In 2018, at age 15, two friends and I who shared a passion for themed entertainment began building a highly realistic recreation of the Disneyland Resort in Minecraft.
It started as a small multiplayer server the three of us could build on together, and for its first couple of years it topped out at around 40 players online at once. Then it went viral during the COVID-19 pandemic, when many people couldn't visit the places they loved, and concurrent players jumped into the thousands. The server is entirely free to join and play, and the player base has stayed strong since: there are rarely fewer than 150 people online, and more than 500,000 have joined in total, collectively taking over 16,000,000 rides on the recreated attractions.
Since 2018 we've recreated nearly every attraction at the Anaheim resort, pushing Minecraft's limits with accurate audio playback, detailed ride recreations, and more than 10,000 custom 3D models each made by hand. I'm still actively involved, and we keep adding new content and hosting events for the community.
The project also became a testbed for real show-control tools. We developed an inverse kinematics system for animatronic figures, so their movement could be driven by target positions instead of animating each joint by hand. Firework shows are synchronized to the millisecond, and the park's light fixtures can be controlled live over Art-Net, so both can be programmed with the same lighting and show control software used for real-world shows.