In seventh grade our two founders William and Ethan created the first software to facilitate automated tournaments in Minecraft: Pocket Edition. It was a rocky start – neither of them had any prior experience in computer programming. While researching multiplayer software online they quickly found Shoghi Cervantes, who had created a program to connect copies of Minecraft: Pocket Edition. 

Through online chats, they worked together to add combat support to his program. William wrote programs to reset the arena the players would compete in, count down match time, and keep a rotation of tournaments. Ethan wrote scripts to time the tournaments, restart the servers, and pass events into the code.

After weeks of testing they set up the first public instance of the game, running the tournaments off a computer in Ethan’s basement. They proudly presented their creation to the world through a post on minecraftform.net

Within the day there were more people wanting to play than Ethan’s home internet connection could handle! Luckily one of their parents was a businessman and helped take their good idea out of the basement and into the cloud. On the following Sunday, the first big server was purchased in Scottsdale, Arizona. 

This success led to our very first website.

And we even had a mobile app to help manage your account, until Microsoft took over that responsibility.

Now in 2023 the Lifeboat network hosts 16 different game modes on servers spread across 3 continents. The servers are developed by a team of 5 and maintained by our incredible moderators. Most of our recent efforts have been in our back-end systems to allow for bigger servers, lower ping, and better anti-cheat.

An update coming soon will include the first game using some of this new tech. More details coming soon!

We have experienced many amazing things along our journey so far and have arrived at some pretty cool islands. Sometimes the winds blow hard, and the water is rough. But we are still sailing, and we are looking forward to the updates we have in store for all of you.

Here’s to another 10,

• The Lifeboat Team

---

Remember back in the day when this was how to join the server???