YouTuber reaches Minecraft world edge in 14 years; mirrors Karl Bushby's 28-year trek across Earth

The open-world of Minecraft can take years to successfully cross, and a new real-life accomplishment by traveller Karl Bushby has proven just how massive this 17-year old game really is.

While I was doom-scrolling on X last night, I came across an interesting post by StokeyyG2 about a man named Karl Bushby.

Around 28 years ago, the United Kingdom resident embarked on a journey to circumnavigate the world on foot - and 28 years later, he’s finally back in the UK.

It got me thinking about open-world video games and if there are any games out there that are so massive they’d take a similar length of time to fully explore. Games like No Man’s Sky and The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall are popular examples, but Minecraft stood out as the most impressive of all.

KurtJMac’s legendary Minecraft walkathon could have taken much, much longer

Back in 2025, you might have heard of a streamer called KurtJMac who made it his personal mission to walk to the Minecraft Farlands. In the Java edition of the game, those who travel far enough will come across a sort of boundary, where the engine’s rendering tools break down and the world stops being generated.

It took KurtJMac an extraordinary 14 years to walk from his spawn point to the edge of the realm, which is half the time it took Bushby to find his way back to the UK.

Consider this though … If it took 14 years to reach the Minecraft Farlands from where the game spawns you in, it’d probably take you double to walk from one edge of the map to the other, depending on how often you play each day/week.

In theory, walking from one end of Minecraft to the other could take you just as long as it would to walk around the globe and back to where you started. And they say Crimson Desert is a big game.

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Honourable mentions for the biggest video games of all-time

Minecraft is by far the biggest and while it does have a finite end to it, it sure doesn’t feel that way when you’re playing.

A very, very close second though is No Man’s Sky. That said, No Man’s Sky cheats a little bit because rather than one big walkable map, it’s broken up across 18 quintillion planets, according to Hello Games. Nobody has had the time to actually count them so we’ll just take the studio’s word for it.

This, in theory, means you could spend your entire life going from planet to planet, but if you set down on the biggest one, you could find it’d only take you around two days at most to set off and arrive at the point you left.

Then you’ve got The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall. Again, this cheats a bit because it’s mostly procedurally generated. It’d take you around three or four days to see the whole thing.

Crimson Desert is next, and despite the coldness towards it, even I can’t deny that it’s open-world is both impressive and visually-striking. It’d take you around six hours of real-life time to cross which is quite the accomplishment.

After that, you’ve got your classics like The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Red Dead Redemption 2 and other such games. No doubt Grand Theft Auto VI will earn a spot on that list too when it launches in November.

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