The Journey
We're players first. Always have been, always will be. This whole thing started because we wanted to play Minecraft with our mates, and honestly? The hosting options out there just weren't cutting it. So we did what any self-respecting gamers would do; we built our own.
We first played Minecraft in 2009, back when there were only 9 blocks in the game and the world was only 256 blocks wide. That version is now called Minecraft Classic. Honestly, we weren't hooked.
That came later with Minecraft alpha, when redstone and TNT got added. As teenagers, the ability to crash our clients by exploding massive piles of TNT really appealed to us. And as programmers, building complex redstone circuitry like ALUs within a video game? That fascinated us like nothing else.
But the thing that really got us into Minecraft was sharing it with our friends. Hours spent designing street layouts, building perimeter walls to keep out creepers, setting TNT traps (and accidentally detonating them ourselves).
And naturally, we became obsessed with modding - finding ways to walk through walls, tame creepers, mind-control skeletons. It pushed us to hone our programming skills, forming the bedrock of our careers. Minecraft wasn't just a game, it was how we learned to code.
Over the years we've managed servers and organized communities. Running servers, we got to know dozens of people we'd otherwise never have spoken to, and made lifelong friends. To this day, one such friend still reminds us about that a shipment of illegally spawned diamonds we allegedly failed to deliver; the refund of one Muller Rice plus interest is still pending.
Together with out friends, we've run everything: vanilla survival, crazy modpacks, creative servers, you name it. We've worked with content creators, built custom plugins (some good, some... not so much), and spent way too many late nights debugging why the server keeps crashing at 3am.
Thing is, we were always players first. Every problem we solved, it was because we were dealing with it ourselves. We know what it's like to lose a world because backups failed. We know how funny it can be to fall off the world because a chunk won't load.
We know what players actually want because we are players. We've spent over a decade managing servers for our friends, families, and content creators.
In 2020, like many people, we decided to start a new server with our family, friends, and partners - The Cat Lord Server. We should explain; Ben's fiancée is a fan of cats. This server is now in its fourth iteration, and it's become something special.
Our parents joined shortly after it started. Work colleagues (now good friends) joined. People from as far away as the USA and Japan joined. In fact, Ben's parents got so into Minecraft that they're now content creators on YouTube with thousands of subscribers!
But as our communities grew, we kept running into the same problems everyone else does. Want multiple worlds? That'll be another $20 a month per server. Need proper backups? That's an extra $15. Server's lagging? Well, that's just how it is. Support tickets take days, and half the time the "solution" is to pay even more money.
We were spending more time fighting with hosting providers than actually playing. There had to be a better way.
Obsidian Worlds started not because we wanted to make money, but because we wanted to build a better platform for our families, friends, and ourselves.
Originally, it wasn't even called Obsidian Worlds. It was a directory called "scripts" on a bare metal server we were renting. Over time, more and more scripts were added, bespoke tooling was developed, and we found ways to innovate on the traditional model.
We developed ways to spin up unlimited worlds on demand, without paying extra. Timetravel backups which allow us to instantly roll back to automatic checkpoints. Real performance on bare metal hardware.
Eventually, we realised the only problem left to solve was to bring our innovations to the rest of the community. We decided to build a hosting platform that was for the community, by the community. And that's how Obsidian Worlds was founded.
Writing this, we're struck by just how much Minecraft has impacted our lives - quite unlike any other video game. It's altered the trajectory of our careers by motivating us to improve as programmers. It kept us sane during a global pandemic. It's allowed us to forge new relationships and changed the nature of existing ones. Working on Obsidian Worlds is nothing but the next logical step in our Minecraft journey.
We're not in this to make a quick buck. We just want to make it easier for people to play the game they love, with the people they love. That's it.
If you want to be a part of our journey, hosting your worlds with a team that actually get's it, sign up to our Early Access waitlist, and join our Discord server. We'd love you to help us shape the future direction of Obsidian Worlds and Minecraft multiplayer.
The people behind it all
Co-founder & Frontend Developer
Co-founder & Fullstack Developer
Co-founder & Design/UX