Today we’ll be exploring the topic of abandoned virtual worlds, and doing a little bit of ‘digital urbexing.’ What is it about abandoned video games that makes us feel so… uneasy, or even nostalgic? And in exploring these digital spaces, can we discover something more than just polygons and code, can we discover the… ghosts of these places?
• SOURCES: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KyEXKJv0idZHVMDHqwXoFiiImXYvAeWwv3q940ieXHw/edit?usp=sharing
• PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/saganhawkes
• SPOTIFY: https://open.spotify.com/artist/3tYN0aD5MYboKohIw2lsdx
Second Channel
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCoxDtkNE2-aAS31762rTRPA
Opening: (0:00)
Source Maps: (4:50)
Minecraft Servers: (18:32)
Roblox Places: (42:41)
Maid Marian MMOs: (53:03)
Blockland Servers: (1:04:03)
The Ghosts of Place: (1:16:25)
Ending: (1:27:08)
source
I've been trying to find an old map, used in Zombie Panic Source back in the day, it was set in a mansion with outside sections. All I can remember of such a great map is that it was filled with lots of deadly traps, had an outside area going left from the foyer entrance where players spawn, and for whatever reason a music loop was fixed to a chandelier in the same foyer.
I figure if there's anywhere to find out what that map was called and how/where to download it. It would be here. Let me know if it rings any bells.
Your video topics are so fascinating but your voice is so soothing that I just want to put it on repeat and fall asleep to them
You should cover some old doom 2 wads! Like ( My house )
Love seeing you randomly exploring Blockland build servers when most people are at work on a weekday lol
Cheers to the chads playing Blockland since 2004 Blockland alpha.
I mainly host a dedicated server and alternate between gamemodes i love like zapt zombies, TDM, rising lava etc….
DM and TDM have always been pretty fun.
Speedkart Remastered is newer even more fun version of Speedkart really popular racing gamemode.
Blockland Events have also thought me how programming works as well as rpg maker. Events is basically a really easy way to do basic programming with bricks. Of course you can also just code anything you want and make it an addon.
I still play Blockland. I was the 1681st person to buy it back in the day.
Also “myriad” is not said with an “a” preceding it.
The intro hits so different after recently going back through my first few favorited roblox games
The House of Leaves is just a mineshaft with an odd navigation system
made my day <3
Play more Blockland join Christmas Blockparty and especially the New Year’s server 2025 server on new years eve night.
And beat everything in Age of Dungeons it’s so worth it
I LOVE SAGAN HAWKES LONGFORM CONTENT
peak vid
I think ur the only yt essayist whose videos i not only look forward to, but also ur music! Great one as always⭐
sagan hawke tuah
hell yeaahh, new vid + awesome topic, missed you man! (also at 31:26 the sign on the floor is written by an argentinian, woah!)
VR chat is also full of spaces like this, for those looking to explore more.
Less than 2 mins between ads.
Bullshit.
Indentations in the sheets????? Where their bodies once moved but don't move anymore???
"who has not had that feeling of seeing your friends dashing down the sidewalk where you grew up?"
Everybody including me who lived/s miles apart from anyone in the middle of the countryside: What's this fairytale gubbins you're on about?
The closest experience I've had to any of this because our countryside internet was so shit is Furcadia. It was so active 20 years ago, just dead now.
i am german and this is an top video 👌🏻👌🏻
thanks algo for bringing me here
1:11 You look like Yung Lean
As someone who doesnt have nostalgia for games like Roblox or Minecraft or Gmod, i find it very interesting to see peoples blend of nostalgia, discomfort, and sadness when revisiting these online games now empty.
Then the moment you mentioned "Club Penguin", I had a gutteral resistance, like, "Please don't show me it empty." I know its not even online anymore, but that game exists in my mind as it was, which was full of players and memories of social development for myself and many others. So don't kill that place for me, Sagan, even if it's already dead.
inco out here scaring all the newgens away
Cool vid
I feel like this man deserves a wendigoon signal boost
great video!
As someone who’s been doing this for a month now, specifically playing old Roblox games from my childhood, this video feels like a much deserved punch in the gut to remind us to cherish what we currently have
Love these videos so much.
hi! i've been watching your videos for years now and it's always a highlight of my day when you post! much love!
I find it absolutely fascinating that people are talking with such fondness for early Roblox. I don't mean to shit on it or anything because every generation has their "back when games meant something" moment, but I just so vividly remember how everyone who grew up a gaming generation prior constantly talked about Roblox as an example of why modern gaming for kids was soulless and corporate, when it had just come out.
Great video, but, how can you show sherwood dungeon, and not once go in the dungeon.
Amazing video thabk for making it
that renderman sequence was cool as hell!
stanley kubrick the second
Gonna yap a bit Minecraft is one of my special interests :3
Most of the missing leaves are probably because of a plugin called world edit, a common way to remove trees was to use a command "/replace (log type),leaves air" so the terrain would stay intact but the trees would get properly cleared away so they could build. There are DEFINATELY easier ways to do it but most people get taught the /replace and /fill commands first so they don't cause a server crash. Honestly allot of the repeated halls and strange cuts where the terrain feels like it should probably have some elevation are all probably from world edit. I used to be a professional builder, world edit was one of the most important tools we had in the earlier days. Looking back on servers where people were taught world edit are always a trip, there will always be some random buildings oddly meshed together weird geometry blocks of missing water in filled pools Large areas that should look normal but have something a bit off about them masses of things that are floating that shouldn't be able to, buildings /copy ed and then /paste ed for miles. sometimes you'll find some really messed up builds that just look like something reached out and carved a chunk out before placing it back just two blocks up and in. World edit practice servers always end up looking like an AI trying to piece together what professional Minecraft builds should look like. It gets some of it right but then there's allot that looks so off that it couldn't of been made by anything other than a robot. If your interested I'd talk to some people from the world edit community, I don't know if anyone does practice servers anymore, but some of them ought to have world files just sitting around.
Whats intiresting about these exploration videos especially in abandoned minecraft servers is many of the mostly or intact houses/mining systems are so confusing and odd from the outside perspective but once made total sense to someone or the entire server
There are jokes on those servers we will never understand, storage systems we would never personally use, mods we haven't seen in years and glitches/farms that in modern day can't be used or are just inconvenient due to the updates after these worlds
Hey Sagen those sounds you heard while swimming were ambient cave sounds because the game thought you were still in a cave at the time. Hope this helps!
Babe wake up, new Sagan video just dropped
Again?
Warms my heart to see blockland getting videos! the sounds you heard in my render freebuild server is the default ambience of the renderman mod whilst running, with creepy sfx 😮
There was an old minecraft server i used to play on called Faux Paws. I was a common resident of the server for years and I had built a massive castle on the edge of a mountain.
Near spawn there were hundreds of small shops and bases all with their own stories. There's even an Unnus Annus tribute near spawn.
I remember helping someone fend off a griefer, I remember creating my own shop in the server mall, I remember the server Admin happily watching me build my castle and enjoying my progress. I filled my castle with hidden rooms and trapdoors all hiding secrets, and I would give people compasses that led to my castle so they could explore…
The server shut down a few years ago due to the admin having money problems. We all took a group screenshot saying goodbye on the servers last day… the admin even gave us all a world download of the server. I think the world file was about 10 gigabytes.
Sometimes I go back to that world with the distant horizons mod so I can see for miles and I realized just how many builds were everywhere. Some ive never seen before.. i wonder what there stories were… i miss it..
It is very weird and meta that I had an hour long dejavu of seeing this exact same video like Years ago. I'm also high and sleep deprived. that I suspect helped
1:13:41
and all we need is some other YouTuber making a dead online games video and a segment like that: "as I was wandering the land of Blackland, I've stumbled upon a house. Upon resting inside, I noticed something – I was being stalked by a horse"
hey im a blockland history nerd – the online blockland servers still being hosted don't really feature much actual historical builds/worlds from as far back as 2007, blockland servers have typically had a short lifespan unlike minecraft worlds and whatnot. as a result, the servers you visited showed more newly built stuff only, i guess aside from that one build that comes with the game. for exploring super old stuff, it would be best to either download archived saves or have someone specifically host them for you (alongside classic old mods/add-ons too!)
I forgot i was downloading drivers and at 1:27:14 my monitors turned off as he said that
The seriousness doesn't match the topic at all, it just comes off as pretentious and unintentionally comical
The horse thing reminded me of a dream I had. In the dream I was at a wedding, standing up near the altar next to the bride and groom. The priest came over to give communion, but refused to give it to me. I asked why and he said "Because, you're a horse." And then, I turned into a horse. I woke up a bit later.
1:07:59 Hey, I made that pixel art!
Well… not technically me, Blockland has tools where you can turn images into pixel art like this, they're pretty easy to download and a lot of freebuilds have these scattered around.
Still pretty cool to see my art in a video like this! :3
Also, that server is on a default save. which means it's just a standard map that people can load. I think it was built by Badspot (the actual dev), but don't quote me on that. Inco (the host of this specific server) mainly uses it for testing purposes with the actual monster that inhabits it's premises, and he's made a few changes. A few more types of them, some more based on inside jokes, others just generally being memey.
I would love to see you return to Blockland sometime, since the game has a small active playerbase, and there's usually a cycle of servers over the years that make sure that we have at least some peaks of activity. There's also multiple discord servers and other stuff. It used to be more active before some players decided to steal a huge amount of player IDs from people who bought the game from the official website and not Steam, I think it was a security leak somewhere, but I forgot because that was 4 years ago now.
Thank you again for putting attention to the game, it's been a cornerstone of my childhood and it still is important to me to this day.