Going in-depth on ImagineFun with Mouskegamer

Imagine Fun has only been around since 2018 but has been a major player in the past year. They have become the largest server in the community, getting about 500+ players on at one time. While the server is not 1:1 it is what they call “a memory” of the park and not the real thing. What a child would see, something larger than life. Founded by a group of friends coming from a past server, they wanted to create something as a passion project. It is safe to say they succeeded. Today we decided to talk with Mousekgamer to learn more about the server. So join us for this awesome Interview!

Disneyland Front Gate – Photo Provided By ImagineFun

Jason: Can you tell me where Imagine Fun came from and why it was started?

Mouskegamer: So the history of the server is complicated, first let’s give you some context. I was in high school back in 2017, summer had come up and I was looking for somewhere to play. At this point, I was getting back into Minecraft a little bit, and before this, I had done some personal projects, like building Disneyland “1:1” for fun in single-player but looking back it was god awful, but it is what got me started. Going forward I ended up on another server that is not around anymore, that server was the place where I got into the community. Joined a discord for the first time, I learned about all the other servers. At that point, I tried going on others and I was not a fan of the 1:1 scale, I enjoyed an exaggerated interpretation of the park. On this new server, I met Slinx who is our Imagineer. We ended up starting ImagineFun. back to the context, the server shut down in October of 2017, the guy who owned it though gave us the world file and the pack. Said “here you can host this if you want to” since I had become good friends with him. We went and started hosting it, expanded on it a little bit. We built 2 attractions from November to January. The issue was it was not to scale though, not at all. It was more of a memory of the park, not a recreation. That being said it was really quick for us to realize this was not gonna work. At the same time, the person who owned the server with who we had partnered to host had issues with the whole community.

Disneyland Castle Backside – Photo By LiveTheMagic

Now it’s better but at the time things were not going well so we moved past that, and I got ownership of the server. A few things happened, and we left. We went to go start our server and that is what “Imagineering Fun” came from. The main server “Imagineering Fun” started in February of 2018, and I started it by bringing a train station I made in single player the year before. That is what the train station is now but it has been slowly changed a million times but it looks similar enough. Started it with slinks and another friend who no longer works on the project. Then we brought on Sean in late 2018, another person was brought on named Connor in 2019 and then Cam was brought on in 2020 after we blew up. Since then it has just grown and we did not expect it but here we are!

Big Thunder Mountain Station – Photo By LiveTheMagic

Jason: What is your background at Imagine Fun?

Mouskegamer: Everything. No, but seriously I am a jack of all trades. I do building, video, and audio design. I do a ton of background music work. For some of the trailer work, I put together the last News Wire. We all do have very similar skillsets in that regard. I also do a ton with Traincarts and custom ride systems that we use on Tower Of Terror. I work with those but I do not develop those tools. I know some Java scripts so I have learned a little bit. Limited in HTML. I feel like there may be more but pretty much a little bit of everything.

Jason: What is something that changed the course of the server? That made you all so huge?!

Mouskegamer: TikTok. I do not fully understand what happened but someone posted our server on TikTok and they did it in a way that reached 13 million people. It was the craziest time ever for us, we had about 100,000 people in the first month. It was insane, I did not understand how TikTok worked at the time, back then I only had ever used it, never posted my content. To see something we produced posted on there reaching that amount of people showed me how we needed to get into this. The number of people trying to join the server kind of dosed the server by sending too many packets or in this case players. 6,000 connections per minute. That leads us to scale the server, reached out to a few friends over at VortexPVP. They had never seen anything like this before so we had to scale the server with like a network. At the peak, we had 2,000ish players on concurrently at one time. While we have not reached that level again we still have gotten during events 500-600 players. Ride release days tend to be very big when we hype them up as well like Bugs Land. We also want to say thank you to the community, it is something that makes us different as we have such a passionate community and it makes us proud of what we have created. Everyone kind of knows each other, it is awesome and I am super happy to be a part of it. Heartwarming to see things like the theater groups pop up doing musicals on the server, it is just amazing!

Jason: What is one thing you would like to tell your guests?

Mouskegamer: Thank you, oh, and stop asking about certain rides, haha. We are gonna make them all trust me! Honestly, I could not be happier than where we are today. It is all thanks to them. I do not know what we did to deserve this amazing support but I am super happy to be where we are. As much as I make fun of the questions, I do love and appreciate all of them. So thank you.

Jason: Last question, any new things coming down the pipeline you can share?

Mouskegamer: We always have stuff like that in mind, normally we don’t plan that far ahead. While other servers have deadlines with builds and stuff. That makes sense they are companies, trying to run a business. For us, this is a personal project so we don’t have deadlines, just an idea in our head at the beginning of the month what we want to complete. Let’s say May I want to finish up Star Tours or something… that’s not happening by the way people, it’s terrifying. Whatever we want to do or feel motivated to do we make it happen. We once got on a Zoom call with Bob Gurr that man behind so many of the classic Disney attractions who worked with Walt on most of them. He talked to us about the creative process and how there is not one. He just comes up with an idea when it needs to happen. So we are kind of like that. It is just a bunch of us having fun on a personal project, the more passionate we are on a project the better it will come out.

ImagineFun has a ton of new things and events in the works. During May they are celebrating May the Fourth be with you. This includes an awesome Star Wars Hyperspace Mountain overlay on Space Mountain, tons of character meet and greets, New Parkour in Galaxy’s Edge, and player lightsaber dueling. The server also recently reopened Alice and Wonderland, then on top of that Peter Pan. Both classic dark rides in Disneyland’s Fantasyland.

There are lots of things coming soon from ImagineFun and we can not wait to showcase them all to you! Thanks for reading everyone! Let’s hope the length in-between articles for the next one is not as long!

Article written by Jason Pennypacker or LiveTheMagic.

ImagineFun Links

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Imagine_Fun

Discord : discord.gg/disneyland

IP: Mc.ImagineFun.net (1.16.5, Java)

Oh, yea did you know we are now looking for Videographers and Writers? You can join this awesome team! Click here to apply today!

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