Three hundred and fifty years ago, a great fire swept through London, gutting the medieval city inside the Roman-built walls. Now, you can relive the conflagration in Minecraft.
The virtual experience in the popular Microsoft-owned game is the result of a partnership between historians at the Museum of London and video game developers, including stunning imagery (in familiar blocky shapes) created by the Dragnoz game studio.
It will be available as a map for Minecraft users to download starting on July 29. The museum uploaded a sneak peek of the virtual world to YouTube last week, which depicts a pre-dawn London that's eerily quiet, presumably right before the fire begins. Included is the interior splendor of the original St. Paul's Cathedral, one of the fire's most famous victims.
Besides downloading the map to explore at home, visitors can experience it via exhibits in the museum itself. There, you'll be able to walk into the bakery where the fire started and see how the flames spread across the city, as well as channel your inner archaeologist to identify objects melted by the flames.
As with other Minecraft virtual worlds, the imagery itself is blocky, a bit like a city built out of Legos, but it does a great job of conveying an eerie feeling that something bad is about to happen to London.
Minecraft also works well for adding an interactive educational component to the fire: an exhibit scheduled for February 2017 will allow museum visitors to try their hand at rebuilding the virtual city following the plans of 17th century architects Christopher Wren and John Evelyn, according to Engadget.
Microsoft has been touting Minecraft's educational abilities recently, including releasing a free "Education Edition" of the game for teachers and students in May. It has also used the game as a "digital playpen" for artificial intelligence research, with teams of engineers developing algorithms to teach AI programs how to learn concepts in the virtual world.