Africa by Toto has seen a resurgence in popularity lately, with Weezer and Al Yankovic recently joining the bandwagon. It’s always fun to see covers of your favorite songs done in unexpected ways (there’s a group that did a hilarious heavy metal version), but one place I didn’t expect Toto to turn up was in Minecraft.
A YouTuber who goes by grande1899 has recreated the song using Minecraft’s redstone system of wires and switches to activate a music-box style setup of tuned note blocks. While it looks like a complex system, it’s not all that hard to figure out – the redstone signal travels along a pathway that doubles back and forth, striking the note blocks positioned along the way that create the tones for Africa.
What is striking about it is the insane amount of time and effort that would necessarily go into making something like this, which is essentially a player-piano scroll in chunky 3D. As you can see from the video, the system stretches out a long way, and it’s a couple dozen blocks deep the entire way.
Here’s the video, have a listen. As grande1899 writes in the description, the audio you hear isn’t perfectly synced with the visuals, but you can see as they pan over the music box that it’s playing as intended.
GameFront spotted this earlier today, and as they note, grande1899 has got to be pretty tired of listening to Toto by now. But it looks like the effort’s been worthwhile, since the video has nearly a million views as of this writing.