Remembering Pendar2

This is very different from the kind of story we usually publish on Minecraft.net. I should warn you that it’s a very sad story, but also an inspiring one. It truly shows what the Minecraft community are capable of at their best.

Bryan, better known in the Minecraft world as Pendar2, was the creator of the Emenbee Minecraft Server. Founded way back in 2011, this hugely popular community server would see over *1500 concurrent players* at its peak, and over a million unique visitors over the subsequent seven years. Those are amazing numbers, the kind you only see if you’re a server moderator of great skill and care.

But late last year, Bryan shut down the server. He’d been suffering from cancer and the server was becoming impossible to maintain. Sadly, Bryan recently passed away. He was “a genius, a compassionate person, and our hero,” his friend Mod_Masta wrote on the Emenbee website (the full statement is well worth reading – it’s a beautiful tribute to his friend).

But this was far from the only tribute made to Bryan. Emenbee players have returned to the server to transform its hub into a memorial for him. Just look at the staggering amount of signs and messages players have left:

I got in touch with Mod_Masta, who was kind enough to send me a download of this Minecraft world, and give me permission to share some of its messages in this article.

Honestly, there are simply too many excellent ones to include them all here, so I’ve chosen just a few of the many, many, many heartfelt tributes that show how much Bryan meant to the Minecraft community and the players of his server:

This article took forever to write, because I couldn’t stop wandering around the hub, trying to read them all. Some of them are sweet, some are funny, and some of them tell amazing stories of friendships formed in a server that felt like home, thanks to Bryan’s tireless efforts to make it that way. He clearly inspired a great many people in the Minecraft community, and through their tributes to him, they’ve inspired me right back.

Rest in peace, Bryan. On behalf of everyone at Mojang, thank you for the incredible thing you built here.

Computer science was one of Bryan’s passions, so his family have created a fundraising page for a computer science scholarship in his name. If you’d like to learn more about it, make a donation, or share the link so more people are aware of it, click here. And thank you!

Special thanks to Mod_Masta for all his help, and to Eurogamer, who published an excellent article that brought this story to our attention.