The Rise and Fall of the Dream SMP
The Dream SMP is a Minecraft multiplayer server that has been very popular since 2020. The server was made by Minecraft streamer and youtuber Dream to play with his close friends. After the addition of another Minecraft content creator, TommyInnit, to the server in early summer 2020, the Dream SMP saw a change from vanilla (playing the Minecraft game as intended) to a more role-play based kind of recordings. It isn’t until the arrival of Wilbur Soot, fellow Minecraft youtuber, as well as musician and former Soot House creator, that the Dream SMP starts gaining in popularity for its role-play content. Since 2020, it has been fastly rising as one of the most prolific fandoms of the last few years, with an average of 30,000 views per live and even 600,000 views on some lives. As someone who has been following the growth of the Dream SMP since 2020, I’m interested today in looking at the rise and fall of the server over the years.
First, let’s talk about how the Dream SMP got to be so big. Its start in May 2020 came at the same time as the COVID lockdown in the UK and US and, as schools went online and the whole world was forced inside, we all turned to the Internet for entertainment. If you remember growing up on Minecraft, then believe that today’s teens are also growing up on Minecraft and the Dream SMP audience was mostly kids aged 14 and up who had just earned a lot of free time. The audience availability meant more people were turning to Twitch, a streaming platform where at any hour of the day, someone would be playing your favourite game. As some Minecraft servers focused on Youtube videos on demand, like Hermitcraft, the Dream SMP chose a more live approach with content creators streaming almost every day. And due to the time difference between American and European creators, it was likely very few days passed without any content.
The arrival of Wilbur Soot on the server led to a definite jump into role-playing as the players were divided in two, the Americans, who owned the server and ruled like kings, and the British, who were pushed out and persecuted. In summer 2020, Wilbur Soot decided to create a hot dog van around which he built a wall, named the land L’Manburg, and declared it to be a free enclave, independent from the rest of the server. Wilbur, with experience in role-playing on games such as World of Warcraft and RuneScape, as well as knowledge of Dungeons and Dragons and several years as a Dungeon Master for local DND clubs, was the nudge it took for the role-play to take off. As the story progressed, more and more creators were added, their characters evolved and became actual archetypes, and we realised it was not love of the game that pushed these creators to play Minecraft, but how they could use it for storytelling. Wilbur, the independent nation leader, had become a naive short-sighted president who lost his own re-election. Tommy, the hero, the energetic, abrasive little brother figure grew in maturity as sacrifices and mistakes were made again and again. And Dream became the egotistical antagonist that foiled their characters so well.
On August 12th, 2020, the Youtube channel SAD-ist posted an animatic titled Warriors, retelling the first act of this role-play and skyrocketed the popularity of the Dream SMP to unprecedented levels. The animation led for people that were uninterested in Minecraft to see what the Dream SMP had to offer in spite of it. The cinematization of first-person-perspectives into actual film-like scenes opened up new possibilities for artists to adapt what the characters looked like into their own design and led to a boom in fan content, be it animation, drawing, cosplay, fanfiction, or even song-making, thus reaching even more people. The attention to dramatisation led to the streamers also using audience expectations to tell their story, notably with the addition to the server of Technoblade, famous talented Minecraft fighter, to help Tommy and Wilbur after their exile from their nation. They would use mechanics such as the game logs messages (you never forget the chill you get when you first see Technoblade has joined the game), the weapons names, or incredible builds to tell the story and often quip about which scenes would go into the animatics.
From fall 2020 to spring 2021, the Dream SMP saw staggering popularity with streams going as far as breaking Guinness World Records for number of views. The story had then evolved into complex political events with different factions and ideals and saw the rise of characters like Techno the anarchist, Quackity the capitalist and Eret the king. It also delved into interpersonal relationships between the characters and played strongly on the dynamics, drafting Wilbur and Tommy as siblings, or Techno and Ranboo as mentor and mentee. It is only after March 2021 that the Dream SMP content started to dwindle as many underage fans returned to in-person schooling. Due to the end of lockdown, the audience didn’t have the same availability for streams and a lot of the younger fans developed a fear of missing out since the lack of on-demand content and the fast pace of lore started to leave them in the dust. A lot of my friends at the time told me they were stressed when in school as they feared something big would happen in the lore and they’d miss it.
A lot of the creators also turned to other forms of entertainment like Tommy starting a vlogs channel, Wilbur creating his own band, Tubbo going on to develop his own public Minecraft server or Ranboo turning to variety gaming. Dream SMP streams became rarer and often focused on complicated lore with big productions. Karl and Quackity, notably, streamed content that devolved more into staged cinematic videos instead of improvised role-play that despite being high quality led to the server losing its roots. Wilbur left the writing team and every creator was left to make their own lore with a lack of coordination mostly due to the number of people present on the server at the time. Many characters fell in the shadows and some creators even alluded to not enjoying playing on the server anymore due to the fans’ expectations for lore. What had started as a mix between goofing around and impactful role-play had become solely heavy lore all the time, leading to a slow burnout for some of the creators.
(NOTE: This piece was drafted before Wilbur’s final stream on the Dream SMP. I was supposed to talk about non-serious bits used as canon lore, i.e. Sally the salmon but now I see there was a point to it, fun. Yes, sometimes the bit is ridiculous but Wilbur reminds us of the roots of the Dream SMP: hot dog van, and Hamilton role-play, and fun. His character’s end, revealing that he has always been American and teleporting to real-life Utah, is a reflection of this. I also believe that the recent passing of Technoblade was significant in explaining why so many creators are choosing to end their characters’ arc definitively, as one can imagine the emotional cost of playing on a server where your friend is no longer after he was such an important pillar of the story.)
Of course, it’s impossible to talk about Dream SMP without talking about the elephant in the room: cancel culture. Due to the age range of the fanbase and the fact that they mostly grew up on the Internet, they tend to not have the best conversation etiquette and get singled out on social medias, not to mention that people love to hate what kids love, as was seen with Twilight and One Direction in the early 2010s. The younger audience has always had this focus on cancel culture and the idea of catering to an impossible moral purity. The beam of hate casted on the Dream SMP community holds them to impossible standards of perfection and they feel the need to constantly be the best version of themselves, and to push those ideals onto others. Outsiders are always looking into the community with bad faith to modify and accuse the young audience as well as the content creators. The community then turns this onto themselves as well as the creators, and try to pry out the bad eggs by looking for any flaw a human being could have (spoilers: we have many, that’s what makes us human). Due to the fact that the underage community lacks the etiquette and the hindsight of older Internet users, there was a dichotomy created between minors and adults, where minors saw themselves as a protected species that could do no wrong and used this status to create discourse with adults then backtrack by saying they were being persecuted. They are cancelling without learning from what they do and sometimes not allowing people to learn from their mistakes and it goes to the point of digging up past tweets to prove the people they follow are either ethically and morally perfect or rather problematic beings that must be never spoken of. Content creators as those of the Dream SMP and their friends became so scared to misstep as they feared they might lose their entire audience over nothing (this, of course, only concerns trifle claims and not homophobic, transphobic, misogynistic, ableist or predatory comments) that they had to change the way they interact with fans. The Dream SMP community has changed how we use Twitter, in a more accessible way with tone and character tags, but will always be seen negatively for all the drama that surrounded it.
My wish for the Dream SMP is for it to be remembered for the good it gave us, the richness of the story, the fun we’ve had, the tears we’ve shed, and not the bad that came from it and around it. Hopefully, the Dream SMP will go down in web history for its prolific artistic fan content and how it transcended storytelling and led to new ways of role-playing. As Wilbur himself said, ‘Enjoy what you want to enjoy, don’t let anyone get in your way, especially with role-play, and make something that will make people inspired.’
This article was drafted with the help of the timeline curated by the Dream SMP wikia team, Wilbur’s Hey and Stuff podcast episode on roleplaying, the Twitch statistics for TommyInnit’s twitch account, and my own memories of the events.