Simon Collins-Laflamme, known as Hypixel is a Canadian Minecraft redstone engineer who is widely known for creating redstone-based adventure maps in the popular video game, Minecraft. Many of his maps have become so popular that they have even been featured on a server that he set up for his viewers though sadly in mid-2016, he announced on his website that his Adventure Lobby would not be making a return. Ever since the server was released to the public, the network grew rapidly and became a really big hit for Minecraft multiplayer. As of April of 2019, Hypixel network has reached a online player peak of 100 thousand, being the first Minecraft server to hit this milestone.
History[]
YouTube[]
Hypixel joined YouTube on June 14, 2012, and uploaded his first video on June 20. The video featured a very simple floor trap. It was made to trick players in multiplayer survival worlds that entered a building with the intention to steal a player's items into trapping themselves. Once the player would try to leave, they would find that they could not get out due to there being no stairs. The player's first thought would then be to flip a lever in the room to possibly make stairs appear, however it instead makes the player fall to their death. The video currently has over 200,000 views.
In September 2012, Hypixel worked with popular redstone engineer Sethbling on Team Fortress 2 in Minecraft. Together, they remade the Team Fortress 2 map Dustbowl using only redstone; however, there were some differences due to the limited redstone capability at the time. Hypixel later also recreated the Team Fortress 2 map 2fort in Minecraft on his own.
Hypixel only ever made one map that required a single mod called Skyjacking. Skyjacking is a PVP map that required the SDK gun mod. Players are separated into two teams, terrorists and counter-terrorists. The counter-terrorists goal is to defuse 3 bombs set by the terrorists within 10 minutes. The terrorists goal is to prevent the counter-terrorists from doing so. The third and final bomb has two wires, a red one and blue one. The counter-terrorists must choose which one to cut. One will blow up the plane instantly when cut and the other will disarm the bomb when cut. There is no set wire to cut. Which wire must be cut in order to disarm the bomb is randomly decided by redstone.
Hypixel over the years, continued to upload many videos featuring redstone contraptions, most of which are downloadable. Eventually, his redstone maps became so popular with Minecrafters that he decided to set up his own Massively Multiplayer Minecraft server named after himself. The server features many of his adventure maps and PVP mini-games remade using "Bukkit plug-ins" to reduce lag since it is a very large server. The server currently holds an average of 20,000-30,000 players at any given time and is one of the most popular Minecraft server networks to ever exist.
On October 28, 2015 Hypixel released a video on YouTube annoucing on what he calls it the "next chapter of hypixel" to tell his subscribers and PC server players that Hypixel: Pocket Edition went into Alpha testing. In just the first day, the Pocket Edition server reached over a ground-breaking 13,000 players. Hypixel: Pocket Edition alpha officially closed on March 31, 2016. It will return in 2017 with a Beta version of the server. However, Hypixel addressed that he wont continue the Pocket Edition Server due to Software Problems that Hypixel Pocket Editon has to use, one of the reasons is they have to make a software from scratch. But he has never closed his idea to revive Hypixel PE.
Main Server[]
The Hypixel server was released in beta on April 13, 2013, by Simon Collins-Laflamme, whose username is "hypixel", and Philippe Touchette. The two originally created Minecraft adventure maps together and uploaded trailers to their YouTube channel. The Hypixel server was created to play and further showcase these maps. Minigames were originally created for users to play on while waiting for other players, but the minigames themselves gained popularity on their own and became the server's main identity, and efforts from Hypixel were put towards new server content instead of the making of other Minecraft maps and games. In 2015, it was revealed that the server cost around $100,000 a month to maintain, back when the server had around 16,000 players online. As of April 2021, the server regularly reaches over 150,000 concurrent players, peaking at over 216,000 on April 16. On December 21, 2016, Hypixel reached 10 million unique players in total, and had reached 14.1 million unique players by the time Hytale was announced on December 13, 2018. The server reached 18 million unique players in April 2020, according to a tweet by the server owner. As of September 15, 2015, Hypixel attracts 1.9 million players every month.
Around April 2018, Hypixel began to use Cloudflare Spectrum as a DDoS protection after being the victim of multiple attacks hosted by Mirai against the server.
On August 2021, Hypixel has to retrench all voluntary Mods for Hypixel as they are phasing on Game Master Mods.
Hypixel China[]
In May 2017, Hypixel partnered with NetEase, the publisher of Minecraft China, to release a version of Hypixel in China, sometimes known as "Chypixel". This separate version of Minecraft and the Hypixel Minecraft server would be operated and translated by NetEase, as part of their partnership.
On April 13, 2020, NetEase announced that the Chinese version of the server would be shutting down on June 30, 2020, due to the expiration of the agreement.
Minecraft maps[]
Hypixel is most popular for his "Herobrine Mansion" map which spawned a sequel map called "Herobrine's Return". This is the list of all of the Minecraft maps he has released for download:
- Nether Arena
- Dance Dance Zombie
- Vampire Survival
- Snakes and Ladders
- Pig Fishing Tournament
- Creeper Survival
- Survival Horror
- Team Fortress 2 in Minecraft: Dustbowl
- Obsidian Defenders
- Quakecraft
- Blaze Boss Fight
- DOTA
- Creeper Dungeon
- Star Wars Adventure Map
- Self Building Village
- Deadly Tic-Tac-Toe
- Gladiator Arena
- Wave Heroes
- Skyjacking
- Nintendo Console
- The Walls
- The Walls 2
- Team Fortress 2 in Minecraft: 2fort
- Herobrine's Return
- Wrath of the Fallen
- Death Sentence Arena
- Wither's Challenge
- Zombie Apocalypse
- Herobrine's Mansion
Trivia[]
- The area to the left of the Nether Portal in the Bed Wars lobby has been nicknamed the 'Dog P00P Spot' by YouTuber/Streamer AndyDrewXP and his audience.
- Even though the creator is Canadian, the server is hosted in the US.
References[]
