
Modes like The Walls, in which teams have 15 minutes of preparation to craft weapons and construct fortresses before the barriers between them come down and battle commences. The next thing they focused on were minigames, intended as 30-minute PVP experiences players could mess about with while they were waiting for their friends. "That's when we realised, 'Oh shit, this could be a big thing.' So we started to work on the Hypixel Minecraft server a lot more." "If you looked at Steam back then we would have been top 20," Simon says. They knew people wanted spaces to congregate, but didn't realise they'd arrive 4,000 at a time. Making their own server to help connect players was the obvious next step, and it paid off. We did a lot of boss fights and stuff and at some point we realised the players knew how to install the maps but they didn't know how to find their friends." "So we were focusing a lot on adventure maps with redstone mechanisms.

"Back then when the 'let's play' stuff was kicking off, Minecraft YouTubers were a big thing and there was a huge demand for adventure maps," says Simon Collins-Laflamme, Hypixel's co-founder. They began as a mod collective before realising there was an audience for something more. Hypixel know Minecraft well because they've stuck with it for a long time. And there will be tools to let people make whatever they want, whether that's the inevitable recreations of beloved fantasy settings or machinima or whatever else players dream up. There will be minigames designed to handle large groups of players (many of them building on minigames already popular on the Hypixel servers). There will be an adventure mode that's basically an RPG complete with progression, story, and drop-in co-op. Hytale is being built to serve different kinds of player. But it's their experience that gives Hytale's creators a chance of succeeding where others haven't. Plenty of other developers have had the idea of making a game like Minecraft but with a few tweaks, and many have failed. They've seen first-hand what players have done with Minecraft.

They're holders of several Guinness world records including "most popular independent server for a videogame" and "most popular Minecraft server network".

He's the content lead on the newly announced Hytale, and Hytale is being made by Hypixel, the company behind a massive set of Minecraft servers of the same name. Minecraft is a collection of different communities that have all done amazing things with it."ĭonaghey knows this better than most. "When people have looked at Minecraft and tried to understand what it is, they've looked at Minecraft as this game," says Aaron "Noxy" Donaghey.
