In early 2012 a guy called Chad Dunbar saw YouTubers struggling to make slick videos of the game back then, matches had to be managed by a server admin who’d place players on the start podiums, restart the server between rounds and reload the map to all. This mainstay is based on The Hunger Games: 24 players roam a large map, gradually picking each other off until one winner remains. Take MCGamer, which was one of the first big minigame servers, having accidentally popularised Survival Games. But they’re also inflected by a very modern sensibility – of instant access and YouTube. Minecraft minigames are often similarly wild and messy, built by self-taught modders fiddling around. These Minecraft servers remind me of the 1980s computer games scene, when kids like the Oliver brothers taught themselves to program and made massive hits like Dizzy in a matter of weeks. And always hanging over it all is the big question: will Minecraft ever stop being popular? But, along with the rest of the Minecraft community, it’s weathered a pretty tumultuous past 12 months, with Mojang beginning to enforce its EULA, which includes regulations for the way server owners can run the game, and the Microsoft purchase. It’s a full, legit operation, the kind that had a big presence at Minecon this year, holding onstage tournaments and community meetups. Behind the scenes, Hypixel now has a core team of 26 programmers, world-builders and admins, supported by 100 volunteer support staff. The majority of them are between 13 and 16 years old. It attracts 1.9 million players a month and a total of 6.9 million unique players have logged in since it started in early 2013. But operations manager Aaron ‘Noxy’ Donaghey tells me that today it’s a very different server to what it was in the past. Minecraft’s inventory UI is still bent into presenting options for your account and its 35 minigames. Visit Hypixel by simply punching its server address, mc., into your vanilla copy of Minecraft, and its lobby is the usual chaos of players setting off particle effects and transforming into mobs. So I chatted to a couple of their creators to find out, and I encountered a surprising world that’s undergoing big change, facing big challenges, and holding big potential. They’re huge, and Duncan wrote a great intro to the server scene last year, but despite their size, I didn’t really know how they work or what makes them tick. Hypixel has 16,449 players online right now. That would put it among the top 20 games being played on Steam. Mineplex, at the time I’m writing this on a Friday lunchtime in the UK, has 12,022 players online. To many Minecraft players, the servers and the games they play on them, from Survival Games to SkyBlock, are Minecraft. Places like Mineplex, Hypixel and GuildCraft, where rather than the standard survival or creative Minecraft, you play heavily modded multiplayer games. And that means its big minigame servers are still popular, too.
Good news, Microsoft! Minecraft is still popular.
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