I founded this community on October 10 2010.
It all began when I was introduced to Minecraft around June or August 2010. I started playing the game, and I immediately loved the endless possibilities and the social aspect of the game. I mainly played multiplayer in that time (alpha oof! https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Java_Edition_Alpha_v1.1.2_01) even though it was terrible unstable, I had tons of fun!
Around that time I also became a moderator for the Tweakcraft Minecraft server, a server being hosted by people from Tweakers.net. The server was run by Grum, who now works at Mojang. During my stay there among all those technical people, I really got interested into the aspects of running a Minecraft server for myself, and that is when I decided to rent myself a server box at a data center.
I hosted various mock-up Minecraft servers which were available for everyone to join, offering a wide range of RPG plugins and simple mods. These were fairly popular but managing a server with multiple people at that would just end up in tons of griefing.
I wanted something more serious than constant griefing and having to reset the world. I wanted to create a very small community of people who would have fun playing together and doing something constructive instead of annoying other players.
I wanted to offer my time and resources to an idea that I would find interesting. While browsing the minecraftforums, I found some great ideas and reached out to some of the posters with the question if I can do something to make it real.
One of those was recreating the entire world of Middle-Earth. Growing up with Lord of the Rings, my interest peaked! After some discussion and finding willing people to start off the project, the first blocks were being built shortly after.
