'They're like, 'Yeah, we've got 20,000 users',' Donaghey says. It was here that he met the Hypixel team. Part of the job was attending conferences such as Minecraft Expo, which was part of Insomnia Gaming Festival. He ended up getting a job at game server host Multiplay helping with customer support as, in his words, 'the Minecraft guy at the company'. Indeed, it drew in Donaghey, too: an indie developer and a Minecraft player since beta, a kind of server-slash-social experiment called CivCraft 'opened my eyes to the possibilities of things that could be done in Minecraft'. Unsurprisingly, in hindsight, these short, fast, rewarding and even social minigames soon became the main draw of the server. The solution? Introduce short, entertaining minigames to keep people occupied: snowball fights, or Quake homages, or even a curious thing called 'Hunger Games', inspired by a new film series, where you'd battle to be the last player standing in an ever-shrinking arena. There were sometimes hundreds of people queuing in the lobby waiting for their adventure to begin.

It undeniably changes things.' From Hypixel to Hytale 'I don't want to come across like, 'Oh, we're burdened with all this interest',' he laughs. The eyes of thousands of players, and some of the biggest players in the game industry, are now very much upon the project he's leading. 500,000, I'm happy, and a million, I'm like, super happy.' At the end of the first week, the trailer hit 11 million views.

'In my head, you know, anything below 250,000, I'm disappointed. 'We had an internal poll on how many views,' Donaghey says. But the trailer – which showed off features such as a realistically lit and animated world, adventure and minigame modes, extensive modding, an in-game animation tool and even live scripting – immediately struck a chord. His fear was that Hytale – a game with more than a passing resemblance to Minecraft (opens in new tab), created by many people with a background in running a successful Minecraft server – would be dismissed as yet another title destined for the ever-growing blockgame graveyard.

Hytale download