Messina ’19 spent two years building campus with Minecraft blocks.

During the social isolation days of COVID-19, time was heavy on Zach Messina’s hands. “I just kind of needed a little project,” the 2019 graduate says. So he found one: creating a detailed model of the entire Columbus campus in Minecraft, the best-selling video game of all time. In it, players can use digital blocks to construct anything they dream up.

Messina, who studied evolution and ecology at Ohio State, along with naval science, had never attempted anything quite like it before. He’s not a YouTuber or a Minecraft expert (at least, he wasn’t when he started). “The biggest project I had ever done was maybe a couple skyscrapers.”

As a time-use ploy, it worked brilliantly, taking about two years to finish. Messina enjoyed getting lost in the details as he meticulously re-created each building, even when the game meant he had to settle for some twists. For example, the duck paddling on Mirror Lake is actually a chicken, an ocean and a mountain lie just past the outskirts of campus, and cows wander the Oval.

Coding could have deleted some of these quirks. Messina experimented a little with it early on but swore it off after accidentally wiping out half of Jennings Hall. So the cows remain, providing a bit of that College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences flavor.

Everything is there, from landmark buildings such as Thompson Library, the ’Shoe and Morrill and Lincoln towers, to the ones you walked past a thousand times but don’t quite remember. (Dulles Hall, anyone?) Messina focused mostly on exterior structures but added interiors for a few of the major buildings.

To make sure everything fit to scale, he laid out the streets first. Then to fill in details, he turned to Google Earth, Google Maps’ street view and a campus map he’d been given as a freshman. It helped that he still has friends in the area. “Sometimes, I asked them to run to campus real quick and snap me a picture,” says Messina, now a Duke University graduate student studying teaching.

When Ohio State’s social media accounts shared snippets of Messina’s intricate creation this summer, the videos garnered more than 45,000 reactions, half a million views between Facebook and X, and quite a few awed comments. “I was ecstatic,” Messina says.