Blockland, a Multiplayer, Collaborative 3D Building Game

Blockland is a 3D, collaborative building, open-ended virtual world sandbox game. Created with the Torque engine and available in a free and registered version for PC and Macs, it's been around in one version or another since 2004 (Wikipedia page here) and has a small but passionate fanbase, but for some reason, I didn't quite know about it until yesterday, when co-creator Ben Garney mentioned it during his talk at the Flash Gaming Summit. Avatars are block-like, and so is building -- pretty much prim-based.

A single Blockland game server "can handle up to 40 players at a time or so," Ben tells me. "Make collaborative builds of up to 250k bricks. Also start minigames, blow things up, drive vehicles around, spawn bots, and so on." And like I said, a passionate fan community doing heavy duty user-generated content -- after the break, for example, dig this guy's version of Myst, made in Blockland:

Interesting that this preceded Minecraft but rarely gets cited as a predecessor (or for that matter, a contemporary of SL.) If you play it, share your experiences in Comments.

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Comments

[qarl]

i was scrolling by and saw the picture... paused and said "THAT'S MYST". i'd know it anywhere.

[Vax Sirnah]

It amuses me that whenever there is any building/sandbox game out there, there is at least one Myst replica in it.

@qarl - get into the Myst Online community - they could use someone with your skills. Come...join us... ;)

[qarl]

eh - i lost a lot of enthusiasm for the Myst universe when i started working for the brothers. :)

[Connie Arida]

Minecraft anyone?

[Hiro Pendragon]

Did Blockland start with a seeded world or base objectives? I'm curious.

[Cake]

I used to play this a little until Minecraft came along.. Minecraft is a lot better at handling prim building, which is why I made the switch.

[Darkness]

@ Hiro

No, it was always user created manually, though there are mods that make "maps" with terrains, but they are being deleted by Ben Garney.