Blade Stunner

Loyal readers of Minecraft.net – the one's who spend their weekends arguing about the best Block of the Week and print out every article so they can keep them in a creepy scrapbook – may remember an interview we ran earlier this year with Marceau “Udvio” Nakayama.

Marceau's a self-taught creator, one whose main focus is designing incredible environments and structures that transport you out of your comfortable surroundings. His love of travel and culture gives each of his works a sense of a journey and discovery, and this is just one of many reasons why we love his latest Minecraft creation, Awakening.

“This started as personal research for a more cyberpunk theme,” Marceau says. "It’s basically a vision of an alternate future where most cities are very densely packed. It has a lot of layers [in the] buildings and structures. The initial idea was to have a space facility where people would experiment with anti-matter and space-related forces.”

Marceau knew that he wanted to expand this original vision, but it wasn’t until he stumbled across a Minecraft competition with the theme ‘human achievement’ that it hit him. “I thought, ‘that’s perfect!’” recalls Marceau.

“Awakening is basically the human achievement of discovering new weapons and how to transcend dimensions.” He continues, “in fact, the whole point of Awakening is the discovery of human civilisation being able to control the greater of nature’s powers and to use it - not [always] for the best purpose.”

This is the core concern of Awakening - the dark side of humanity’s ambition. One the one hand, Awakening celebrates humanity’s technological advancement with strong, sharp structures and beautiful colour composition. But on the other, there is space: the part of nature that we know the least about. Should we harness the power of anti-matter and the unknown? Can we be trusted with it?

Marceau started playing Minecraft in July 2015, when he discovered the creative community through a contest. Instantly, he was hooked on the ability to create a build, share it, have people edit it, and mix different projects together with other people. “That’s how I started basically,” he says. “I just got interested in doing that and I met a few people.”

Marceau tells me this is a big part of why he loves the game. Not only is it a new medium for him to develop his art, but he’s excited by the variety of people and talent in the Minecraft community. “You have people that are passionate about video making,” he says, “or about the artistic side of Minecraft, or the gameplay - redstone-related for instance – or sculptures or terrain through the World Machine program. So there is a collision of different mediums which is really interesting, that’s the reason Minecraft is actually quite universal, I think.”