This Minecraft map that recreates one of history's most notorious slums made me reconsider what's important in 3D level design

Like roughly half of the internet, I am fascinated by Kowloon Walled City. Built on the site of a military fort, the Walled City was a Chinese enclave situated within former British Hong Kong. Its existence was tolerated by Britain provided China made no effort to exercise its jurisdiction. This peculiar legal status left it largely ignored by both nations, and as such it became the site of rapid, unplanned urban development through the latter half of the 20^th Century.

At its height circa 1989, Kowloon Walled City was the most densely populated place on Earth. More than 35,000 people lived in an area of six and a half acres, giving it a density ten times that of Earth's most tightly packed cities like Giza and Manila.

Classified as a slum, Kowloon Walled City suffered from destitution and poor sanitation, and was rife with illegal trading, prostitution, and at various points, organised crime. It was also architecturally unique, its distinctive facades concealing a maze of tight alleyways and buildings interconnected with ladders and informally constructed bridges.

The Walled City's distinctive architecture and labyrinthine layout make it a natural setting for a video game, and it has appeared in virtual form numerous times. The city forms the basis of a level in Call of Duty: Black Ops, while a fictionalised version of the Walled City (simply named Kowloon) appeared in Shenmue 2. Pretty much any cyberpunk-themed game is likely to have a little Walled City in it too, whether it's Cyberpunk 2077, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, or 2022's futuristic feline adventure Stray.

Nonetheless, I've always wanted to see a game that goes all in on Kowloon Walled City, that meticulously recreates its alleys, apartments, and many informal pathways and lets you explore them freely. That game still doesn't exist. But thanks to one intrepid Minecraft builder, you can now wander the streets of Kowloon Walled City in virtual form.

Sluda Builds is a qualified architect, Minecraft builder and YouTuber who specialises in extraordinary constructions within Mojang's digital Lego set. His previous projects include solarpunk cities, brutalist skyscrapers and industrial ghost towns. Kowloon Walled City is his latest creation (or in this instance, recreation), and as Sluda explains in the accompanying video, its construction was a monumental undertaking.

To recreate Kowloon Walled City, Sluda first built a 3D model of the city to ensure every street and building was accurately placed. As Sluda notes, every building in the city was completely unique as they were constructed with no real municipal oversight, so getting the position of every building right it important to recreate the shape, size and flow of the pathways between them.

Constructing the city also yielded some surprises that aren't obvious from images or top-down maps. Most notable is the fact that the city was built on a sloping incline, with a 45-foot difference in elevation between its lowest and highest points. This isn't evident in aerial photographs as one of the few building rules the Walled City's was subject to was a height restriction of 14 storeys, due to its proximity to Kai Tak Airport. Consequently, all the buildings cut off at roughly the same height, making the City appear flatter than it is at ground level.

Once laid out, Sluda recreated each building in raw blocks, before filling out details like the facades and the rooftops. The result, at a glance, is an impressive recreation of one of the strangest human-made places ever to exist. But I was curious how Sluda's map would hold up to closer scrutiny. So I grabbed a copy of the map (which is available for purchase via Sluda's Patreon), booted it up in Minecraft, and took a stroll through this quirk of civilization.

The map spawns you on the outskirts of the Walled City, where you can get a good view of what is probably Sluda's main achievement in the project, the facades. While they lack the grime and dilapidation evident in images of the real Walled City, Sluda effectively captures their wild variety, particularly the network of caged balconies protruding from each tower like architectural acne. The map also includes contemporary buildings that surrounded the Walled City shortly before its demolition, and their grey uniformity provides a powerful contrast to the Walled City's highly organic structure.

The map also provides an impressive sense of the City's scale, and just how imposing it would have been on approach. While the name "Walled City" harks back to its fortress origins, it also accurately describes how its tightly packed buildings loom like a single, solid wall when viewed from ground level.

Inside the city, the detail falls away considerably. Many of the inner buildings are constructed out of uniform Minecraft blocks, while building interiors are completely bare. Some of that detail comes back in the city-centre, however, where the facades return as they face inward toward the Walled City's yamen, the administrative office that survived as one of the few low-rise buildings in the city.

Nonetheless, the map does provide some sense of what a foreboding place The Walled City would have been to navigate. Most of its alleyways are alarmingly narrow, following no obvious logic in how they twist and turn, making it easy to get lost despite its relatively small footprint. One factor the map doesn't represent is how those alleyways often appeared more like tunnels, due to how the sky was often blocked out by masses of overhanging objects, such as cables, awnings, balconies, and informally constructed bridges.

On the subject of bridges, the map represents the Walled City's fabled interconnectivity to some extent. Buildings that physically touch one another have some walls "knocked through" letting you pass from one to the next, while you can also ascend staircases from the ground to the rooftops, where coloured banners represent the clothes-filled washing lines that crisscrossed the Walled City's skyline. There aren't that many connections between rooftops, however, meaning you cannot cross the city without touching the ground as its citizens were allegedly able to.

What's primarily missing from the map, of course, is the people who lived in the Walled City. The human traffic squeezing through its alleys, the ad-hoc stores, the whine of workshops and factories that were implausibly crammed into its tiny apartments, the unregulated schools, clinics, and dentists. While the map provides a good sense of the Walled City's shape, it doesn't really communicate what it might have been like to live there.

This, it should be stated, was not the objective of Sluda's build. But it nonetheless made me think about what I deem important in virtual architecture and level design more broadly. My favourite games are always those that give me a complex, natty 3D space to unpick, like Dishonored 2's Stilton Manor, Hitman's Sapienza, and Thief: Deadly Shadows' Shalebridge Cradle. But playing Sluda's map made me realise these levels are more than just environmentally challenging sequences of rooms and corridors. They say something about the people who lived in those spaces, exuding their virtual history from their grimy walls, spooky attics, and beautifully recreated gelato shops.

Without this internal life, the novelty of Sluda's map wore off quickly. This isn't to slight his sterling work in creating it, or to say that I expected the map to include imagined histories of 35,000 people. But it made me realise that the reason I want to explore a virtual Kowloon Walled City is not the reason I thought it was, and that while a building or even a city may be built for form or function, it is ultimately defined by the people who live there, and the ghosts they leave behind.