10 Years of Magic
Celebrating 10 Years! – Special Article
OneBigNation is turning 10 years old, and we’ve got some news!
Ten years ago today on August 7th 2012, OneBigNation opened its doors to the public. It has been quite a wild ride getting to where we are today, and we couldn’t have achieved this milestone without help from our amazing staff teams and or wonderful community of guests, contributors, and supporters. Join us in this special article where we explore our community’s past, present, and announce some big news for the future of OneBigNation Networks!
Our History
OneBigNation over the last decade
On August 7th 2012 OneBigNation came online and accepted guests for the very first time. Believe it or not; back in 2012 OneBigNation opened as a PVP-Survival & Mini-Games network on Minecraft 1.7.9! OneBigNation was originally started as a small shared server network among a group of friends who wanted to be able to host their own Mini-Game tournaments. The 2012 staff team helped bring the server to life and it slowly started gaining new players, and new features. In late 2013 to early 2014 OneBigNation dropped its PVP and Mini-Games due to fading popularity and intensive upkeep with updating servers to 1.8 and 1.9; Around this time our founder changed the concept of the network to a theme park recreation network inspired by other communities at the time. By December of 2014 OneBigNation opened its first Disneyland Resort and Park to the public, one of a kind with working shows, rides, and new never before seen technical features for the time. From 2015 onward OneBigNation hit the ground running with the ultimate goal of recreating all Disney Parks and Properties. In early 2017 OneBigNation set forth on its current biggest undertaking: The Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando Florida. To this day this project is still in the works and our team is continually dedicated to its completion. During this time in 2019 OneBigNation took on a side project of recreating Port Canaveral with the intended goal of also recreating Disney Cruise-line’s entire fleet of ships. The Cruise-Liner server opened to the public three months after its initial announcement with the world’s first and only 1:1 scale recreation of the Disney Fantasy Cruise Ship. To this day the team is still working on creating the other vessels including the Dream, and the brand new Wish alongside Disney’s Cast-Away Cay Island Resort.
A special thanks to our staff teams
Click the expansion bar below to see a list of every single cast member that has helped make OneBigNation what it is today since we’ve opened. All cast members are listed by order in which they joined the staff team, and their position is listed as their last held role before leaving the network or what their current role is if they are still with us today.
A snapshot for the record
What is our team up to?
Our Cast-Member team has been hard at work over the last few months continuing to create the magic of the theme parks in Minecraft. We know it may feel like things haven’t been moving along since the server has been closed to the public, but we promise that our team is continually dedicated to providing our guests with the most immersive experience possible for when we re-open our doors. Below we’ve included some photos and descriptions of the progress our team is making across the parks.
🚝 Transportation & Ticket Center
🏰 Magic Kingdom Park
🌐 EPCOT Park
📽️ Hollywood Studio Park
⛷️ Blizzard Beach Park
🌴 Disney's Polynesian Resort
🏖️ Disney's Boardwalk Resort
🚢 Disney Cruise Line
Very recently our team went through the Transportation & Ticket Center (TTC) and gave it a refresh and a brand new coat of paint. In this new version of the TTC the updated tram loop and security tents are added, and the color scheme of the entire build area is updated to reflect the 50th anniversary changes.
Over in EPCOT the Imagineers have been hard at work getting more and more of the park completed. EPCOT right now is our heaviest under-construction zone on the server; however we anticipate to open this park at the same time as Disney’s Hollywood Studios. All parts through EPCOT are being worked on, including the world showcase pavilions; Canada, UK, France, Morocco, Japan, America, Italy, Germany, China, Norway, and Mexico. At the front of the park the Imagineers are rapidly putting out progress for the future-world east and west areas including; Test-Track, Mission Space, Play!, Cosmic Rewind, Land, Seas, and Imagination! we are excited to share our work with you and we cant wait for you to be able to explore the final product!
We haven’t talked much about it, but our team is also getting to work on one of the two Disney Water-Parks: Blizzard Beach! Right now nothing above ground is built yet, however our team has very quickly surveyed the areas and laid out of the necessary outlines to bring this water park to reality real soon!
A great big beautiful tomorrow
A look into our re-opening
Over the past few months we’ve seen over 150+ new guests join our community which is awesome! The number one question we’ve gotten from our community is “Why is the server down.. When is it coming back?”. These are great questions, and our staff have been very quiet in answering these questions because the truth is that we just don’t know yet. We feel it is unfair to hold our team to a deadline of getting OneBigNation re-opened to the public because it may lead to rushed half baked work, which results in lower quality experiences for our guests. We are striving to provide everyone with the best server experience possible when we return, and we are making many major changes to achieve this goal.
Since January of 2022, our development team has been hard at work creating a brand new server-core and back-end that will run our network. We’re also in the process of migrating our server network over to new more powerful machines that can handle much more processing and guests online at once. The new back-end, and new server machines will ultimately lead to us being able to provide a more efficient game environment with a host of brand-new innovative custom features that we are working to implement into our attraction experiences. This development process takes a massive amount of time, and we are happy to say that we are gradually approaching the production phase of this new back-end, which means we will be ready for our server to accept guests with these new features implemented and tested. The downside of this process is that we have no real way of knowing when exactly the development and bug testing process is completed until we are very very* close to opening. With all of this in mind we completely understand that our guests are longing to rejoin the network and experience the magic of the Disney Parks and Resorts- and we promise you all that our team is working its hardest to bring us back online and ready for guests as soon as possible. In the meantime we will continue to engage with our community via social media and our discord server, and when we are ready to open- if you are engaging with us on these platforms you will be the first to know!
If you or someone you know are interested in helping us work on the server whether it be Building, Technical Work, Community Moderation, Or Development work and helping us quickly bring the servers back to our guests, we encourage you to check out our job opportunities and apply on our Careers Page! We are constantly looking for new members to join our team and help develop our culture of talent and amazing hard workers!
A whole new brand!
That’s right! When we re-open, OneBigNation will be rebranding and returning as ‘SparkParks’! This change in our branding has been a long time coming, and you may have seen some hints to this announcement over the past few months; starting with the change in our main server logo to the new Sorcerer Hat with two Sparks of imagination to the side. We will continue to own the OneBigNation name as a parent company, however all of our theme parks and community will go forward under the new name and brand. You may be wondering what else is included in this new network branding… As you can see in our new logo tag above, a brand new font is being developed and introduced to our community by our developer Exmplv! This new font will be used across all of our self hosted platforms to bring together a new modern and clean (but still playful) look to our services that we feel identifies our organization. You will soon find this font being used on our website and resource-pack. Speaking of: We are making a new resource-pack and website to go along with our re-branding!
We can’t share too many details about our website work just yet… But keep posted for future news and announcements about it. Our brand new resource-pack is being completely developed by our team from scratch. We aim to create and edit all of our own textures and not re-use/recycle textures from other resource-packs in the community. We feel that this new resource-pack will enhance the over-all look and guest experience of the server when we re-open to the public. Our guests can expect to find a standard 128×128 resolution pack with amazing 3D models, and realistically styled playful textures that compliment the builds of our theme parks. This resource-pack will be released for public use on our network when we re-open, but for now we’ve taken some sneak-peek photos around the parks with this resource-pack enabled to give you all a taste of what is coming to your screen very soon!