Minecraft pixel art of Kirby, a 1-Up mushroom, and Nyan Cat built with blocks

Minecraft Pixel Art

2009fan artclassic

Published September 6, 2026

Minecraft Pixel Art is fan-made artwork built inside Markus "Notch" Persson's sandbox game Minecraft, using the game's colored blocks to render huge 2D images of video game characters, cartoons, and internet memes. It started with a single Super Mario build posted on the Minecraft Forum in June 2009, about a month after the game's alpha release, and grew into a massive community hobby with dedicated servers, subreddits, and conversion tools.

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Overview

The format usually places blocks on a flat vertical wall to recreate sprite art, with builders picking wool, terracotta, or concrete blocks whose colors line up with the original sprite's palette3. Common subjects skew heavily toward retro Nintendo sprites, particularly Super Mario and Pokemon, along with anime characters, movie posters, and other internet memes1. Large multiplayer "pixel art servers" were set aside for this kind of building, with each new creation stitched next to older ones across the map1.

By 2011, helper tools like Spritecraft let builders skip the manual palette-mapping step by importing any PNG and outputting a block-by-block build guide5. That lowered the barrier for anyone who wanted to convert an existing image without hand-picking every block, and it helped push output volumes into the thousands on sharing sites like Planet Minecraft6.

Origin & Background

Platform
Minecraft Forum (first build) / YouTube and Reddit (viral spread)
Creator
Miclee
Date
2009

Minecraft was released in alpha form by Markus "Notch" Persson on May 17, 2009, giving players free rein to stack blocks in a voxel world written in Java3. About a month later, on June 16, 2009, a Minecraft Forum member using the handle Miclee posted screenshots of a Super Mario build inside a thread titled "Share your creation!" and asked other players to show off what they had made2. That post is credited as the first widely seen pixel art build inside the game3.

How It Spread

On August 8, 2009, a YouTube channel called minecrafter uploaded a walkthrough of pixel art found on a multiplayer Minecraft server, showing off huge sprite builds of Pokemon and Super Mario characters1. The video pushed the idea of dedicated art servers out to a wider audience beyond the Minecraft Forum crowd.

By early 2011 the hobby was pulling in outside attention. On January 27, 2011, the image-editing contest site Worth 1000 ran a Minecraft pixel art contest, and on February 11 a Se7enSins member using the handle King David posted downloadable Super Mario pixel art templates3. On April 13, 2011, the Spritecraft Java utility was released, letting users convert arbitrary images directly into Minecraft block layouts5. The /r/minecraftpixelart subreddit went live on September 24, 2011, giving builders a central feed for new work4.

By April 6, 2012, Planet Minecraft was hosting more than 4,396 pixel art submissions6. On September 22, 2014, Redditor QueenMercury posted an r/Minecraft thread titled "I made all the original 151 Pokémon in Minecraft," which cleared 1,000 upvotes inside 48 hours7.

How to Use This Meme

A typical build starts by picking a sprite or image, mapping its color palette to the closest matching Minecraft blocks (commonly wool, terracotta, or concrete), then placing blocks column by column on a flat vertical wall so the picture reads correctly from a distance. Tools like Spritecraft can auto-generate the block map from any imported image, which speeds up big builds like full Pokedex walls5.

Frequently Asked Questions