Minecraft Memories and the Pigman war

  So one thing I was super into back in the day and even now I guess is the game minecraft. The game just had sooooo much appeal to almost every part of my life. The vanilla sandbox offered up the perfect purposeless fun that you could play for as long as you wanted. You could log in, build a house, explore a biome or two, mine, and sometimes even kill a boss in current versions. It’s just so simple, yet so very fun that I would never really put down the game for a super extended period of time. It was the game where I met some of my oldest friends and we spent so many nights just on servers doing whatever we wanted from smp to mods and to the thing that really sort of defined our identities, creative servers. In those creative servers, it was some good fun chaos. In fact(not to be a shameless youtuber here), if you want to see some of that silliness is still on my youtube channel in this video

One thing we did that was really cool and definitely the best part of those creative servers were this little thing called companies. Since my username is AZ19AGENT, I created the wonderfully named AZ19 Co. All of us made our own companies, named them, we built these sick HQs using the most advanced tricks and clearly the best building skills on display just so we could show these companies off to each other. What did they actually do or make? Who cares, it was just awesome to imagine ourselves as the CEOs of these fictional companies and work together. The building projects became really fun bonding moments for us and even though the original group isn’t the same, we’ve lost some and have definitely been walking a bit of our own paths, those memories will never go away.

So where is this leading to? Well, since the companies didn’t actually have a purpose we wanted to give them one. Like the young kids we were, we decided that our companies would be the leading group in a war against the zombie pigmen of the nether. I don’t exactly remember how we settled on this. Maybe it was because of the zombie pigmen behavior at the time, or maybe we all thought the nether just gave evil vibes all around, but that was where we ended up. I even made a super nerdy imovie trailer template for the project(still on my youtube channel lmao)

Even though the idea was simplistic and we definitely didn’t really flesh it out, we started making lore for this darn thing. The zombie pigmen came from nowhere out of the nether and began terrorizing the lands so the king enlisted our companies to develop weapons and train armies to stop them. I have everything I’ve ever written about it on some google doc saved from well over 10 years ago at this point. It brings up two different wars with the eventuality of us finding peace with the pigmen and maybe uniting against the endermen because we all learn that they are the actual huge threat that needs to be dealt with. Our companies specialized, my company would be the most in charge of handling the frontline war with the help of my friend Aidan’s company. I wasn’t even the CEO of my own company at this point in the story. I was the head of the science division and was promoted by choice through the previous CEO who resigned from the position for no apparent reason. Through my and Aidan’s companies we would make tanks to turn the tide of the war. We had some npc companies known as Quartz and Obsidian Co who would support us. Other companies would go into special research to create weapons and deploy stealth/scout units to provide valuable intel. Our wartime efforts helped turn peacetime into a golden age with overworld mobs falling to the patented Village Defense Unit which helped bring crime and unemployment to a record low. 

Why am I even bringing this stuff up? It was just some cringe thing that me and my gaming friends did when we were all 12 back in the day. Surely it was just all pointless fun right? Well if you thought that at all while I was explaining any of this, you are wrong. These are the kinds of things which can define you for the rest of your life. I’m not saying that in a “I never grew up” kinda manner. Just that the idea that you get to sit down with your friends, having the chance to create something together without worrying about other people seeing it or needing to abandon it early because you have actual real life obligations, creates a very special moment. This goes twofold for both life and the game minecraft itself. We didn’t use mods or ingame quests to create this narrative, as janky as it was. We placed blocks in the virtual lego game and found some way to harness the creative energy of it. Without doing that I probably wouldn’t ever be doing things like writing stuff in a creative manner had I not started back then with my friends. This obviously isn’t to say that Minecraft is where you will find your big story, I don’t even know if this could ever amount to something more than a happy memory, though I might end up trying just for the heck of it. Stuff like minecraft is so beautiful for allowing us the chance to do that. So in an effort to repeat the message I’ve tried to express in doing this blog. If you’ve ever had the itch to create/tell a story, find your way to do it or at least write it down because creativity is beautiful.

This was a pretty fun thing to revisit, I do have the entirety of the original pigman war story draft sitting in my drive so if people want to see it, I may post it. Not sure if the 7-10 of you who read this blog would actually want to, but hey y’all read whatever I post so who knows. That being said, I deeply appreciate anyone who reads this far and has a slightly better day because of it. We’re almost a month into these posts and I haven’t felt myself slowing down at all. That being said, I’ll be back tomorrow and if there is any amount of support for posting the old drafts I probably will do it. Maybe my old friends won’t want to because they’re involved, but hey we all need to revisit our cringe pasts to see how based our present is. That line sucked, this closer is ruined. Bye.