Mike Tomlin spent 19 seasons coaching the Pittsburgh Steelers, but apparently he had another long-term project going on behind the scenes.
He was building a city in Minecraft.
Not a little house. Not a farm. Not a diamond tower that you abandon after three days.
A city.
Tomlin recently gave the world its first real look at the Minecraft world he’s been working on for more than 12 years, and it turns out the former Steelers head coach has been taking the game much more seriously than most people probably expected.
The first thing you need to know is that Tomlin plays in Creative Mode, meaning he has unlimited access to blocks and doesn’t have to worry about gathering resources or surviving the usual Minecraft threats. That’s important because this isn’t Tomlin spending his evenings mining for diamonds. He’s an architect.
And once you see the city, you start to understand why this apparently became his therapeutic escape from football. Tomlin’s world has high-rise apartment buildings, a boutique hotel, an executive spa, conference rooms, aquariums, public restrooms, a baseball stadium and an MLS stadium. He has entire neighborhoods built around a body of water, with buildings positioned carefully to take advantage of their surroundings.
It is also worth remembering that Tomlin was apparently doing all of this while he was still coaching the Steelers.
Former Steelers running back Le’Veon Bell, who ironically went through a complicated stretch with the organization during the same period, including two suspensions (2015 for marijuana possession and DUI and 2016 for missing an NFL mandated drug test) and a pair of notable holdouts during the 2017 pre-season before returning for the regular season followed by his infamous 2018 in-season hold out that lasted the entire 2018 NFL season before being subsequently traded to the Jets in 2019 summed up his thoughts on Tomlins Minecraft city.
“We were tryna win superbowls and coach T was on minecraft building cities,” Bell wrote on X.
This is where the Tomlin part of the whole thing really comes through. He isn’t just throwing buildings wherever there’s an open patch of land. He’s thinking about sightlines. Which makes sense after spending 19 years coaching in a city with one of the best sightlines imaginable.
Tomlin explained that he was “view conscious” when designing some of his high-rise buildings, making sure residents would actually have something worth looking at from their windows. There are also buildings where he paid particular attention to lighting, using glass ceilings and other design elements to make the interiors work.
Yes, Mike Tomlin apparently has opinions about Minecraft lighting. And it gets even nerdier.
He pointed out that “lighting was a challenge 12 years ago,” which might sound like a ridiculously specific thing to remember until you think about what Minecraft was like when he started building this city. Back then, if you wanted to light up a big building or keep an area from getting dark, you were often relying on something as simple as torches. At one point, Tomlin even gets into the weeds about how he used glass ceilings and other design choices to make sure buildings had enough natural light while still maintaining the look he wanted.
For anyone who has actually played Minecraft, this is the moment where the joke stops being “Mike Tomlin plays Minecraft” and becomes “Wait, Mike Tomlin actually knows Minecraft.” Tomlin wasn’t just giving us a city tour. He was giving us the patch notes from memory.
At one point, Tomlin explains that he placed villagers inside one of his buildings to get a better idea of how people would actually move through the space. The city even has public restrooms placed throughout its facilities because Tomlin wanted the world to feel like an actual functioning city.
And then there are the penthouses.
Tomlin admitted that he became particularly obsessed with building rooftop penthouses. One of them features an open living and dining area, a “Jack and Jill” bedroom setup and an outdoor rooftop entertainment space. But Tomlin has a favorite.
His favorite rooftop penthouse is modeled after Trump Tower, complete with the “Trump Tower” sign on the front. The build dates back to around 2015, and the video makes clear that the name was part of the original build rather than a statement about Trump’s later political career.
For a man who spent nearly two decades answering questions about football, it’s pretty crazy hearing him break down the floor plan of a Minecraft apartment like he’s pitching a new real-estate development.
The first building Tomlin ever created in the city is a boutique hotel, and tucked underneath it is an underground speakeasy. Because of course Mike Tomlin’s Minecraft city has a speakeasy.
The hotel itself includes an executive spa, therapy rooms, boutiques, an elevator well and a main desk. Tomlin even spent time thinking about the building’s lighting and how the space would function.
At this point, calling this a “Minecraft world” almost feels underselling it. This is Tomlin Town.
The best part is that this started with his kids. More than a decade ago, Tomlin became interested in Minecraft because his children were obsessed with the game. What started as something he could do with them continued even after they grew older and moved on from the game.
Tomlin didn’t. If anything, he got more invested.
And his son Mayce Tomlin provided perhaps the best piece of evidence of just how invested his father became.
“Bro I used to come home sometimes and my playstation would just be gone. And I wasn’t in trouble,” Mayce wrote on X.
He’s described Minecraft as therapeutic and a way to detach from the pressures of his professional life. Over the years, the world followed the family from PlayStation 3 to PlayStation 4 and eventually PlayStation 5.
And now Steelers fans are finally getting to see what Tomlin was building all those years.
The best part is that this doesn’t even appear to be the whole city. Tomlin’s first roughly 20-minute episode only covers a portion of the world, with more buildings, neighborhoods and sports venues still waiting to be explored. His son Dino Tomlin has explained that the project needs to be broken into multiple videos because there’s simply too much of the city to show at once.
So yes, Mike Tomlin built a Minecraft city. A city with luxury penthouses, a Trump Tower, an underground speakeasy, aquariums, stadiums and carefully planned urban development.
But after seeing the first tour, maybe we shouldn’t be surprised. The man spent his career preaching preparation, organization and attention to detail.
Apparently, he does the same thing with his bublocks.
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