Minecraft Monday

~ the eulogy ~

Minecraft Monday existed for fifteen weeks across the summer and early fall of 2019. Keemstar, a YouTube personality better known for drama videos than for games, had been pushed toward the idea for over a year by the meme account Grandayy, and was already running Fortnite Fridays on the same model. The Minecraft version debuted on 24 June 2019 and over a million people watched it live.

The organizing principle was simple and slightly cynical. Players were invited on the size of their following rather than on whether they could play, because followings bring viewers. Ninja and PewDiePie both turned up, and so did the makeup YouTuber James Charles, who was not pretending to be good at it. UMG Gaming ran the servers while G Fuel and Apex Hosting paid the bills. Ten thousand dollars went to the winning pair every week.

I was in my mid-thirties in 2019, writing computer vision code in Ankara. This was a tournament for an audience that had grown up inside YouTube, built around a game I had only ever watched other people play, with a prize structure that made more sense as television than as sport.

~ the dossier ~

~ the format ~

Teams of two worked through a run of minigames, and whoever had the most points at the end took the money. The friction was built in from week one. Experienced Minecraft players were seeded next to people who had barely opened the game, and the community that actually played it watched its own skill ceiling get used as a backdrop for celebrity. That resentment shows up in most contemporary accounts of why the format did not survive.

One player came out of it with a career. Technoblade won four of the fourteen events and posted the best individual score in seven of them, including a record 1,892 points alongside Philza in week 10. Technoblade died of cancer in June 2022, by then one of the best-known names in Minecraft, and that trajectory starts here. By week 13 the stunts had taken over the format: MrBeast put a fifteen thousand dollar bounty on Technoblade during a Hunger Games round, and Bajan Canadian collected it.

~ week fourteen ~

After week 13 on 16 September 2019, Keemstar went on Twitter to say the tournament had been running on a shoe-string budget with corners cut, but that it would be back in November. Three weeks later, on 7 October, week 14 started and somebody broke into the server partway through. The event was abandoned with no winner recorded, and the results table for that week is one struck-through row where the scores should be.

November came and nothing returned. Nobody ever announced that it was over. Fourteen events is the whole run, and the fourteenth does not count as a finished one.

~ the inheritance ~

Esports writers rate it the second serious competitive Minecraft format, after an unsuccessful Badlion and ESL partnership around 2017, and by a wide margin the most famous. The closure gets attributed to the community friction and the breach together, with the polarizing status of its host sitting underneath both.

The gap filled within a year. MC Championship, built by the YouTuber Smajor1995 with the map-making group Noxcrew, took the creator-tournament format and ran it without the drama attached, and it is still going. Minecraft Monday proved the audience was there and then handed it to somebody else.

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