'Electric Blockaloo' Minecraft Festival Pushed To July, Changes Name Over Similarities To Far-Right Group

The ambitious and sprawling in-Minecraft music festival previously known as The Electric Blockaloo is being pushed back two weeks thanks to a somewhat unexpected Minecraft update that affects the work previously completed for the festival, which features hundreds of artists and exclusive sets all taking place inside the popular block-building game.

Meanwhile, event producer Rave Family has changed the name of the event to Rave Family Block Party, saying the name was too similar to that being used by an American far-right extremist group, presumably the citizen militia seeking to bring upon a second civil war known as “The Boogaloo Boys.”

Rave Family’s Jackie McGuire explained the Minecraft update would require re-doing or updating a lot of work already done for the event, which includes custom builds from artists including Steve Aoki, Griz and many others, but could prove to be better in the long run.

“It’ll be better for everybody all around,” she told Pollstar after learning her team of about 15 engineers and artist liaisons would need to postpone the inaugural event. “The servers in Minecraft are dependent on the version of the game they’re running. You can’t run 1.16 on a 1.15.2 server, and we can’t guarantee that all the apps we use to tie all the servers together will be able to update their plugins in time for the 25th, so we’re going to postpone the festival by two weeks.

“One of the other reasons we’ve not done a ton of promotion yet is that it doesn’t feel appropriate right now, with the Black Lives Matter movement and a lot of people who are finally having their voices heard. We don’t want to be a voice not adding to the conversation. My whole team took a whole week off to protest, and we really want to leave room for marginalized voices that need to be heard. By pushing it out a couple weeks, we give a little more time for that, and time for people to have recovery time.”

The update is exciting for Minecraft users as well.

“The cool thing is the Nether in Minecraft is getting its first update in five years,” says McGuire, who led the first all-female team to win TechCrunch Hackathon competition in 2018. “They’ve got new monsters, new block types, it’s a really cool update, and actually going to be a better experience for fans because there’s going to be cooler stuff in it, but it’s a bummer the timing worked out the way it did.”