In December, John MacInnis, BIND ’13, logged on to the video game blog Kotaku— a morning ritual—and found himself staring at one of his class projects: a toast-firing gun designed specifically for Mega Man, who sits alongside the Mario brothers and Pac-Man as one of the most popular video game characters of all time.

Built for his sophomore studio class, which charged students with building a toaster for a cartoon character of their choice, the images were picked up from MacInnis’s online portfolio and ran with the headline “The World Deserves a Mega Man Toaster.”

This wasn’t the first time MacInnis’s work had garnered an Internet audience. A few weeks before the Kotaku article, his work was featured on the main page of Coroflot, a popular design website.

“People were telling me what a big deal it was to be featured on Coroflot,” says MacInnis.

It was cool, he says—but being featured on Kotaku, his favorite website?

“That was a dream come true.”

—Dan Morrell