A History of Mindcrack — The First 10 Years

Mindcrack has had a rich history full of many great moments in the 10 years since it all began, inspiring fans with what’s likely over 100,000 hours of content and well over $1 million raised for charity, while also overcoming the various low points and drama. I’ve typed up these 18,000 words covering their entire history, trying to keep it compact while still covering everything important to help highlight the past and show the many paths they’ve followed to get here as the group went through the various changes. These past couple years have been promising as new people have become involved in Mindcrack and their charity focus has fully taken control, and it’ll be exciting seeing how far they’ll go in the next 10 years.

TL:DR:

Mindcrack is a group of friends and content creators who have known each other for years, coming together to play various games and uniting as a group to help people through charity. Initially started by Guude as a singleplayer Minecraft let’s play series on YT in 2010, it quickly turned into a server for friends playing together, with let’s plays starting to become more prominent on the server through 2011. Towards the end of 2011 most members had active let’s plays that started to skyrocket in popularity from an audience on the younger side being drawn to the mass appeal of a Minecraft server with a dedicated playerbase. Heading into 2012 as growth increased at incredible rates, Mindcrack series outside the base server started to become more prominent in the group with UHC, FTB, various collabs, and conventions, and the subreddit started up. 2013 would see PMC launch and the peak of the group’s growth after a server restart, and the first players started losing interest in Minecraft as non-Minecraft series and streaming started to pick up. Major changes occurred in 2014 with the group’s focus moving away from Minecraft after many players were losing interest in the game or just a vanilla server causing the loss of the mass appeal and a decline in popularity, and various drama came about some of which resulted in Mindcrack becoming trademarked. In 2015 they embraced the move away from Minecraft, committing to the non-Minecraft series and continuing to improve their charity events, along with a gradual change in platforms to Twitch and Discord going into 2016 where the Mindcrack community is still located, with some big group streams and events in 2016. In 2017 guests started to show up in Mindcrack more in the various collab streams and marathon, with the new faces becoming prominent in 2018 where they started to become VIPs. Many more of the Mindcrack friends became considered VIPs in 2019, as charity efforts continued to increase and even more collaborative series started up. Catching up to the current day, 2020 would see the group’s charity efforts become even more focused as they launched a Patreon to improve future charity events and brought charity into more areas in the group, the group would reach a new high of 1,800 hours streamed per month on Twitch by the members, and Patrons on the Mindcrack server would lead to some more interactions in the community.

TL:DR on the TL:DR:

Singleplayer Minecraft YT let’s play in 2010 > Minecraft server for friends in 2010 > Popular YT let’s play Minecraft server for friends in late 2011 > Highly popular YT let’s play group of friends focused on a Minecraft server in 2012 > Super popular YT let’s play group of friends in late 2014 > Highly popular YT/Twitch group of friends in 2015 > Popular Twitch group of friends focused on charity in 2016 > Present

2010 — The Beginning

It all started exactly 10 years ago on October 19th, 2010 when Guude uploaded a video for a new Minecraft series “Mindcrack”, saying he probably didn’t have anything unique to add. The let’s play started out as just a singleplayer series in Alpha which steadily gained in popularity, with the first episode reaching 1,000 views less than a month later, and in November he was talking about plans for the next season to be a multiplayer server once multiplayer was more stable.

In December those plans came to fruition and the server was founded by Guude with his IRL friend Madcow, releasing the first video of Season 2 on December 8th in Minecraft Alpha 1.2.5. Later in the month Guude would invite his World of Warcraft friends Alcimedes and thejims to join the server, and a couple other friends LowlanderND and it3fergie also might have joined in the first month with Lowlander having bought the server and paid for it for several months, although their join time seems unclear and they barely played. Several of the WoW friends came from another private SMP server that was around before Season 1 had begun. Many of the early members didn’t make any videos, and Guude had the only videos on the server in 2010.

Minecraft Forums was one of the very early places Mindcrack’s first growth started, in 2010 Guude was interacting with others who were active in the early Minecraft community such as by running a Let’s Play Directory thread updated with every Minecraft let’s Play(previously run by Avidya), and he had a Mindcrack thread where a number of the active commenters would later end up as members. In December Guude and a couple others built a Christmas tree on the server which would become a server tradition, with this one using spawned in materials and getting blown up. On December 25th he announced a contest to join the Mindcrack server where viewers would answer 26 questions about the first season on signs around a world download.

2011 — The Server Takes Off

This year would feature a large amount of growth both in member count and popularity as Minecraft Let’s Plays took off, Minecraft released out of beta starting Season 3, and many players joined from contests and other means ending with more than half the current official members. Mindcrack continued to just be about the Minecraft server with members getting removed for inactivity on the server, however other let’s plays from server members started becoming more prominent as the group grew and Mindcrackers would visit a convention for the first time with the inaugural MineCon.

On January 1st Guude invited JSano on the server, a let’s player who Guude had discovered from the MC Forums and had given shout outs to in the previous months. JSano started the second let’s play on the server and just over a week later began the escalating prank wars with Guude, a Mindcrack server tradition that has continued ever since. Also on the 1st, Nebris and Espie23 both submitted their answers for the first contest getting 100% and joined the server. Guude’s WoW friend Crysix joined in mid-January, and Adlington and Kuroro both tied in the first content and got in on February 1st.

A gaming community known as The Spawn was started in March by Avidya with help from Mhykol and Coestar, who was a well known early Minecraft let’s player. The Spawn aimed to bring together several existing communities and served as an open meeting place where many future Mindcrackers and other prominent people in the community met. Guude befriended a number of people here including Avidya and Coestar who he would invite later in the month, although Coe declined the invitation.

The server continued on with about 10 people playing, of which Guude, JSano, and Ads uploaded as let’s plays and thejims and Nebris put out occasional videos. In March Guude’s first subscriber Stennett was invited but he barely played, and then in April Mhykol was invited on as a guest for a YT series where Mhykol would visit various servers, he wouldn’t really play until the next season though. In Mindcrack’s first April Fool’s, Guude pretended to leak the server IP and when viewers tried to log in they were transported to a bedrock box where Nebris would kill them. Late in April Guude announced the second contest where viewers would submit Minecraft videos for the favorites to get picked. The next week Espie23 was removed for inactivity.

The contest concluded on May 8th, resulting in VintageBeef, Baj, Davmandave, Kennedyzak(both forming 2creditstoplay), and a wildcard Shreeyam who was just 13 years old at the time. Davmanddave and Kennedyzak had met each other in the Mindcrack IRC. They’d be the last new members to join the Season 2 server, however in July one of Guude’s fans who made his new intro asked him to play a different form of Minecraft together, and on July 25th Guude and BdoubleO released the first episode from their playthrough of the recently released map Legendary from Vechs’ new Complete the Monument genre. Despite episode 1 being the first time the two had ever spoken, OOG meshed well and would remain good friends for a few more years before their falling out. Etho would also appear in some OOG series later on, becoming OOGE.

A third contest was announced on August 5th where contestants had 20 days to finish Guude’s Season 2 arena, and the winners were voted on by the members and announced on September 1st as Just_Defy, Pakratt, and Arkas, although they wouldn’t join until the new season a couple weeks later. Previously Avidya had suggested a CTM style PVP map after watching OOG’s Legendary, and Guude brought the idea to life together with Vechs in the form of a map of mirrored lanes known as Race for Wool. Guude arranged for a match between OOG and Avidya & Coestar although PSJ almost played instead of Coe, and the first episode released on September 4th. Guude’s original concept for RFW was to have a large number of interchangeable blocks so the lanes would be randomly generated every time which he felt was better for entertainment, and there were even plans for a large tournament with IGN, but before the concept could be realized the RFW community rapidly built up based around speedrunning the maps after hours of practice which demotivated Guude from continuing his plans.

On September 14th after 280 days the server reset and Season 3 started with the release of Beta 1.8. A few members had stopped playing in the preceding months and several of them were removed from the whitelist, leaving Adlington, Avidya, Baj, Beef, Davmandave, Guude, JSano, Madcow, Nebris, thejims, and Shree as the server members along with new contest winners Just_Defy, Pakratt, and Arkas. BdoubleO was also invited on the server at this time, and Mhykol officially joined having previously been considered a guest. Almost all of the current members were making videos now. Around this time Baj made the Mindcrack logo still used today.

After the success of the first RFW match, Guude ran a 4v4 tournament with four teams on Vechs’ new RFW map Direct Fire. Starting in mid-September, the matches introduced a multitude of future Mindcrackers to Guude: Docm, Etho, MCGamer, Pause, and Zisteau all played in it as well as several future HermitCraft members. Soon after that, Guude watched a livestream of Pause playing his 404 CTM map, and because of that he added Pause who joined Mindcrack on October 30th, followed by Etho and Doc in early November who were popular YouTubers known for technical Minecraft videos, with Doc having 20K subscribers and Etho having an impressive 63K subs. On October 15th future member MCGamer started up a Minecraft gameshow called the Ultimate Miner which would have many current and future Mindcrackers play along with other well known let’s players.

On October 20th Guude launched a whitelisted fan server that featured prominent people in the community. Initially starting with about 15 people Guude selected, it would expand from contests and invites from both Mindcrack and fan server members, lasting for 3 seasons until it shut down in June 2013. Several former fan server members would later participate in Surviving Mindcrack Island including the winner DireDwarf.

In October of the previous year The Shaft Podcast had started as a podcast dedicated to Minecraft and Guude appeared as a guest in November. Many Mindcrackers would make appearances on the podcast in the future, and it’s where Guude met Wes Wilson who was a host. In mid-November YouTuber Kurtjmac held a livestream for reaching his charity goal featuring several guests from Mindcrack, after which he revealed his previously hidden coordinates from his walk to the Minecraft Far Lands. The first MineCon was held in Las Vegas on November 18th and included the release of Minecraft out of Beta, and Guude and BdoubleO both attended for their first time meeting. Other attendees included future Mindcrackers BTC, Coestar, PaulsoaresJr, and SethBling, as well as Wes Wilson.

Avidya would be removed from the Mindcrack server’s whitelist by the end of the year due to inactivity, and MCGamer was added in early December, a YouTuber who had been running charity marathons called Zeldathon since 2009. JoeHills was also considered instead of MC, but only MC got the group’s required unanimous vote. Also in early December, Pakratt began construction on a new project called Guudeland, an area specifically for minigames that would be built on every subsequent server.

2012 — More than a Minecraft Server

Mindcrack featured rapid growth through 2012 as Season 3 had hundreds of videos and continued to attract fans, and Mindcrack began putting more focus on aspects outside of the server with the first UHCs, modded Minecraft, a multitude of collabs between members with series such as MineZ, Chivalry, and Ace of Spades, a wide variety of games played by members, the podcast, and Mindcrack’s first panel at a convention. It had become a group of content creators that were friends rather than just a group of friends, and having an active let’s play was now a requirement to join the group.

The year started with Kurtjmac joining the group in mid-January, a YouTuber who had an ongoing charity series where he had been walking to the Far Lands in Minecraft Beta for almost a year. In September of the previous year Guude had started a Minecraft hardcore series during which Guude said he wish health didn’t regenerate, and when Beef watched it he contacted Jack Beardmore to make a mod for that. The mod also changed golden apples to require gold ingots instead of nuggets. Guude, Beef, Pause, and Baj proceeded to use the mod for a new series starting on February 22nd, Ultra Hardcore Season 1. The goal of the special gamemode was to kill the ender dragon while only having golden apples and health potions for healing, but it didn’t last long before they all died in 5 episodes.

UHC Season 2 started three days later with much better success, and although Baj died in episode 8 they successfully beat the ender dragon who they named Glydia after the community manager at Mojang called Lydia. Around the time the last UHC episode came out in early March, Team Canada composed of Beef, Etho, and Pause had pranked Guude on the server with a solid ceiling of giant mushrooms at the new build limit of 256 blocks. While cleaning up the mushrooms using a tall ladder, they came up with a new minigame on the spot called King of the Ladder involving players punching each other and grabbing the ladder again to reach the top which would become a popular minigame in Minecraft. It would be featured on almost every future Mindcrack server, mostly at Guudeland. Team Canada would make many pranks together and play a wide variety of Minecraft maps, modpacks, and other games over the next 8 years.

After the success of the first two PVE UHCs, Mindcrack changed it up for Season 3 to include 8 players in a PVP UHC match starting on March 20th, and after six 30 minute episodes including Baj farming wheat, Doc fishing, and Pause killing Etho, Guude reigned victorious. As UHC S3 was ongoing the subreddit r/minecraft was initially used for maps and discussions of the new popular series, and as a result a new subreddit r/mindcrack was created on March 22nd that would quickly become the main hub of the Mindcrack community, and it would remain the main place for discussions and other fan-made posts of Mindcrack content until around 2016 when the discussions started to move into the individual members’ Discord servers and Twitch chats.

Pause got to know Rob, also known as OldManWillakers and later Rawb in March by playing Rob’s PVP gamemode Dwarves vs Zombies (DvZ), and would be joined by other Mindcrackers later on. In late March Team Nancy Drew formed when Baj, Beef, Guude, and Pause investigated a furnace prank that Pakratt had built, later having many series together. Zisteau joined Mindcrack on April 1st, a YouTuber known for his playthroughs of Vechs’ CTM maps and high effort videos. He would bring a new level of pranks and builds to the server. Nebris attempted to prank the server in an April Fool’s day stream but was foiled and it led to impromptu hide & seek. UHC Season 4 began on April 9th as a 4v4 matchup on mirrored islands with an alternate goal of completing a victory monument, and after finishing in only 3 episodes UHC S4b was held with the same teams in a normal world.

BdoubleO invited Pyropuncher to Mindcrack on April 10th, who had started out on YouTube playing CoD. At the time Pyro had the most subscribers in Mindcrack and so Guude was a bit hesitant to add him, as he preferred bringing in smaller channels for Mindcrack to grow instead of big channels to grow Mindcrack, others would later push for adding bigger channels though. Also in April, after GenerikB wasn’t allowed to join Mindcrack he started a new group of let’s players around a new private Minecraft server based on Mindcrack known as HermitCraft. They would be one of the main let’s play servers behind Mindcrack, and when Mindcrack moved away from Minecraft in later years HermitCraft would become the main Minecraft server based let’s play group.

Guude got into contact with the new Minecraft server hosting company MCProhosting to start a Mindcrack public server with a cap of 1,000 players and the server launched on April 15th with 15,000 players joining on the first day, however the host was unreliable and didn’t fulfill their promises leading to Guude spending a large amount of time managing the server, and Guude had the server shut down on April 27th. The idea of a public server would be revisited for PlayMindcrack in 2013.

AnderZEL was invited by Beef to the group on April 17th, who started on YouTube with Minecraft but was also really into FPS games. UHC S5 started on April 26th with 12 players and 7 episodes. During May a new series CobbleHATERz started up playing Minecraft without cobblestone, started by Pakratt with MCGamer, Nebris, and Rayman who was a fan server member that had taken X_Wing_Ian’s place on the server a couple months before. After slaying the Ender Dragon Glydia on the Mindcrack server in early May, UHCs S6 and S7 were held in mid-May and early June. Millbee would soon join on June 9th as a result of Beef’s invitation and an earlier invitation from Pause who was a friend. On May 23rd a new YouTube channel was created as MindcrackNetwork which would be used for group based content, and the first videos uploaded on June 19th were a multiplayer game with Team Nancy Drew and the first episode from Season 1 of the new Mindcrack Podcast which would run for 178 episodes until March 2017. Beef invented a new game in Minecraft on the Mindcrack server called ABBA Rules caving where the winner takes all the ores mined during the caving trip, and since then it’s been played on every season and even in modded.

Despite being on the server since the start of Season 3 and having worked on a spawn castle and floating mothership, Arkas had never released a video up to this point, but on June 10th he streamed from the server on Twitch, and on July 10th he released his first video on YT, jumping from 2.75K to 12.75K subs overnight. With Arkas making videos, the Mindcrack group now fully consisted of content creators. In late July Pause and Guude traveled to Alabama for the 5th PlayOnCon convention, during which Pause was hypnotized and lap danced. Future Mindcrackers Aureylian, BTC, and GenerikB were also attendees which Guude met for the first time as well as Wes Wilson who was an employee. Guude with initial help from Nebris had been planning out a special Survivor based competition in Minecraft to let a new member on Mindcrack, and while at PlayOnCon he enlisted the help of the map maker BTC to design the world and challenges for the secret project. Shortly after that Aurey was voted on to join Mindcrack but didn’t get the required unanimous vote, and Mookake too was considered for a member. Guude would also attend DragonCon in August, and Doc and Anderz were two of a number of YouTubers paid to attend Gamescom in August.

The decision to let GenerikB join was reversed and he joined Mindcrack on August 2nd, a decision which Guude deeply regretted later. He was one of the biggest users of roleplay on the server and quickly formed the B-Team with BdoubleO on August 20th after Etho had killed BdoubleO. The B-Team would play in many series together, but some would cause issues later on. UHC S8 started on August 13th and would be the last UHC for 8 months. Kurt’s FLoB-athon livestream was held in August after reaching another charity goal and featured Mindcracker guests, and shortly before that another charity stream QubeTubers featured a few Mindcrackers raising money for Child’s Play. Aureylian joined HermitCraft in early September with limited activity. Millbee and MCGamer formed Orange Wool in late September shortly before the Mindcrack server started using snapshots, and Avidya would rejoin Mindcrack on September 28th and participate in the group wither slaying the next day with the addition of the wither. After some buildup, a mock trial was held on the server on October 1st to resolve the earlier conflict between Etho and the B-Team.

In early October everyone in Mindcrack got keys for the newly released Chivalry, and Mindcrackers playing it and spreading word of the game became an example of Mindcrack’s influence. A special PVP event was held on October 5th where members of Mindcrack and HermitCraft faced each other on the Cube Control map Xisuma had made. On the 14th the first day of TerrafirmaCrack released, a PVP gamemode Pakratt organized across multiple IRL days in the Minecraft mod TerraFirmaCraft which also had Shree and several fan server members including DireDwarf, and is where Pakratt first met his future wife HonneyPlay. The next day 15 Mindcrackers played with BTC on his new Minotaur map, and on the 27th BTC was announced to have joined Mindcrack which was secretly because of Guude’s secret project. Also in late October was a Halloween party on the fan server which numerous Mindcrackers joined.

Mindcrack got into modded Minecraft on November 14th with the first modded Mindcrack server played in the Feed The Beast pack which would become a new addiction for many members. There would be 122 videos before the server reset in December. On December 24th, Modded Mindcrack Season 2 started with FTB coming out of Beta and a specific Mindcrack FTB pack releasing. It would be the longest running modded season, with 809 episodes releasing until September 2013. November would also be when Zisteau started an infamous series of 8 pranks against BdoubleO disguised as the E Pranker.

Late in November MineCon was held at Disneyland Paris which 8 Mindcrackers flew out for as well as SethBling, with them staying inside the Disney Castle. Mindcrack held their first ever panel at the MineCon, and several members attended other panels as well as met with Mojang employees, fans, recorded a podcast which featured Dinnerbone, JL2579, and future member SethBling, visited Paris, and got into various stressful situations such as Disney security pulling out a gun one morning. Around this time Guude gave JL the nickname JLZipCode which would soon turn into the new name of his previously unnamed technical server, “ZipKrowd”. During MineCon PaulSoaresJr was announced to have joined Mindcrack. After MineCon ended, 4 Mindcrackers traveled to London for a fan meetup in a pub and at the London Eye.

2013 — Continuing to Grow

Another year would see the group continue to grow as a few more members were added and they grew as friends and experimented with their content to figure out what works, with the year featuring a number of one-off group events, more conventions including the first PAX they attended, a gradually increasing focus on streaming, the development of the public PlayMindcrack server, their first ever charity marathon, a new season of the Mindcrack server, various drama caused by a large diverse fanbase, and the peak of Mindcrack’s growth as Minecraft started to slow down as the main focus of the group. By this point Guude had given up his powers to solely make the group decisions with the group running as a democracy holding monthly meetings, and the group would be incorporated as a business for legal reasons by the end of the year.

Both Coestar and BdoubleO joined HermitCraft in January, although Coe wouldn’t be active. On February 7th Mindcrack announced the White Cannon Tournament, a public event headed by Pakratt with help from the Mindcrack Fan Server, The Spawn, and Overcast Network. The event featured a vanilla world where participants gathered TNT cannon supplies in a time limit, then built and fired the cannons at targets aiming for both accuracy and destruction along with special challenges. Prelims took place in late February with the Finals in early March, and several Mindcrackers spectated and built cannons including Guude, Beef, and BTC. Pakratt wouldn’t start streaming until July so nobody in Mindcrack streamed coverage, but Pak’s friend Honney and several fan server members including DireDwarf streamed the event.

Beef and Kurt started up a new series in F1 2012, a series that would have a number of seasons over the years. In mid-February a group event with the first full battles took place in BdoubleO’s Season 3 arena, and in March several videos came out of PVP fights around the server. By this time the minigame server PlayMindcrack was already planned and these fights were similar to the Survival Games that would come later in the same areas of the map. Late March would see 8 Mindcrackers attend PAX East in Boston for the first time along with future members Aureylian and Sevadus, as well as various online friends including several HermitCraft members. At the convention there were meetups with the Mindcrackers, signings, an FTB tournament which involved Direwolf and Slowpoke, and many fun times.

April Fool’s 2013 was very elaborate, with Guude announcing he had turned ownership of the server over to SethBling who announced people on the Mindcrack server could now use creative, and Seth was added to the sidebar of the subreddit. A subreddit mod Aubron announced he was the real Etho after the voice actor Etho was killed in a tragic accident. The biggest prank was Mojang releasing Minecraft 2.0 in collaboration with Mindcrack, HermitCraft, Seth, and Vechs, featuring a large number of changes that were revealed in videos by 14 Mindcrackers. The game featured such nonsensical changes as Etho Slabs, coal blocks, burnt out torches, stained glass, exploding animals, horses, and Super Hostile mode.

UHC Season 9 started on April 2nd as a throwback to the first 2 seasons with a goal of killing the Ender Dragon Glydia, and SethBling appeared as the first ever UHC guest. Afterwards Guude asked for Seth to join Mindcrack but Seth declined. In mid-April half the Mindcrackers played on the Ironwood Valley PVP map together, and then late in the month a similar number played on another PVP map Calamity. GenerikB left HermitCraft in April, and UHC 10 was held in early May. Vechs announced he’d be joining Mindcrack on May 17th after many interactions with the group over the years although he wouldn’t join S3, and Coestar who was a friend of the group announced his retirement from YouTube on May 23rd. UHC 11 started in early June with guest Dinnerbone, and it was played with eternal day and for the first time featured 20 minute episodes instead of 30 minutes. After Dinnerbone played in it, UHC’s changes were added to the vanilla game with a new gamerule for natural regen, a spread players command, and changed recipes so golden apples need ingots and glistering melons need 8 nuggets. Rob was a podcast guest in late June and made intros for subsequent episodes.

After reduced server activity, Mindcrack voted for a server reset although some such as Guude were against it, and the final Season 3 tours took place in late June after running for 22 months. Mindcrack Season 4 started on July 1st 2014 in 1.6 using the new UHC mode on the server so players wouldn’t naturally regen. A few days later 11 Mindcrackers gathered to kill the Ender Dragon, and another week later they killed the first wither on the future Guudeland island. Originally they planned to remove the UHC restriction after killing the two bosses, but they were enjoying it so much they voted to keep it on.

With the start of Season 4 Mindcrack’s growth peaked, and many channels started to have their sub growth slow in the summer along with some such as Etho also having views gradually start to go down. The amount of content on YouTube was skyrocketing and offered competition for views as Minecraft’s popularity also slowed their growth, and more and more members were starting to move their focus from YouTube to Twitch where some had been streaming since 2011, which combined with Mindcrack starting to shift their focus away from just the Mindcrack server and most of the members having more mature content compared to the many YouTube channels targeted at a young audience gaining popularity led to the group appealing to a smaller audience and not gaining as many new young viewers.

UHC 12 took place in mid-July with guests SethBling and JL2579 and had major lag issues, with extremely fast mobs and a day/night cycle between 2 and 5 minutes. Shortly after the UHC started, PlayOnCon 6 was held in Alabama with Guude, BTC, and Mhykol attending along with future members Seth and OMGchad where both met Guude for the first time and Guude got to know Seth. Wes Wilson who was an employee and Rob also attended. During July Doc and Anderz officially formed DnA, having various series together. In August Shree announced he had left the Mindcrack server, but he remained on the whitelist and continued as an active mod on the subreddit.

Early August saw another convention, Vidcon, held in Anaheim where Guude, Pause, GenerikB, and Seth met up with fans, and Guude got to know Seth better. In late August five Europeans attended the UK gaming festival Insomnia i52 and held a Mindcrack panel, and they also recorded an IRL podcast episode with Dinnerbone joining. Also in late August PAX Prime was held in Seattle, with Guude, JSano, Kurt, and Pause attending. Future members Seth, Sevadus, Coe, and Aureylian also attended along with Phedran and several friends, and there was a Mindcrack meetup. In later years PAX Prime was renamed to PAX West.

On September 23rd a mysterious new player was seen on the Mindcrack server with the account NewMindcracker. The next day, SethBling released his new map The Building Game through a group event with 6 Mindcrackers playing it together, and it would be a fun game played in Mindcrack for many years. On October 5th it was revealed that NewMindcracker was SethBling having used the account just to get settled on the server without the pressure from fans, although the fans built up a massive amount of hype because of it. He was a popular YouTuber known almost exclusively for videos of creative Minecraft inventions. Guude’s secret project would finally be recorded in a single 22-hour session at the end of September, featuring YouTubers with low sub counts chosen by Mindcrackers where they’d have a chance to join Mindcrack. The event would have over 200 hours of footage filmed by Mindcrackers, including Seth who hadn’t been revealed as NewMindcracker yet. The project would take years to edit and get through legal issues with the Survivor show.

After announcing it in mid-September, Mindcrack held the first ever Mindcrack Marathon in late October exactly 7 years ago today. 21 out of the 26 Mindcrackers participated, and some of the guests were Notch, Dinnerbone, and Rob. The 48 hour stream took place on Mindcrack’s Twitch channel supporting Child’s Play charity with hopes of reaching FLoB’s Season 4 goal which needed about $50K more. In contrast with later marathons the entire stream was spent playing Minecraft, played on both the Mindcrack server and some creative and faction servers provided by MCProHosting for $20 donors. Some of the notable events included Jaaski donating $1,000 to blow up GenerikB’s mansion, Etho getting his first ever anvil kill, Guude’s joke about BTC hiding in a hole making the front page of Reddit, Notch mining the last block of Doc’s witch farm perimeter, and many fun events. There were raffles throughout the stream, and in total the marathon raised $118K for Child’s Play.

MineCon 2013 would take place in Orlando at the beginning of November, and before MineCon started Mindcrack held a party in Orlando funded by signed postcards and tickets although there was still a loss. 15 of the 26 Mindcrackers attended the party and MineCon, and 7 HermitCraft members, Aureylian, OMGchad, Sevadus, DireDwarf, Rob, Wes Wilson, MC’s friend GreatScott, and several Mojang employees and other friends attended the Mindcrack party. BTC made a special adventure map for MineCon which featured almost everyone from Mindcrack as voice actors. MineCon started on the 2nd and would include a Mindcrack panel, meetups, and having fun together. During MineCon Pause introduced Guude to his friend Rob in person for the first time, and after finding out about Minecraft’s new EULA changes that’d be coming later to prevent pay to win servers Rob pleaded for Guude to add him, Nisovin, and their project DvZ to the upcoming PlayMindcrack server. Despite already being well into its planning, Guude agreed which would have major impacts on PMC’s longevity. While at MineCon Guude gave BTC the nickname “Jor-El”, which would later turn into Jarool and be a popular name for him.

Back in 2012 Guude talked about YouTube Networks taking such a high percentage of revenue and how he wanted to make his own network. When he was planning it the network BroadbandTV came in and offered to form a network for Mindcrack to get everyone managed which was important as it helped protect against copyright claims, and that likely happened at some point in the second half of 2013. Many of the Mindcrack members would remain managed under this network until 2018 when YouTube removed managed channels which left the managed people unprotected from claims, and BBTV would help out in other ways as well.

Coestar would start a special series on Twitch called StreamADay where he streamed every single day to keep him motivated through his depression, which is still going to this day having recently passed 2,500 consecutive days of streaming after starting on December 5th. UHC Season 13 took place in mid-December, featuring guests Rob, Dinnerbone, and Grumm. Wes Wilson announced his resignation from The Shaft in December, and Guude invited him to work with Mindcrack where he’d be the general manager for PlayMindcrack and later the group’s project coordinator.

Mindcrack announced the new public minigames server PlayMindcrack on December 8th, which was originally planned to be a server with games all based around Mindcrack for the Mindcrack community and with extra profits getting put into a group fund to pay for events and such. Mindcrackers would proceed to test some of the games in videos, and the server would enter closed beta open to supporters on December 20th. Initially the server started out with the games Mindcrack Survival Games, DvZ, King of the Golden Monocle, and Barnyard Blitz, as well as a museum server with the first 4 Mindcrack server worlds. It’d open to the public on New Year’s Eve and the server started out popular, however many members felt that Rob was turning the games and server to be about himself rather than Mindcrack and choosing to focus on his own projects on the server instead of Mindcrack based games which turned off many of them from regularly playing again. This in turn made the server miss out on the potential popularity that would’ve been generated if it was regularly played by Mindcrackers, and it was instead limited to a somewhat more dedicated Mindcrack audience just for the community and also fans of Rob, of which many would stop playing when Rob left.

By this point in time Mindcrack was a very large group with many hundreds of thousands of fans, and so the group had to deal with regular drama from a large diverse young fanbase who held high expectations for the Mindcrackers, and there was a lot of negativity that went around. On December 18th some new drama occurred when a newer Mojang dev known as TheMogMiner donated $500 to Guude and joined a Mindcrack FTB server under the assumption that it was the Mindcrack server. He got mad with people on the server after not receiving appropriate ranks and went to Twitter to vent his emotions about Mindcrack in some very negative tweets. Guude clarified that there had been a misunderstanding and refunded the money, and TheMogMiner apologized the next day. The incident would be a major contributing factor for Mindcrack to later trademark the name and help provide protection against other servers using it.

2014 — Going Through Changes

2014 would mark the departure of Mindcrack from the Minecraft server and decline in popularity after moving their focus to areas lacking the mass appeal of Minecraft. The year featured the group’s biggest cases of drama as the B-Team made many videos without disclosing they were sponsored, Rob left PlayMindcrack after a behind the scenes falling out with Guude, and GreatScott caused drama when leaving Mario Kart. As 2014 went on, many Mindcrackers would start to lose interest in Minecraft or just a vanilla server, as it was a diverse group of friends who all didn’t necessarily start off playing Minecraft and it just didn’t hold their interest after 4 years, and Mindcrack gradually shifted their focus away from Minecraft as the number of non-Minecraft videos made by Mindcrackers doubled and Minecraft videos started to fall off in the second half of the year. Streaming would also significantly pick up during the year especially with more people regularly streaming on Twitch joining, and the group’s charity efforts would grow as they became involved with Extra Life.

The year would start off with a number of Mindcrackers playing on a Pixelmon server, a mod adding Pokemon to Minecraft. A new Mindcrack series followed it, Garry’s Mod Murder, featuring Pause, Baj, Pyro, and Juicetra with 3 episodes in mid-January. The game Power Juice was also added to PMC during the month. On January 28th GenerikB put out a video where he toured the EpicCloudMC server which caused viewers to speculate that he was paid to do it, something that would’ve been illegal to not disclose and would come up throughout the year. January ended off with the famous question, “Standing or Sitting?” UHC Season 14 came out in February featuring the proximity based voice plugin also used in Guude’s secret project. Also during the month the third season of modded Mindcrack started, using a new pack now named Crack The Beast FTB which was developed by Baj. Instead of using the normal format, the server was based around PVP and raiding bases which players tried to keep hidden. Biffa joined the season as a guest. Two months into the season the modpack moved from FTB to the ATlauncher and was renamed CrackPack.

In mid-February the B-Team made 3 episodes on EpicCloud’s prison server, a server which had perks costing hundreds and even thousands of dollars clearly targeted at children with access to their parents’ money. They would be followed up in March through July with 3 more episodes on another EpicCloud server, 3 episodes from the MinecraftParty server, and 3 more episodes just of BdoubleO and two friends on the MinecraftParty server, raising suspicions on sponsored videos and advertising pay to win servers targeted at children. Much later on BdoubleO deleted the EpicCloud videos.

GMod Murder returned in late February with Guude, Rob, Pause, and Baj and would run until April, later having Avidya and Pyro join in. On March 7th they started a new 4-episode GMod series in Stop it Slender, and Coestar would make his return to YouTube starting as a guest with the first episode, subsequently appearing in every GMod series. Another GMod series started shortly afterwards, Prop Hunt, and it would be one of the main GMod series. Mhykol launched a PMC bouncy castle town in March where players could chuck his head around and play the music “Buckle Your Pants”. Halfway through the month they held a PVP event on the server at Arkas’ town. In late March Guude, Seth, and BTC attended GameVidExpo along with Wes, Aurey, and Chad, and the 3 Mindcrackers held a panel where Guude and his phone became a joke. Around the same time Phedran’s popular modpack Life in the Woods released which would be played by several Mindcrackers.

April Fool’s 2014 had various individual gags from the group, including PMC’s museum server turning into Seth’s GoatSim and Doc saying he’d be quitting YT to start a TV show, which caused him to lose thousands of subscribers. UHC mode finally ended on the vanilla server on April 2nd, and UHC Season 15 started up in early April, followed by yet another shortlived GMod gamemode, Deathrun. Also in early April, Chad started up the Mindcrack Weekly Recap. Coe, Pause, and Avidya became known as the Cupcake Mafia around this time after playing games together. Later in April, 8 Mindcrackers attended PAX East in Boston along with Aurey, Chad, Phedran, Sevadus, and Wes. They held their first ever PAX panel with Wes moderating and also recorded an IRL podcast. All the Mindcrackers stayed at a rented house where they got into various shenanigans, including discussions on the proper way to eat string cheese. A week later Seth released a new PMC town for 4-team basketball, and Zisteau started working on the evolving town “Calamity Town”. Late in April the GMod crew recorded a one-off TTT episode with positional audio, and a more permanent TTT series would soon start up in May. Also in late April, Rob started up a group called the Buffalo Wizards playing Garry’s Mod games together. At the start, the group mostly consisted of Rob’s acquaintances including HCJustin, and Coe was also in the group with Pause joining later on.

May started off with Millbee joining the GMod crew and a new temporary GMod gamemode. On May 1st the B-Team released the first of 21 episodes on the MMORPG server WynnCraft, which was their first definite series involving illegally undisclosed payments, as much later on BdoubleO added text to the descriptions saying they were sponsored. After talking with her at GameVidExpo, the group invited Aureylian to join in May. Another non-Minecraft group series started up in Space Engineers on May 14th. UHC 16 happened in late May, with guests Dinnerbone, Brianmcn, and OldGanon. The 4th season of modded Mindcrack began in mid-May as CrackPack S1 after a final fight in Etho’s castle, and this season would also be PVP based with two large teams using CrackPack. The season had most of the Mindcrackers as well as guests Coe, Sevadus, Chad, Wes, and Biffa. The B-Team’s shady operations continued on May 24th with the first of 3 episodes played on the GTAverse server, a new server that started just to make money and that would shut down within months having unfulfilled payments. May would close out with Seth’s first Super Mario World speedrun on YouTube, a new genre on his channel that would eventually take his focus away from Minecraft.

June kicked off with another big non-Minecraft series in the recently released Mario Kart 8, a series with many Mindcrackers and friends that would run until late 2016 and then later continue with the Switch version that’s currently on hiatus. Early in the month Aurey and Vechs got together for the first of several series together. June would also have a big PMC update adding the games Camelot and Revenge of Cookie, and there was another game made by Etho that was planned to be added in June but Battle Bane would need some more work and didn’t make it onto PMC. In other news related to PMC, Mojang made public the updates they had planned for the EULA which Mindcrack was told about at MineCon and announced they’d need to be complied with by August 1st, requiring changes to how PMC generated income. E3 was held earlier in June with Doc and Aurey attending and included a Twitch party, and the 7th PlayOnCon was held in late June and like the previous ones involved quite a bit of alcohol, Guude and Pause were the only members to attend but Chad, Wes, and Rob also went. Guude was elected president of the event.

The start of July would have UHC 17 with guests Coe, Sevadus, and CaptainSparklez who had been in a number of collabs and conventions with Mindcrackers over the years. In July Guude revealed his secret project was now being edited together by BroadbandTV rather than editing the 200 hours of footage himself. BBTV would provide $30,000 towards the production costs. The project getting edited wouldn’t make it ready for release though, as it would get stuck resolving legal issues for years as they faced issues from being based on Survivor. Chad joined the GMod crew near the start of July and around that time they also switched from Prop Hunt to Prop Hunters and set up custom taunts. On July 4th Sevadus announced he joined Mindcrack during a stream, and he was one of the first members to have Twitch as their main focus over YouTube. Ten days later the Season 4 tour took place during which Coestar finally became a member after playing games with the group for years.

As the Season 4 Mindcrack server’s activity had been dropping, Mindcrack held a vote at some unknown point months in advance to do annual resets on the map regardless of activity, something that was contested and people like Guude, Etho, and Doc were strongly against it, but the annual resets won the vote. GenerikB was one of the people voting the strongest for resets just because it’d get better views. This was a disadvantage of Mindcrack being run democratically, as such a large group wouldn’t always make the best decisions for the health of the group. Knowing an arbitrary reset was inevitable was a contributing factor in people not wanting to play on the server and sped up the shift away from Minecraft. Mindcrack Season 5 started on July 18th in a 1.8 snapshot with a 500x500 world border constantly expanding every day to keep players together and add interest as new areas were regularly exposed. Rob added a role-playing plot world to PMC called Lords of Minecraft in July which was mostly played by the Buffalo Wizards, and the game Pajama Jam Time was also added.

With the Minecraft EULA requiring servers to comply by August 1st and other servers making changes, PMC removed the ability to buy in-game gold with real money and later added a new paid silver currency for cosmetics, resulting in reduced server income. Because Rob hadn’t been working on the projects that Mindcrack wanted done for PMC and there’d be less income after the EULA restrictions, Rob announced later in August he’d be leaving PMC taking his DvZ and Lords of Minecraft projects with him. Guude was fine with it and assumed they were still friends, proceeding to upload the first video of a series recorded together and preparing to move on with PMC under new devs, but Rob was expecting PMC to shut down and had a different view on how the situation was going which led to a big falling out between the two and drama. Guude would find out that when he had been giving money to Rob to split with the developers, Rob would pocket tens of thousands while giving Nisovin a tiny amount and telling him it was failing.

On August 6th the B-Team started yet another shady series on the MafiaCraft server with 6 episodes and a livestream, during which they talked about how good of a deal the paid benefits on the server were, with strong evidence it was an illegally undisclosed sponsored advertisement and viewers even speculating that they were an owner for the server, and calling them out for supporting a server going against the updated EULA. Much later on BdoubleO would later delete the MafiaCraft and GTAverse videos. On August 20th the B-Team released a new video promoting the MineBrawl Sky Wars server, and the next day a screenshot was posted to the subreddit showing the MineBrawl server owner saying he had paid both of them $2,100 per episode which caused a lot of backlash from fans wanting transparency and condemning their support of pay to win servers that target children and break the EULA’s terms.

Long before this point Guude had found out about the non-disclosed sponsored videos the B-Team were making and confronted them about it, but it just led to an internal conflict that deepened when he told the group about the videos. Many Mindcrackers were worried the group would face legal issues because of the illegal videos being made and that advertising the servers with overpriced benefits targeted at children would damage the rest of the group’s image, and so they started figuring out a way for the two to leave when they wouldn’t stop making the undisclosed sponsored videos. Nobody in the group wanted to outright kick them out and reveal what they had been doing as it would just cause a lot of negativity and Mindcrack would receive a ton of backlash and drama, and so they started work on trademarking Mindcrack to legally define who the members were and serve as a way out for the B-Team, as well as helping protect the group from situations like the MogMiner incident where others had used their name. The group was trademarked towards the end of the year and it would be announced in early 2015.

The start of Season 5 had seen some resurgence in the Mindcrack server’s activity, but it didn’t take long before members stopped playing. Mindcrack was built up as a group of friends that weren’t necessarily all super into Minecraft, and after playing the game for 4 years and knowing that the server would just arbitrarily reset in a year many of them had started to burn out on the game, which wasn’t helped when Minecraft went without a major update for almost 1.5 years after Microsoft bought the game in September. Minecraft was the reason the group had become so popular even influencing Mojang’s development and continuing to focus on it would’ve kept their views up, but the vanilla experience just didn’t hold interest for most of them anymore and they weren’t going to force people to play a game and so the group moved their focus to other things. Without an active Minecraft server the group lost their mass appeal, and towards the end of summer most channels had their growth and views significantly slow down with many channels starting to lose subscribers by the end of the year as people that were only fans for the Minecraft server left, and many of the members starting to put more focus on Twitch also contributed. The Mindcrack server would continue getting played by some members, but as time passed by it would become more of a casual server just played as friends without the regular events, roleplay, and content specifically meant for a YouTube audience, and it became the same as any other series they played together.

Continuing on in August, GamesCom was held in the middle of the month with several Mindcrackers attending, GreatScott joined Mario Kart on August 20th which would lead to some more drama, and Wes joined the GMod crew at the end of the month. Zisteau started up a popular new series called Zisteau Plays Minecraft towards the end of the month, and PAX Prime at the end of August would have another Mindcrack panel moderated by Wes along with meetups, signings, and shirt sales, with 9 Mindcrackers attending the convention along with Chad, Phedran, and several friends.

The 2014 Mindcrack Marathon would occur in mid-September hosting a number of changes from the previous charity stream. This time the group would be raising money for Extra Life, a CMN program helping sick kids, and for the marathon the hashtag #ForTheKids was used which went trending in some countries. They raised $113K passing the goal of $100K, of which some was donated before the stream as an incentive to unlock streaming perspectives from each member in the first ever live UHC. The live UHC would have donors able to affect the game by giving items to a player of their choice depending on how much they donated, and donors were supposed to spectate it live in a mirror world but the server had issues. This would be the only main marathon to be just 24 hours, and 23 out of 29 Mindcrackers participated alongside a large number of guests including Chad and DireDwarf. The marathon was divided up into a variety of segments streamed by different members including the Mindcrack server, Minecraft games and PMC, Mario Kart, SMW, and Garry’s Mod, and the UHC was streamed by Chad on the main channel despite not being a member. During the UHC Pause accidentally fed his horse a Notch apple which someone had donated $1,000 for, and #ForTheHorse subsequently went trending on Twitter.

As September continued, UHC 18 was held later in the month with guests Chad and OldGanon, and around the same time BroadbandTV started a Mindcrack Multi-Channel Network on YouTube to support smaller channels. PMC would release the replacement plot world for Lords of Minecraft, Mindcrack Island. Yet another convention happened in late September with Arkas and Baj attending EGX. Heading into October, PMC would release a new popular game that Seth and Cubehampster had made called Missile Wars. During October the group voted to not do annual map resets anymore, but by this point it had already left its effects on the members. The fifth modded Mindcrack season started on October 14th as CrackPack S2, using the newly released CrackPack 2.0. This season wouldn’t be as active as previous seasons, having a lot less players which included guests Biffa and Wes, and there’d be quite a bit more streaming than before. A new PVP based modded series called Fly Boys started up in mid-October with some people including BdoubleO, and Generikb and Etho would later join. It was followed up by a modded Minecraft battle royale series in late October, a project BdoubleO had been working on for a year called Survival of the Fittest. Six Mindcrackers played in the first season along with some HermitCraft members.

Towards the end of October, Guude, Pause, Beef, and Phedran traveled to Vancouver where they held a meetup and participated in an Extra Life charity stream segment run by BroadBandTV, although the stream had many technical difficulties. Guude also had his credit card stolen in Canada. While the three members were in Vancouver, a new account was seen on the Mindcrack server called spoooky_ghost. After various shenanigans around the server he’d be revealed as OMGchad on October 31st, finally having been invited by Guude on October 2nd after participating in other group activities for years and even being in smaller administrative meetings with Guude and Wes. He’d be the last member to officially join the group bringing the total up to 30 members, but like before there’d be a number of candidates that failed to get the required unanimous vote from every member, and in later years there’d be VIPs that’d essentially become Mindcrackers that hadn’t signed the contract with regular interactions in the group.

Early in November the Mindcrack server held a PVP fight with shrinking borders to signify the world finally opening up. A few days later 4 Mindcrackers attended the first ever Extra Life United held in Disney’s Coronado Springs Resort in Orlando, an event where Extra Life ambassadors could meet the kids that the charity supports and a tournament takes place where the winners win money for a CMN hospital of their choice. Sevadus was the overall winner of the tournament which had the final game be a race to the nether on an Xbox, something most of them had never played Minecraft on before. Season 2 of Survival of the Fittest took place in late November. The game Regicide was added to PMC in November, and DvZ was moved back to Rob’s server.

UHC 19 started up on December 8th having two large teams using the mumble plugin. Shortly afterwards the ender dragon was finally killed on the vanilla server now that a stronghold was accessible. GreatScott hadn’t really been fitting in with the Mario Kart group and it was even causing people to leave, so finally after internal discussions Pause asked him to stop participating in karts which got blown way out of proportion in yet more drama. After having their growth slow, the Mindcrack YT channel started losing subscribers in December, and the subreddit’s growth had significantly slowed for several months. The year ended off with Zeldathon Relief, the 13th Zeldathon and the first one to raise over $100,000 for charity.

2015 — Embracing New Directions

The changes the group had been going through over the last year would be fully realized in 2015, as they announced the trademark with 5 members leaving, embraced the change in focus away from Minecraft which caused many fans to leave, and continued to grow the group’s focus on charity that would take over as the main goal that the whole group focused on. The number of YouTube videos would start to decline as Twitch really began taking over, and Mindcrack’s audience would become more mature as the younger Minecraft audience stopped growing and many left combined with a different dynamic between fans and content creators as Twitch became more prominent. The first Discord servers would also start, a platform which would later take over the subreddit as one of the main locations where Mindcrack fans interact with each other and the members.

The year started off with a number of new series in January including the second season of Space Engineers featuring Guude, Millbee, and Coe, a group that would soon become known as The Show and remain together to this day with some breaks mixed in. Another team that formed in January was GOB, with Guude, Chad, and Beef playing many CTMs together. The game Blackbeard made by BTC’s build team was added to PMC in January. In mid-January Kurt and Beef started up F1 2014, and on January 21st Seth became the first human to perform a credits warp in Super Mario World on console, soon taking the world record and starting to experiment with the technical aspects of the game. PAX South was held in San Antonio late in the month, with 9 Mindcrackers along with Wes holding a panel and renting a house together, and Necomi also attending. During the event they got to meet the creators of the fun new party card game Superfight, and they made a video playing it together.

February would have UHC Season 20, a race to kill the dragon like Season 9. During February Guude announced that he’d make one Mindcrack server video per $500 raised on his Extra Life page, with the top donor making an appearance on the server. Doc participated in HermitCraft’s UHC S7 as a guest in late February, and Doc along with Etho would join the HermitCraft server in early March as both still wanted to play on a Minecraft server with dedicated players which Mindcrack no longer had. Etho would leave Mindcrack shortly afterwards, but Doc would continue in both groups to this day, being in HermitCraft for Minecraft and Mindcrack for charity marathons, events, and various other games. Mindcrack held another panel in early March at PAX East, with 7 members and Wes attending as well as Phedran. BTC announced it’d be his last convention for financial reasons. After a short hiatus in February, the Mindcrack Podcast returned in March with Chad as the person running it, now with sponsors which helped supplement the group’s costs for servers and events.

PMC launched UHC on the server in March, allowing players to play in traditional style matches. Various drama would come about in March from Rob answering questions on ask.fm, most notably leaking that Guude’s secret project was a contest with the winner joining Mindcrack. Later in March the first run of Mindcrack GMod came to an end, but Coe and Pause still continued playing it with the Buffalo Wizards. In late March Team Nancy Drew reunited for some weekly mini-series in a variety of games, finishing out with a long run of GTA V ending in September. N3RDFUSION was announced to the public on March 20th, a private production company that was at the time made up of 5 content creators that mostly streamed, including Pause and Sevadus. Within 10 minutes of the announcement it caused the #1 hashtag worldwide on Twitter. For April Fool’s 2015, Mindcrack rebranded as BrainMeth for a day. The Mindcrack subreddit’s growth had plateaued in March, and with the April Fool’s joke the subreddit saw it’s biggest ever daily drop in subs both from people not getting the joke and the ongoing decline, and the joke rebranding also cause many channels to lose subs.

Because of the group becoming trademarked in response to the B-Team, members were required to sign a contract licensing out the trademark so that members could use the group’s name and logo and the group could use their name and logo. Bdoubleo and Generikb obviously didn’t join, and a few others also didn’t sign: Etho chose not to sign as he had fears his name could leak out if signed and his main focus was still Minecraft which Mindcrack had been moving away from, PSJ was a more recluse kind of guy who wasn’t really into the big group stuff, and thejims hadn’t really been doing much with the group and also may have had privacy concerns. Those five didn’t continue as members, but they were still for the most part friends and welcome in the group becoming the first VIPs, which are friends who are whitelisted on Mindcrack servers and welcome to join events. The trademark changes were announced on April 3rd in an announcement titled “Mindcrack is Changing”, which also embraced the direction the group had been moving away from Minecraft and towards other collabs and real world events, accepting that Minecraft was no longer the group’s main focus.

The loss of several large members sped up Mindcrack’s decline in popularity that had been dropping from the move away from Minecraft, and because they couldn’t fully talk about the reasoning behind the trademark many assumptions were made that caused people to leave, with a common misconception being that it was Guude who was solely behind all the changes and they were making the group into a business just for money, as well as thinking that members were required to change their content or attend events to be in Mindcrack. That misinformation getting spread around did some damage to the group’s image for years.

At the beginning of April the first group 7 Days to Die series started with season one of 7 Mindcrackers to Die. Unlike the later group server it was just a normal collab series. As they got into May, a new group of Mindcrackers started playing the modpack Agrarian Skies 2 consisting of Mhykol, Baj, Nebris, Guude, and Pakratt. This group would soon turn into Guude, Nebris, Pakratt, and Arkas, a team that has constantly made videos ever since, and in contrast to groups like The Show and Space Cops with mostly short series in various games they have always done very long runs in worlds. The fourth FLoB livestream took place at the end of May after reaching the season’s goal of $50K for Child’s Play, and 5 Mindcrackers plus Phedran joined the call during the livestream. Also at the end of May was the start of the first season of Rob’s Unforgotten Realms Live with Buffalo Wizards including Pause and Coe who was the main streamer, with URealms Live being a series of custom DnD type sessions. There had also been a single stream in March.

In June six Mindcrackers attended E3 2015, where the cinematographer Drew did filming for the group for the first time having previously just filmed the series Chad on the Street. Mindcrack produced several videos covering the event and held a podcast while together, and there was also a Twitch party again. During E3 this year’s charity marathon was first announced. Ending off June, Mindcrack announced they had collaborated with Superfight to produce a custom Mindcrack themed expansion pack. It’d be the group’s only significant effort at merchandising, otherwise only ever selling minor stuff like shirts, postcards, and keychains. During June PMC’s plot server Mindcrack Island was replaced by Tribes. June ended with the start of UHC 21 where players teamed up when they found each other.

July would see Crack Attack added to PMC, the last gamemode released to the public on the server. MineCon 2015 was held in early July at London and resulted in many stories as they explored London and also had some conflicts. 12 Mindcrackers attended, although originally it was supposed to be 20, and other attendees included Wes, Shree, and Dadbee. There was another Mindcrack party held before the convention, and Mindcrack held a panel which C418 participated in along with meetups and signings. One night while sitting down at a Chinese restaurant Guude, Chad, JSano, and Wes got into a conversation that led to discussions about Wes’ work with Mindcrack, and with Wes having recently acquired a new job he would soon step down from his position working with Mindcrack. During MineCon Seth got to talk to Elon Musk about his MarI/O project and autonomous cars, and this trip was likely the origin of Arkas being from Norway.

Shortly after attending MineCon Shreeyam made his return to the Mindcrack server as a VIP, and around that time the 8th PlayOnCon was held with just Guude and Wes attending. July 19th was the one year anniversary of Season 5, and so they travelled far away to make a new spawn and act as a new world while still keeping the original area. Towards the end of the month the second season of 7 Mindcrackers to Die started, this time being a PVP series with two teams. VidCon took place at Anaheim in late July, with Chad and Aurey attending and Aurey being in a panel. Guude got inspired watching Twitch Plays Pokemon in 2014, and so he started work on a Mindcrack server version developing a site called Mindcrack Cam with the help of JoeHills. CrackCam was finished in August, letting viewers move a spectator account around the Mindcrack server through streams on the Mindcrack Twitch channel. Mindcrackers set up several challenges for CrackCam including to unlock a charity stream and they put various hidden surprises underground.

August began with a new Rocket League series featuring Chad, Kurt, and ConeDodger, a prominent member in the Farlanders community who would become a friend of Kurt and later get involved in Mindcrack. On August 8th six Mindcrackers participated in the Noxcrew gameshow in Minecraft with Chad being a host. PAX Prime occurred in late August, the last one before being renamed to PAX West. Mindcrack again rented a house with 8 Mindcrackers, and they hosted a panel, recorded a podcast, uploaded videos of interviews with game devs, and Pause and Guude were gifted Tenga eggs which they experimented with in videos. Drew, Breon, and Phedran also attended. Around the same time the PMC dev team manager Sigils announced he’d be stepping down from that role on the server. UHC 22 started on the 26th with guests BaconDonut from N3RDFUSION and Wyld, and was played in 1.2.5 as a throwback to the first seasons.

On September 15th Guude finally announced his secret project had a release date of January 2016 after getting stuck with legal issues for years, having dealt with the similarities to Survivor. On the same day the 3rd season of 7 Mindcrackers to Die started, this time having 8 members in a PVP series with teams of 2. A few days later Mindcrack GMod returned with the Trouble in Terrorist Towners, featuring the addition of Justin in one of his first Mindcrack series who’d become very involved with Mindcrack in the coming years. The first ever TwitchCon took place towards the end of September, with 6 members including BTC holding a panel as well as attending some other panels. N3RDFUSION also held their first ever panel during the convention. Mookake created the Minecraft chainworld series in September which would later be played by various Mindcrackers and Justin, and Kurt made it into the 2016 Guinness World Records with FLoB.

October started off with a new season of F1 2014, this time with Kurt and Cone instead of Beef. Possibly the first Discord server in Mindcrack started up in October with Coe’s Discord, which would be followed by many other servers opening up later in the year and especially in 2016. For almost 3 years the Mindcrack subreddit had been the main location for Mindcrack fans to post everything on including fanart, discussions on Mindcrackers and their content, questions, statistics, analysis of everything the Mindcrackers did, info on events, birthday celebrations, and hype. As streaming became more prominent some of the discussions and questions moved to Twitch chats, and as the audience became more mature and stable with the move away from Minecraft there became less of the questions and analyzing everything the Mindcrackers did and said. Discord would provide a new platform which for the most part would replace the subreddit over time, as each member opened up their own Discord servers which were better suited for fans to discuss the member, post fanart, and participate in a community more focused on the relevant content creator. Out of the thousands of members across the many Mindcrack Discord servers many of them have been in multiple servers with regular interactions with each other, but being spread across 20+ servers resulted in a reduced sense of community and made it harder to see the interactions the Mindcrack community has.

The 2015 Mindcrack Marathon took place in early November and for the first time it was an in-person marathon with 17 Mindcrackers flying out to San Francisco and 3 participating remotely along with CaptainSparklez. In total the 48-hour marathon raised about $220,000 for Extra Life, and the segments consisted of both games and live segments with Drew being the main filming crew member. Some of the segments which would become marathon staples included the first ever blindfolded Lego building with Seth and Sevadus, two different live UHCs, and the first Who Wore it Better, and there were many other familiar games from the group including the Mindcrack server, Agrarian Skies, The Building Game, Superfight, Garry’s Mod, and Ultimate Chicken Horse. Additionally there were many incentives for donors to inflict punishments on Mindcrackers determined by wheel spins. Mindcrack becoming trademarked significantly helped the marathon get as big as it was, having needed to negotiate with companies for travel and the location at the Microsoft Loft as well as getting sponsors which had donation prizes. Like the first marathon there was a donor server for $25 donors, but this time it was just a normal server. $10,000 was raised from t-shirt sales during the marathon, and the top donor was permanently whitelisted on the Mindcrack server as a guest which ended up being AmethystRaindrops. With the third charity marathon in a row, Mindcrack had established charity as one of the group’s main focuses which would only grow in the coming years, taking over the main focus that the entire group took part in which had previously been held by the Mindcrack server.

BTC announced on November 12th that he’d be leaving Mindcrack and continued as a VIP, later completely focusing his content on the game Overwatch. The group was now at its current total of 24 official members. PMC announced in late November that several games would be retired. In December Mindcrack held a group Secret Santa, with 18 Mindcrackers each sending and receiving a gift and each uploading a video to YouTube of the unwrapping. On New Year’s Eve it was announced that PMC would be shutting down after running for 2 years.

2016 — Different Platforms

During 2016 every single Mindcracker streamed on Twitch with streaming becoming a main focus for many of them, and a lot of Discord servers started to pop up with those two platforms gradually becoming the main modern location for Mindcrack. In the first half of the year Mindcrack started weekly and monthly streams to raise money for the group fund, with the final one raising money to fly a whole bunch of Mindcrackers out to MineCon where they got together for several series. The Mindcrack 7 Days to Die server would start with most members playing, Guude’s secret project finally got revealed, a new season of CrackPack started, and in addition to the main fall marathon Mindcrack also held a live charity UHC in the spring and attended Extra Life United.

The year opened with a new group series, a 7 Days to Die Mindcrack server running 24/7 with one game day passing for every IRL day. 21 out of the 24 Mindcrackers were interested in playing, and it’d be a prominent series lasting several seasons. In mid-January Guude said the secret project’s release date was pushed back to February, which would then be pushed back again to March 11th. PAX South took place at the end of January, with 7 members attending where they co-hosted a booth with N3RDFUSION as opposed to a panel, and Drew and Mookake also attended. While at PAX Kurt held a Farlanders meetup. Justin joined the Mario Kart group during January. The PMC server finally went offline on February 3rd, with two games under development that never went public. The first was Seth’s Splat game based on Splatoon, and the other was 9 Lives. The second season of 7DTD started on February 2nd as a result of updates. In late February almost half the Mindcrackers flew out to Orlando for the second Extra Life United which was a much bigger event this year, and while nobody performed too well in the tournament they got to have a fun time hanging out with the other ambassadors and visiting Disney World.

Early in March Pause, Beef, Sl1pg8r, and Keralis started playing The Forest, a group that would be called the Pojkband and play many games together. On March 16th the game publisher Frontier held a private alpha launch party in London for their new game Planet Coaster to which everyone from Mindcrack was invited to, as some of the employees had previously interacted with the group through Ace of Spades, and Guude, Doc, and Baj all travelled to London for it along with Biffa. Because of a large time gap between scheduled play times Guude spent hours at a gin bar, and he ended up causing the game’s alpha release to be delayed after questioning why a game with coaster in the title was launching without any roller coasters. Frontier would continue to have a good relationship with Mindcrack. Previously Guude and JSano had done a couple Minecraft maps in 2013 and 2014 becoming known together as Guano, and they returned on March 21st with the 3rd season of Guude’s series playing the Space Chickens modpack. The two have continuously made videos together since then, most of which have been like a podcast.

Guude’s Secret project was finally revealed as Surviving Mindcrack Island in March, 4 years after the idea was conceived. SMI was a Minecraft reality series based on Survivor with 12 YouTubers competing who had less than 10K subs in 2012, each invited by a different Mindcracker. The winner of the competition would become a Mindcracker, with 10 weekly episodes each having 1 competitor eliminated followed by a livestreamed finale revealing the winner. The series was recorded in a single 22-hour session, and MCGamer’s pick YoshiToMario had to cancel being replaced by Mhykol’s pick DireDwarf. Initially the terms “tribe” and “tribal council” were used, but because of legal issues they had to be replaced with “team” and “grand council”. Rob was the first person voted out, and after a surprise comeback from the blue team the final 3 competitors were Honney, darkphan, and DireDwarf, with Honney getting voted out in episode 10 and the final two not knowing who would win for years until the livestream in May 2016. DireDwarf was declared the winner, but he didn’t get the unanimous vote to become a member and so became a VIP in the group.

Up to this point Guude had always paid for Mindcrack expenses out of pocket, spending tens of thousands on server costs, lawyer fees, and fees for meetups, conventions, and other events which was only partly offset by ad revenue from the podcast, and so Mindcrack finally set about getting money for a group fund to pay for the expenses. To fund the group, they started weekly Mindcrack streams on March 28th which would soon be accepting donations and subs, with the streams hosted by Millbee and playing a variety of fun games with many people in Mindcrack. The very first game they played was Golf With Friends (later changed to Golf With Your Friends), a game that would become popular with Mindcrack throughout the rest of the year. Other frequent games they played during the weekly streams included SpeedRunners which had already been played by some members for a while, Ultimate Chicken Horse which also had several Mindcrack series, and Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes. Justin and later Dire made frequent appearances in the streams which ran until July. Also in late March, SethBling manually programmed Flappy Bird into SMW, and 7DTD Season 3 started after version A14 came out.

Minecraft 1.9 released in March after not having an update since Summer 2014, and so Mindcrack held their first UHC in a while. They ran into a world border bug with Spigot and Seth accidentally teleported MC into the world border, then the ending was super drawn out because of shields and a large final world border, so it became an April Fool’s UHC. The official UHC 23 started up on April 4th with guest Brianmcn. A week later the first Mindcrack monthly stream was held, which was like a 24-hour version of the weekly streams and is when they opened up donations. During the stream Seth set a world record for SMW, and there was lots of Golf With Friends among many other games as well as a blindfolded Lego building segment. During the stream Justin joined the Mindcrack 7DTD server for the first time, and he participated in many other segments. PAX East took place in April, and this would be Mindcrack’s last major appearance at a PAX. 6 Mindcrackers again co-hosted a booth with N3RDFUSION, and featured guest appearances from the Build Guild and Godiva Gaming including Honney. Other notable attendees were Drew, Justin, and PSJ. The second run of Mindcrack GMod ended in April.

The second Mindcrack monthly stream took place in May which had similar games to the first one, with Justin and Jaaski participating in multiple segments. Mindcrack opened up a store on their website at the start of the stream selling items like keychains and signed postcards. Shortly afterwards Dire was added as a VIP for winning SMI. For the first time Mindcrack did a live charity UHC outside of a marathon, holding a standalone UHC on May 21st for Extra Life which would become an annual event and later turn into full spring marathons. This had the lowest participation out of all charity UHCs with only 8 players including VIP Dire. A traditional UHC took place at the end of the month, Season 24 which also included Dire. The second season of URealms Live also took place at the end of May. During May activity on the 7DTD server died out which would have interest further taken away when a new modded Minecraft season started the next month. In early June Vechs became the second last Mindcracker to reveal his face, having never attended a public event with the group. During the 16th Zeldathon, Zeldathon Recovery, the team reached $1,000,000 raised for charity in total.

VidCon took place in late June with Chad and Aureylian again being attendees. During June’s monthly stream near the end of the month, Mindcrack started their 6th season of modded Minecraft with CrackPack S3, having most of the stream consist of the server and as usual some Golf was mixed in. This season of CrackPack would have a lot of activity on Twitch having more than 400 hours played in the first 10 days, and each member could invite a guest which led to lag problems from all the players. Some of the invitees included Justin from Coe, Jaaski from Pause, Breon from Mhykol, Mookake, Phedran, Justvan, and Biffa. Breon had been involved with Mindcrack behind the scenes, helping out at conventions in 2015 among other things. The server would be active for 3–4 months. Another race to kill the dragon, UHC 25 took place in late July with guest Pommes Peter, and during the next day July’s monthly stream took place. Throughout the stream there were hourly raffles to win Superfight decks, and they killed the ender dragon in CrackPack. A Superfight tournament took place on Twitch at the end of the month with Guude, Pakratt, and Doc participating.

At the end of July HermitCraft started the first season of a new PVP series Hermit Wars, and Mindcrackers Beef, Doc, and Anderz participated along with VIP Etho. Kurt and ConeDodger were regular players of Minecraft Bingo by this point, and in early August Guude joined Kurt and Cone for his first ever Bingo match which was one of the first times Guude and Cone talked, later developing a close friendship. Mindcrack held their last monthly stream in late August and reached some special goals of raising enough money to fly most of the Mindcrackers out to MineCon, rent several houses, and record certain series, with a live camera in one house and other events planned. PAX West took place early in September with 4 Mindcrackers.

Mindcrackers started to show up in Anaheim on September 20th ahead of MineCon 2016, with a main “Crack House” along with two other rented houses which didn’t have A/C. There was a livestream on the Mindcrack channel showing various activities in the Crack House on the 21st and 22nd, as Mindcrackers hung out together having fun, playing games, signing postcards, and derping around a lot. Drew filmed several videos in the house, including a really good confessions video, a series called “Eat it or Wear it”, a bug eating challenge, and two podcast episodes. While in Anaheim all the Mindcrackers got together for some minigolf, with lots of footage getting edited into three IRL Golf With Your Friends videos later on. MineCon arrived on the 24th with Mindcrack hosting a panel and signing. This was Minecraft’s last MineCon convention, as next year would be the virtual event MineCon Earth.

Shortly after MineCon, the second TwitchCon was held at the end of the month in San Diego having MC, Sevadus, Kurt, Chad, and Pause attend, and Zeldathon held a panel at the convention. UHC Season 26 came out on the first day of TwitchCon, and it was exclusively released on Twitch’s new video service to test it out and advertise it, with everyone in Mindcrack getting benefits from the deal. During September Beef joined the HermitCraft server, but he still continued with Mindcrack and was even active on the next two seasons of the Mindcrack server. In October GMod returned once again almost exclusively in streams, initially with Pause, Pyro, Arkas, and Justin, but soon others joined including Coe, Jaaski, Chiblee, and Austin. They’d play GMod and other games together for years, also forming the basis for the later Huskles, Bike Dads, and Coldies groups.

The 2016 Mindcrack Marathon started on October 21st, similar to the previous year it was a 48-hour marathon for Extra Life with 14 members plus Drew, Dire, and Coe’s wife Necomi flying out to the Microsoft Loft in San Francisco. The event raised about $165K including the spring UHC, and the marathon established a lot of the segment formats still used today along with letting donors apply money to specific incentives rather than having a wheel spin. The standard two live UHCs continued, Mindcrack Season 6 launched live during the marathon with Doc being one of the initial players, there were two poker segments, the first ever SL/CED cooking competition with Chef Andy being a guest, the first appearance of Seth’s game Battleship Twister, blindfolded Lego building, Golf With Your Friends both the game and IRL, some VR games, dog food eating, Who Wore it Better, and many other games. While together the group recorded a podcast episode.

Mindcrack Season 6 started during the marathon in 1.11 having regained interest now that Mojang was releasing regular updates again, and the server would have a decent amount of activity mostly in streams before dying out in July 2017, something that wasn’t helped by the almost 1.5 year gap between 1.12 and 1.13. Content from the server would be somewhat staggered as different members got into the server at different points, with streams not picking up until 2 weeks in, one of the most active members Pakratt not playing until a month in, and Guude and JSano having minimal activity in the first year, as for many of them it was more akin to any other regular series they played rather than a dedicated server.

On October 27th Guude, Coe, Justin, and Necomi started a 7DTD series together, a group which would be named Space Cops in March of the next year and are still playing games today together every Wednesday, tending to do both co-op and PVP games with fun matches that are pretty short. October ended off with the finale of Mario Kart 8, having been played since June 2014. Mindcrack’s Secret Santa returned in December with 16 members participating. It’d be the last Secret Santa, as even with months of planning they were very difficult to organize despite being fun to do. Later in December Etho joined Beef and Kurt on the Mindcrack server to prank Pause.

2017 — A Steady Year

Going into 2017 Guude started to put more focus on his own content rather than group, and while everyone in the group were equals it had often ended up being just Guude planning out group series, events, or communicating with others and so the year would have less of the big group stuff as not many members would step up and organize things, just continuing with the normal collabs and singleplayer content. As YouTube continued to make changes that negatively impacted content creators, Twitch streams would increase significantly bringing the hours streamed up to current levels as YouTube videos also dropped down to near modern levels. Various friends started to interact with the group more which would later develop into VIPs, some of the last Discord servers opened up including the Mindcrack Community Discord, and most of them had gotten burned out on conventions leading to less members travelling which was reduced further by the main convention MineCon no longer being a convention.

January started with another FLoB-athon after reaching FLoB S6’s $60K goal, with 5 Mindcrackers joining the call along with Cone. The new season would switch away from Child’s Play for the first time by supporting Direct Relief. PAX South again took place in January, during which 3 members attended along with Cone, members Chad and Kurt each held a meetup, and Kurt received an award from Child’s Play for FLoB. UHC 27 started up in February with all players disguised as Dinnerbone. The first season of the Mindcrack Podcast ended on March 9th after running for 178 episodes and almost 5 years, mostly from getting tired of doing the same thing for so long and struggling with guests and scheduling. A few days later PAX West occurred, again having 3 members attend. Later in March UHC 28 started with all players disguised as Guude, featuring guests Dire, Justin, and Ragou from Scicraft. It’d be the last normal UHC for almost 2 whole years. Shortly after the UHC started Extra Life United was held in Orlando, and it’d be pretty similar to the previous year with 7 members attending.

During ELU PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds entered early access, a battle royale which would become popular with Mindcrack. One of the common groups that played together in squads starting later in the year was Guude, Coe, Breon, and Necomi which would later evolve into Best Squad in 2018. The second standalone live charity UHC was held on April 15th, raising just over $20K for Extra Life. The next month Mindcrack started up a new series in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe which is still running to this day, although currently on hiatus. Unlike the previous game this one would be mostly streamed, and the players would include Justin, Necomi, Ryuski, Cone, and Phedran in addition to members. Chad attended MineFaire in May, something he’d also attend in later years. URealms Live S3 started late in May, followed by F1 returning in June with F1 2016, this time featuring Kurt, Cone, Beef, and Sl1pg8r.

At the end of August Guude, Chad, JSano, and Mhykol held a charity PUBG stream where they raised $2,000 to benefit hurricane Harvey victims. PAX West took place at the start of September, with 3 members attending yet again in addition to Breon, and Kurt held another meetup. On the 15th the Mindcrack Community Discord officially opened up to the public to go with the marathon announcement. Later in September Guano started playing on the Mindcrack server, a series that has remained active across three seasons. During early October Frontier held an Expo in London to exhibit Planet Coaster, Elite Dangerous, and their new game Jurassic World Evolution. Again Mindcrack members were invited, with Guude, Arkas, Baj, Sevadus, and Doc all travelling for the event.

The 2017 Mindcrack Marathon took place in mid-October, this time called Mindcrack Marathon: Evolved. The marathon featured a large number of guests in addition to 16 people from Mindcrack, and this time they held the marathon at Pixel Corps Studio in San Rafael, CA who also provided equipment and staff leading to a really high quality production. Some of the guests included musicians C418, Approaching Nirvana, and Big Giant Circles, as well as friends Cone, Necomi, Justin, Austin, Iskall, and AntVenom. As usual Drew was on the cameras, and Breon also helped out as staff. It featured a 7 hour pre-show on top of the 48 hours which would become standard for future marathons, and some of the new segments were various musical segments, a greatly improved SL/CED with a points system and incentives to give chefs fake money for auctions and which Chef Andy returned in, augmented reality in a green screen room, and Hermit Quest which was the successor to Hermit Wars. The marathon raised a record $262K for charity including the total from the spring UHC.

Several Mindcrackers and friends attended TwitchCon shortly after the marathon. The first MineCon Earth was held in November with Chad as a co-host, and during the livestream Mindcrack was announced as one of the creators in the Minecraft Marketplace. At the end of November Guude, Pakratt, Arkas, and Nebris started playing the Divine Journey modpack, a very long lasting series that would have videos going out for more than 3 years. On December 1st team Pojkband’s last video was released.

2018 — New Faces

As 2018 would progress the various friends that had been interacting more and more with Mindcrack were recognized, becoming VIPs and getting invited to the server and events. They’d essentially turn into Mindcrackers that just hadn’t signed the contract, in a way replacing the positions of the few Mindcrack members that had gotten busy in life and moved away from content creation and interactions with the group, although that wasn’t officially recognized. The numbers of streams and videos in the group had finally stabilized with around 1,400 hours streamed per month from members. Their charity efforts would continue to increase with the spring UHC turning into a full 24-hour marathon, but the main marathon ran into issues with finding a location and was done last-minute.

The year started with PAX South which had just 2 Mindcrackers attend. Another ELU took place in March, with 9 Mindcrackers and Justin flying out to Orlando. Immediately after that Frontier held a private event in LA for Jurassic World Evolution on March 14th, with Guude and Doc attending as well as BdoubleO where they got to try out the game. For April Fool’s Guude’s community held a scripted UHC disguised as Mindcrackers with Guude and Breon playing it normally, uploading the footage as if it was real. PAX East was held in early April again having 2 members attend. Guude and Coe started up a new joint Patreon later in April called Two Bananas for Sale which has remained active, playing games either together or with Patrons every Friday. The 3rd season of Foolcraft started up in May, a modded Minecraft server with mostly people from HermitCraft including Etho, and Guude was invited to the server.

Late in May the 2018 Spring Mindcrack Marathon started, a new 24-hour charity stream expanding on what had previously just been a spring UHC. It included standard segments such as the donor server, UHC, blindfolded Lego building, and some other normal games but also introduced the new segments Guude’s Awful Tacos and Wreckfest for Breakfast. Cone, Dire, Justin, Necomi, and Unrulybabs all appeared during the marathon, and Ryuski was also seen as a donor on the server in addition to the 14 Mindcrackers that appeared in the remote stream.

In June some of the friends in the group started joining the Mindcrack server as VIPs. Breon and Cone were first seen on the server June 19th, followed up by Pakratt’s recently married wife Honney who first played in early July. During the 22nd Zeldathon in June, Zeldathon Champions, the team reached $2,000,000 raised for various charities. PUBG had seen a resurgence in late April, and one of the main groups playing at that point was Guude, Breon, and Coe with others switching up including Arkas, Necomi, Cone, and Ryuski. Heading into the second half of July the main four playing became Guude, Cone, Breon, and Ryuski, a group which would soon be named Best Squad who played PUBG until 2020 followed up by some other games, with Kingster joining in 2019. Ryuski was added to the Mindcrack server as a VIP on July 12th, and the server would continue to have some activity until the map reset in 2019.

In August some people in Mindcrack started participating in Twitch Rivals mainly playing PUBG, which were competitive tournaments by Twitch played either for money or charity. Other Rivals games played included MtG and Stardew Valley, and in 2020 Guude was invited to play in a Minecraft Bingo Rivals with 3 others but was unexpectedly uninvited. PAX West ended off August with 2 Mindcrackers and a couple VIPs attending. MineCon Earth took place a month later, and Aureylian and Chad were both co-hosts for the event. Night Karts started up in September on Saturday nights, something that would soon turn into Huskles GMod. Guude, Pause, Coe, Justin, Ryuski, Necomi, Babs, Jaaski, and Brain played in the Night Karts. In the latter parts of 2018 Minecraft started seeing a resurgence in popularity from a number of different factors, and despite the game not being a main part of the group this seems to have contributed to effects on Mindcrack, with the subreddit steadily gaining several thousand subscribers from late October until June 2020 after dropping for years. TwitchCon occurred at San Jose in late October, having a number of members and VIPs attending.

GMod returned in November with Huskles, a group playing Prop Hunters and TTT with special integration allowing viewer interactions by voting on available prop taunts and traitor loadouts, with the taunts being sound clips of people in the group and Mindcrack supplied by viewers. Early on the group consisted of Guude, Pause, Coe, Justin, Ryuski, Necomi, Babs, Jaaski, Chiblee, Brain, and Austin, later adding some other friends including Breon. Mindcrack was running into a lot of difficulties getting a location for this year’s marathon, as Pixel Corps was no longer able to host it and there weren’t any other usable locations available on such short notice, but finally in late November the marathon was announced as being held at N3RDFUSION’s office in Seattle.

The 2018 Mindcrack Marathon started on December 7th, just over 2 weeks after it was announced. The marathon raised $170K for Extra Life, having a lower total as a result of a December marathon with such short notice and smaller attendance by members who only knew it would happen one month in advance. The donor server opened up a few days in advance, and once a stretch goal was reached a copy of the Season 6 map was added as a museum to the donor server. In addition to the 12 Mindcrackers attending, Breon, Cone, Honney, Ryuski, Necomi, Darkosto, and AntVenom attended, with Drew, Chad’s friend Josh, and Darkosto’s friend Ashzification helping as staff. This time the marathon had a 9 hour pre-stream as they were setting up, and in addition to regular segments had the new special segments The Great SL/CED Bake Off in addition to the two regular SL/CED segments, a segment painting shirts Bob Ross style while being worn called Bob Ross: Human Canvas which were then auctioned off and resulted in the infamous wig water incident, the first Twitch Sings segment in a marathon using the new service, and an auction for Christmas ornaments painted by each attendee. Guude’s mod Armo proved to be a great help during the marathon keeping track of info, subsequently becoming involved with Mindcrack behind the scenes.

The year ended off with Beef starting a new Pixelmon server called Let’s Go!, having some of the members joining be Guude, Nebris, Chad, Avidya, Justin, Phedran, Babs, Dahl Dantill, and Etho.

2019 — VIPs Gaining Prominence

As 2019 started up, the various friends in Mindcrack would become even more prominent in the group as many were added as VIPs and they participated in even more of the Mindcrack collabs, with most of them appearing in a new season of the Mindcrack server which would have one of the most active season starts. Several new projects would start out of the successful 2019 Mindcrack Marathon, one of which would be a new Crackpack server starting up near the end of the year. Collaborations within Mindcrack would increase as many people from the Huskles started several new series and the vanilla and modded servers let people play together on top of the many existing group series that had been ongoing.

The first normal UHC in well over a year was held in February, with Breon and Cone participating in addition to the regulars. During March ELU was held with Honney and Babs attending for the first time along with others from Mindcrack, and it was followed up by the 2019 Spring Mindcrack Marathon in April which raised $47K for Extra Life having many VIPs and friends participating. During the marathon MCGamer played in a charity UHC for the first time since 2015, and Guano triggered their massive wheat farm on the Mindcrack server that had taken almost a year to build. Pause, Coe, Justin, Jaaski, and Ryuski played Trials Rising together for the marathon, something that’d become a regular series in Mindcrack known as Bike Dads made up of a lot of the people in Huskles, a group which also made an appearance in the marathon. Other segments included the return of some older Mindcrack games in addition to the normal marathon segments, with the donor server being the same server from the last marathon. As part of a stretch goal the marathon caused the early release of Darkosto’s Sky Factory 4 modpack. During April Guude and Cone also did several PUBG Twitch Rivals streams for charity.

After Season 6 lasted for a record 30 months, Mindcrack Season 7 started in 1.14 on April 30th with the addition of Drew and Phedran as VIPs, having 65 hours streamed and 21 different people join on the first day. The season started out very active with renewed interest in Minecraft and the addition of new VIPs, reaching 270 hours streamed in the first week and 1,000 hours streamed by day 40 with even Etho joining in one of Beef’s episodes, but with the group having diverse interests and the server being played more casually rather than having all dedicated players fully focused on the game it’d be active for 5 months before players moved on to other games they enjoyed more, with a new modded server in November taking away most remaining players. Initially the world was limited to 3 main starting islands until updates fixed issues with generation. Unrulybabs was added as a VIP on the server’s second day, Jaaski, Chiblee, and Mookake joined the day after that, and Josh and Justin would join later in May. A daily updating overviewer map launched for the server in mid-May, something that had existed for earlier seasons.

In June the game Codenames got popular in the group, a game that had appeared at many previous conventions and events, with the main people playing it being from the Huskles and Bike Dads groups. Codies as it came to be called was a frequent game played until September. 14 people came together to slay the ender dragon on the Mindcrack server, and afterwards Pakratt had an accident forever losing the dragon egg. In July a new game was started by the Huskles/Bike Dads/Codies people called Project Winter, or Coldies for short. In August a week-long FLoB-athon was held ending off FLoB’s 7th season after raising $38K for Direct Relief, with season 8 starting out supporting the PAWS organization helping animals but later switching to raising money for the Equal Justice Initiative. Dahl Dantill joined Mindcrack as a VIP late in August having been involved with Beef and others in the community, followed up by Soccer joining in September after being an active member of Guude’s community who had raised $1,000 for Extra Life in July. September ended off with TwitchCon where 8+ Mindcrack members and VIPs travelled to San Diego. In October URealms Live came to an end as information came out on lies Rob had told and people he had taken advantage of, with Coe cutting ties with him after Justin had previously distanced himself from Rob. In October Beef started a new season of Pixelmon called Evolved, this time with just Nebris, Phedran, and Babs joining others.

The 2019 Mindcrack Marathon started in late October, being held in Chicago for the first time and reaching the milestone $1,000,000 total raised for Extra Life since 2014, being the 3rd group to do so for Extra Life. The number of friends attending almost outnumbered the official members, with 13 members flying out while 10 previous VIPs and friends made their return along with debutants Soccer and Bentley, plus Drew returned once again for camera work. This marathon had a 6 hour pre-show and featured almost all previous major marathon segments, adding on Beat Saber, Hand in a Box, and some spicy food challenges, as well as expanding on segments such as Bob Ross: Human Canvas and making Who Wore it Better about Halloween costumes. The marathon ran into some production issues mostly related to audio problems on the night shift, but it was still a great success raising over $250,000 for Extra Life. There were several stretch goals reached having effects past the marathon. The first was for Darkosto to develop Crackpack 3 used in a new modded Mindcrack server, another one was to make a Mindcrack calendar which would run into issues totally caused by the pandemic, and the return of the Mindcrack podcast which ended up at the stretch goal for 6 episodes unlocked, just short of permanently unlocking the return.

The first bit of Mindcrack drama in over 4 years came out of the marathon after Anderz failed to show up at a UHC and made a public comment, but with the more mature Mindcrack audience it only had limited discussions as most fans trusted it to be dealt with internally. For once Mindcrack had already started plans for the next year’s marathons before this one had ended, with the 2020 spring marathon date immediately announced and the fall marathon internally known. Darkosto developed Crackpack 3 in a seven day marathon held in early November, with the 7th season of modded Mindcrack and 4th season of Crackpack starting in mid-November. The server was joined by 21 people in Mindcrack including many friends such as thejims, darkphan, and Bentley in addition to the more active VIPs. The server featured a mod for viewer interaction allowing subs, bits, and tips to affect the world, and the server would remain active for about 2 months.

2020 — Full Focus on Charity

While Mindcrack have had their main group focus on charity for years, their diversity in charity work has been limited as a result of budget issues, as even their single big marathon is always a pain getting the money for people to fly out, hotels, a venue, and production equipment and personnel. In 2020 they would put more focus into improving the charity work outside the main marathon and launch a Patreon providing money to improve the charity events with the hopes of eventually doing 4 big marathons per year. Unfortunately the COVID-19 pandemic put a damper on things with ELU in Florida getting cancelled, the spring marathon getting cancelled which had plans for remote bubbles, Minecraft Festival’s cancellation which many were planning to attend, and the main marathon getting downgraded to a remote marathon, but still they pressed on having the return of the Mindcrack podcast alongside the Patreon, the start of Season 8 with Patrons joining, and the most ever hours streamed during the quarantine.

Near the start of the year Adlington showed his face for the first time after being in the group for 9 years, being the last member to do so. Another normal UHC was held a year after the last one on Valentine’s Day, with Ryuski, Drew, Soccer, and Dahl making their debut. Early in March the Mindcrack Podcast made its return with the 6 unlocked episodes, and along with the podcast Mindcrack launched a new Patreon with Patrons getting a bonus premium episode for every normal episode released in Season 2 of the podcast. The Patreon was made so that the money from it could go towards improving future charity events, and they announced that if they reached a Patreon goal the podcast would continue past the initial 6 episodes. Having reached that goal, they announced a $2,500 goal to bring back video to the podcast and later a $5,000 goal to let Patrons at the $25/month tier play on the Mindcrack server.

As a result of the pandemic ELU 2020 had to be cancelled as a physical event, however it still took place online with the normal tournaments, and as part of the event Mindcrack held two live charity UHCs in April raising $49K for Extra Life. Unfortunately Mindcrack’s spring charity marathon also had to be cancelled, which was going to have streams from remote bubbles for the first time where local people in Mindcrack would come together for the marathon. During May the Coldies series came to an end, Mindcrack Mario Kart went on hiatus, and Bike Dads switched from Trials to Wreckfest at the end of the month. The month would also see the all-time highest number of hours streamed in a single month from Mindcrack members, reaching an incredible 1,850 hours streamed during May with the ongoing pandemic.

Mindcrack S7 came to an end in June after 14 months, with Mindcrack Season 8 starting in 1.16 on June 27th. The server started out more active than even Season 7, having 123 hours streamed on the first day and later reaching 430 hours streamed in the first week, and 1,000 hours streamed by day 28. Kingster from Best Squad and Guude’s daughter Apple joined in early on as friends, otherwise having similar players to the previous season. For the first time ever the Mindcrack server used plugins, as they were required to set up protections for Patrons joining who wouldn’t be able to interact in a designated Mindcrack area and have land claims. The $5,000 Patreon goal was reached shortly afterwards, and the server opened up to $25 per month tier Patrons on July 1st. The limit of 250 Patrons at that level was quickly reached with the server cap of 60 being constantly full in the first days. Interest from people in Mindcrack would slow down in a couple months with only a small number of people playing regularly in September, but the Patrons would continue to be more active on the server as they interacted with each other and some of the Mindcrack members and friends.

Huskles GMod went on an indefinite hiatus in July after being active for more than 1.5 years. During August one of the podcast guests was RPG Research in the first charity spotlight done in the podcast, which opened up the possibility of a marathon done for the charity in the future. It was mentioned several times in 2020 that Mindcrack had been working on becoming a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization in the future, something that would open up more options for their charity work and make donations and other things easier, as well as defining the group in a way that better lines up with where their goals had been focused on for years. Late October would see the main Mindcrack Marathon which will start in 4 days, an event that has been downgraded to a remote 48-hour marathon because of the pandemic but will still feature many of the interactions that make the marathons so awesome.

As it stands now, Mindcrack is a group of friends that have been together for many years regularly producing content on Twitch and a little bit on YouTube, with some having moved away from content creation or the group as a result of life taking priority but most remaining active in the group, often playing games together and uniting to raise money for charity as well as having friendly conversations behind the scenes and in various chats, and with an active community interacting with each other and the members across the many Discord servers and Twitch chats. Several group series are currently on hiatus, but there’s still plenty of collabs in the group both weekly and unscheduled, and their main goal as a group is to help people through charity which they’ve been highly successful at and consistently getting better.