Hello! Glad you made it over to this article. I wasn't very sure where to post this so I decided to place it here, and I thought it needed to be documented. This history will be in parts. I don't know as of right now how many there will be, but I know that the story is still being told as of this writing. I hope you find my hard work intriguing at the least. Now without further ado, let’s get on with the show!
A Consecutive History of the EPCOT Center Minecraft Project
By: Mickeynerd17
Prologue:
(In case you haven’t seen this project, I recommend checking out the original post of the project on the forums here: Project Download )
This article you are about to read is the history of one man's obsession. This project was born out of the midst of my personal frustration from multiple sources ranging from the loss of my first successful park to the fact that no complete Epcot Center maps existed in Java or Pocket Edition. I worked on this project one-hundred percent by myself and I made it a true labor of love. I also wanted to show my appreciation for the idea started by Walt Disney to create a city of the future never seen before or since on this earth, an idea that was transformed into the park called EPCOT. I hope you enjoy this history of my humble project.
If you enjoy what you see here and want to support me, please follow my Instagram page and my YouTube channel, both titled Mickeynerd17_Productions.
This history will be divided into parts, and as of this writing is not finished yet, I still have much work left to do, and this history will be updated accordingly as new versions of the project are released. Pictures will be included. (many, many pictures).
And now, the History of the EPCOT Center Project, By Mickeynerd17.
This all started back in late 2017. I was neck-deep in my first successful park on Minecraft, which I named AdventurelandPark, and had started in 2016. I had made four versions with all four together having a number of downloads over 1 million. Honestly, I couldn't imagine it getting that big myself. I was working on version five when I came up with the simple idea of having EPCOT Center as a second park in the map. This would be a custom recreation of Future World with Spaceship Earth being in the front followed by a main plaza with a garden and a fountain with a single Communicore building where the walkway to World Showcase would've been and flanked by all the pavilions going clockwise minus Wonders of Life. It was an ambitious plan, but I believed I was ready to take on the challenge. I had also started working on my own creation of the Horizons building separately as a space pavilion for a new Tomorrowland section of the main park.
Here are some pictures of the building:
I was very ambitious, and that would show up in my work in the years following.
But, out of nowhere, I hit a roadblock. Somehow my developer's version for Version 5 was wiped out in a Minecraft update, thus blowing away all my work. I quickly lost interest in the park, and coupled with the fact that I was losing chunks in the world, and the severe lag problem when moving around, I gave up.
I was lost for a while on what to do, I juggled with the idea of starting a new park and even tried to build a new one, but I had no motivation, so it just went nowhere. Eventually, I happened upon the Epcot that I tried to build, and after looking around the abandoned construction site, I had an idea.
One of the main annoyances of my mind was the fact that there were no Epcot worlds, or "maps" as they are called in the community, that were available for download. The only two I ever found were both incomplete, terribly inaccurate, and one was a continuation of the first. So, with this fact and realizing the failures of my original plan, I decided to make another park, but this time it wouldn't just be another amusement park.
I was going to build an EPCOT Center, my own EPCOT Center, and it was going to be beautiful.
I quickly scrambled through my original plans and tore through the internet at old 70's concepts for the Future World pavilions for inspiration. I decided that I was going to keep the original plan of just Future World, but instead I would have the Communicore buildings be four separate buildings around a main plaza not connected to each other, and I would add two more pavilions of my own, one based off of the Nether and one off of the End dimensions from Minecraft. The End Pavilion would reside in the area that would normally be the walkway to World Showcase, and the Nether Pavilion would sit where Imagination would normally sit, with the latter not being represented as a pavilion in the map. One might ask why I chose not to build Journey into Imagination. I chose not to mainly because I had no way to have Figment as a character. The armor stands that are used for “animatronics” only came in one size, which was the normal player size, so there were no small armor stands to make Figment, leaving the Imagination pavilion only featuring Dreamfinder, and I was not ready to have that at the time, so I just left it out.
Each pavilion would be styled off of a collection of the 70’s concepts for the respective pavilion, but it wouldn’t be just copying, it would be my own work with design influences throughout the pavilion, much like how a jazz artist will take a well-known song and present their own twist to it.
For example, the World of Motion concept art:
And my finished pavilion:
Same with Universe of Energy:
And my own pavilion:
Once I had the ideas in my head, I knew I was ready to go. Approximately a few days after New Years Day 2018, I created a simple flat world, my sandbox for my project, that seemed empty at the time, but I had no idea what it would become in two years. I initially started construction on the hub, working out the lengths of the paths leading to the two sections of Future World. Sadly, I don’t have any pictures of construction due to the fact that I had a ton to work on and didn’t have time to record it all. Starting the project was a terrible struggle for my mind, as I was trying to dig my motivation out of a dark hole in my brain cells, but with grit and hard work, I got my first pavilion finished. The first pavilion to be finished was Journey into the Nether, which in all honesty was the easiest one, since it was a black box with a fancy façade, but it had more meaning to it at the time because I realized that this was becoming a reality. Any signs of depression were soon erased from my mind as I jumped head-on into the construction process. Following the Nether, I then finished The Living Seas, then Communicore/Spaceship Earth, Flight of the Ender Dragon (the parks only rollercoaster, yes, a rollercoaster), Universe of Energy, and then lastly World of Motion. I had started working on Horizons and The Land, but due to their sheer size and detail they would require, I postponed those to Version Two.
I worked on the first version over a period of six months, which was incredible for me at the time because I lacked quality building skills, which made the construction process slower, but once I finished the map, and released it to MCPE Master, an app that allowed people to submit maps for download and already had my four AdventurelandPark maps on, I breathed a sigh of relief, confident in the fact that I had completed a worthy tribute to EPCOT Center…..
…..at least for the time being.
This is the end of Part One. More will come really soon so I recommend you stick around for a bit!
A Consecutive History of the EPCOT Center Minecraft Project
By: Mickeynerd17
Prologue:
(In case you haven’t seen this project, I recommend checking out the original post of the project on the forums here: Project Download )
This article you are about to read is the history of one man's obsession. This project was born out of the midst of my personal frustration from multiple sources ranging from the loss of my first successful park to the fact that no complete Epcot Center maps existed in Java or Pocket Edition. I worked on this project one-hundred percent by myself and I made it a true labor of love. I also wanted to show my appreciation for the idea started by Walt Disney to create a city of the future never seen before or since on this earth, an idea that was transformed into the park called EPCOT. I hope you enjoy this history of my humble project.
If you enjoy what you see here and want to support me, please follow my Instagram page and my YouTube channel, both titled Mickeynerd17_Productions.
This history will be divided into parts, and as of this writing is not finished yet, I still have much work left to do, and this history will be updated accordingly as new versions of the project are released. Pictures will be included. (many, many pictures).
And now, the History of the EPCOT Center Project, By Mickeynerd17.
PART 1: The Creation of an Idea
This all started back in late 2017. I was neck-deep in my first successful park on Minecraft, which I named AdventurelandPark, and had started in 2016. I had made four versions with all four together having a number of downloads over 1 million. Honestly, I couldn't imagine it getting that big myself. I was working on version five when I came up with the simple idea of having EPCOT Center as a second park in the map. This would be a custom recreation of Future World with Spaceship Earth being in the front followed by a main plaza with a garden and a fountain with a single Communicore building where the walkway to World Showcase would've been and flanked by all the pavilions going clockwise minus Wonders of Life. It was an ambitious plan, but I believed I was ready to take on the challenge. I had also started working on my own creation of the Horizons building separately as a space pavilion for a new Tomorrowland section of the main park.
Here are some pictures of the building:
I was very ambitious, and that would show up in my work in the years following.
But, out of nowhere, I hit a roadblock. Somehow my developer's version for Version 5 was wiped out in a Minecraft update, thus blowing away all my work. I quickly lost interest in the park, and coupled with the fact that I was losing chunks in the world, and the severe lag problem when moving around, I gave up.
I was lost for a while on what to do, I juggled with the idea of starting a new park and even tried to build a new one, but I had no motivation, so it just went nowhere. Eventually, I happened upon the Epcot that I tried to build, and after looking around the abandoned construction site, I had an idea.
One of the main annoyances of my mind was the fact that there were no Epcot worlds, or "maps" as they are called in the community, that were available for download. The only two I ever found were both incomplete, terribly inaccurate, and one was a continuation of the first. So, with this fact and realizing the failures of my original plan, I decided to make another park, but this time it wouldn't just be another amusement park.
I was going to build an EPCOT Center, my own EPCOT Center, and it was going to be beautiful.
I quickly scrambled through my original plans and tore through the internet at old 70's concepts for the Future World pavilions for inspiration. I decided that I was going to keep the original plan of just Future World, but instead I would have the Communicore buildings be four separate buildings around a main plaza not connected to each other, and I would add two more pavilions of my own, one based off of the Nether and one off of the End dimensions from Minecraft. The End Pavilion would reside in the area that would normally be the walkway to World Showcase, and the Nether Pavilion would sit where Imagination would normally sit, with the latter not being represented as a pavilion in the map. One might ask why I chose not to build Journey into Imagination. I chose not to mainly because I had no way to have Figment as a character. The armor stands that are used for “animatronics” only came in one size, which was the normal player size, so there were no small armor stands to make Figment, leaving the Imagination pavilion only featuring Dreamfinder, and I was not ready to have that at the time, so I just left it out.
Each pavilion would be styled off of a collection of the 70’s concepts for the respective pavilion, but it wouldn’t be just copying, it would be my own work with design influences throughout the pavilion, much like how a jazz artist will take a well-known song and present their own twist to it.
For example, the World of Motion concept art:
And my finished pavilion:
Same with Universe of Energy:
And my own pavilion:
Once I had the ideas in my head, I knew I was ready to go. Approximately a few days after New Years Day 2018, I created a simple flat world, my sandbox for my project, that seemed empty at the time, but I had no idea what it would become in two years. I initially started construction on the hub, working out the lengths of the paths leading to the two sections of Future World. Sadly, I don’t have any pictures of construction due to the fact that I had a ton to work on and didn’t have time to record it all. Starting the project was a terrible struggle for my mind, as I was trying to dig my motivation out of a dark hole in my brain cells, but with grit and hard work, I got my first pavilion finished. The first pavilion to be finished was Journey into the Nether, which in all honesty was the easiest one, since it was a black box with a fancy façade, but it had more meaning to it at the time because I realized that this was becoming a reality. Any signs of depression were soon erased from my mind as I jumped head-on into the construction process. Following the Nether, I then finished The Living Seas, then Communicore/Spaceship Earth, Flight of the Ender Dragon (the parks only rollercoaster, yes, a rollercoaster), Universe of Energy, and then lastly World of Motion. I had started working on Horizons and The Land, but due to their sheer size and detail they would require, I postponed those to Version Two.
I worked on the first version over a period of six months, which was incredible for me at the time because I lacked quality building skills, which made the construction process slower, but once I finished the map, and released it to MCPE Master, an app that allowed people to submit maps for download and already had my four AdventurelandPark maps on, I breathed a sigh of relief, confident in the fact that I had completed a worthy tribute to EPCOT Center…..
…..at least for the time being.
This is the end of Part One. More will come really soon so I recommend you stick around for a bit!