When you think about “Legend”, you come up with all kinds of different thoughts. This is mainly because Legend has been around for over 8 years in a variety of formats. Therefore, today we travel back in time to 2014 and will report on great successes, setbacks and a unique project.

The beginnings

By Gamerstime

If you’ve been part of the Minecraft community for a long time, the modpack Hexxit will surely sound familiar to you. In this modpack I started the solo project “Minecraft Legend”. Part of this project was that my viewers could suggest quests with rewards to me via the Youtube comments. From these suggestions, I picked two to three for the next episode and completed them.

The project was a great success and many people wanted to be part of the world I created. I was asked many times if it would be possible to play along. This made me realize that I’m not the only one who enjoys roleplaying in Minecraft. At that time, there weren’t many Minecraft multiplayer role-playing games and the few that existed just weren’t good or only in English. So the idea of “Legend” as an MMORPG was born.

After some time, the time had come and the first version of Legend as an MMORPG was released. We didn’t really have experience in what we were doing and the server had some bugs, but they didn’t bother anyone. As a Legend player, you could join one of four races: The Humans, Elves, Dwarves, or Zandars. These had independent territories and building styles. The gods of Legend Angus and Alkatar regularly presented the races with new tasks that could only be achieved as a community.

As a result, huge sanctuaries and cities sprang up and the cohesion of the people in their nations makes me proud to this day. Everyone stepped into their own roles and acted out the history of their people in their own way. The people loved Legend.

Were you there for the release of the first Legend?

The battle for the nexus

When the server was running for some time and the gods had already been appeased by the people, we added another objective as a team. A huge battle for a sanctuary that would take place weekly. Throughout the week, the people had the opportunity to prepare for the big battle. As mentioned above, we were anything but professional at this point and wanted to implement this battle via command blocks. It was doomed to failure.

The big moment arrived and over 10,000 people had gathered to witness the Battle of the Nexus. The countdown ran down and reached zero. Nothing happened and the completely overloaded server crashed. But this setback didn’t stop us from trying again and starting another attempt at a later date.

The surprising success of the project put a lot of pressure on me and the team. When you love something, you want to make it the best it can be, so I made bad decisions under the circumstances. I realized that managing a project with a team is not easy. One of the developers at the time decided to delete all the data on the server, which led to the end of the first Legend.

The Nexus was one of Legend’s most stunning structures!

Get up, move on, fix the crown

To this day, this event represents one of the biggest low points in my life. After that experience, I had no interest in trying again, but Zander gave me courage. He made me aware of why I was doing the whole thing and what made me tick. I am very grateful to him for that.

I decided to try again. Together with a new team, we worked on Legend – Rise of the Phoenix, which was going to be bigger and better than its predecessor. Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, the project pushed Minecraft to #1 in the Twitch categories several times through collaboration with many streamers. To be able to play, they needed a wildcard, because the rush was far too great.

The project was going on for a few months and the team and I sat down to talk about the future of Legend. We wanted to create an MMORPG that would give all players the opportunity to play.

To participate in Legend back then, you had to be a GTime subscriber.

Legend Awakening

We expanded the team and the foundation was laid for the first major Minecraft Legend MMORPG. We worked tirelessly for over a year to make Legend Awakening live up to its name. Heavily inspired by other MMOs, various areas, quests, and classes were to be added over time. However, we could only dream of this for now, although the demand for a release date became more and more frequent. There was also the possibility to buy access to the server via a store, which should also allow the masses to play.

We made the mistake that some development studios and publishers still make today. We released the server way too early, so there was hardly any of the planned content. The project was once again a huge success at launch, bringing in over 130,000€ in revenue, but due to the lack of updates, the revenue quickly dwindled. Shortly before the release of a gigantic update that was supposed to bring in randomly generated dungeons, we had to close the doors of Legend Awakening. We could no longer support the server and staff costs. I learned painfully there that I will no longer release a project too early.

After the end of Legend Awakening, Legend went quiet for a while before we got back together because of the Hytale trailer. With great motivation, we put together a team that was ready to give their all as soon as Hytale would release. But as you probably know, there is no release date for Hytale to this day and we changed our focus.

The release of Legend Awakening was celebrated with an animated trailer from RenderStudios!

The great Minecraft Legend MMORPG

We wanted to do everything right from the start this time and take what we learned from past projects. We wouldn’t release the MMO until it was truly 100% complete. We knew we had a long rocky road ahead of us, but it would be worth it. Legend is meant to captivate you and catapult you out of your everyday life and into a fantasy world where you can be whoever you want to be.

We made great progress and I got a lot of encouragement for what we were trying to put together. Through my experiences over the past few years, I have a clear picture in my mind of what I want the Legend MMORPG to be, which means I have to rely on a team of talented people who also need to be compensated. I decided that no person should invest money in Legend until it is certain that we will even release it.

For the second showcase, where we presented our progress, Trymacs became aware of the project and directly fell under the spell of the unique world. He asked me if he could support the project and the team and I’m glad Max has been a part of Legend and promoting it ever since.

After about 3 years of development of the great Legend MMORPG I had to make the hard decision to put it on hold, because the financial means for the rest of the development would not be enough. But this was not to be the end of my dream.

The great Legend MMORPG has also not passed Trymacs and completely overwhelmed him!

The Legend Network

We decided to go a different way and started working on the current Legend – the server network with mini-game area. The goal is to fulfill our dream of the Legend MMO in the long run and be able to finance it. It is important to say that we do not work on our minigames with less heart and enthusiasm than on the MMORPG.

For almost 1.5 years now, we have been working with a large team to fulfill this dream. And as you probably already know, the release date of the network is not even half a year away, which means that we will soon be able to experience Legend together with you.

If you don’t want to just read about the Legend network, you can watch GTime showing you the whole network!

Thank you!

I would like to take this moment to say thank you. Thank you to the entire Legend team, who share my dream and put their own free time into the project. You are without a doubt behind the project and it shows every day through your great work.

Thanks also to my community. For over 8 years you have been supporting this project and helping me to one day fulfill my dream of Legend as an MMORPG. In the not too distant future, the doors of Legend will open for you and we will prove that every second of work for this network was worth it.

– Yours Kevin