fbpx
Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Douglas Coupland Predicted Minecraft

“Dad, Douglas Coupland predicted Minecraft!” said my son Matthew, who is reading the writer’s 1995 novel Microserfs. Check out this excerpt: Oop! is a virtual construction box — a bottomless box of 3D Lego-type bricks that runs on IBM or Mac platforms with CD-ROM drives. If a typical Lego-type brick has eight “bumps”; an Oop! […]

“Dad, Douglas Coupland predicted Minecraft!” said my son Matthew, who is reading the writer’s 1995 novel Microserfs. Check out this excerpt:

Oop! is a virtual construction box — a bottomless box of 3D Lego-type bricks that runs on IBM or Mac platforms with CD-ROM drives. If a typical Lego-type brick has eight “bumps”; an Oop! brick can have from eight to 8,000 bumps, depending on the precision demanded by the user.
imgres
Oop! users can virtually fly in and out of their creations, or they can print them out on a laser printer. Oop! users can build their ideas on a “pad” or they can build their ideas in 3D space, a revolving space station; running ostriches … whatever. Oop! allows users to clone structures, and add these clones onto each other, permitting easy megaconstructions that use little memory. Customized Oop! blocks can be created and saved. The rations and proportions of Oop! bricks can also be customized by the user in much the same way typefaces are scaled.

A little googling shows that Matthew isn’t the first one to notice this resemblance. But this is the first I’ve seen it pointed out.

Advertisement

Comments

Want to join the conversation?

Subscribe for as little as $5/mo to start commenting on Rod’s blog.

Join Now