With MC Championship: Colour The World taking place later today, we chatted to Avondale (co-owner of Noxcrew) and Tom Hellicar (Project Manager for MC Championship) about converting this beloved minigame tournament into a live show for Twitch Rivals!
“I think being able to see audience reactions live is something which – I know Twitch already does a great job of, giving people the way to watch these livestreams and chat in the community together – but here you can hear people actually cheer for who they want to win,” Tom says, “and to see that live is the coolest part of the show I think.”
“You get to build up your social energy all year long and then you get to let it all out in one weekend in-person,” Avondale adds. “This is our fourth Twitch Rivals – people are knowing what to expect now, so it’s turning from ‘how can we bring this to life’ to ‘ how can we make it even better’ – and we’ll soon know how we did!”
Today’s Minecraft Championship is a Twitch Rivals event, with Noxcrew and Twitch working in collaboration to bring the event to life not only online, but also live from an arena in the Rotterdam Ahoy – the location of 2025’s TwitchCon EU. “It’s a Twitch Rivals show, but obviously MCC is also a brand that we’ve been working on for the better part of six years at this point,” Avondale says. “Twitch want to enable us to have creative vision, but they want to make it better – and ultimately everybody working on the show just wants to make it as cool as can be. Given infinite time and infinite budget we could sell out the Super Bowl, but that’s just not the way it works. With the resources that are available to us, I think the production ends up being greater than the sum of its parts.”
“Twitch put a load of work into making sure the main central stream out on Twitch Rivals is really good,” Tom tells us. “There’s a huge team of people involved in order to produce that – for example there’s game directors who look at all the streams to figure out where the action is, and camera operators to capture the feeling of the crowd.”
Counting down until we hit the @TwitchRivals stage!
Join us on Sunday 1st June at 1:30pm BST.
Let’s Colour the World! 🌈🎨🌍 pic.twitter.com/nju931g41C
— MC Championship (@MCChampionship_) May 12, 2025
2024’s highlights reel showcases the incredible reaction from the crowd.
It’s not just the in-person audience who will benefit from all the extra moving pieces that the live show has in place, but also the viewers watching online. “For the event tomorrow, we’ve put a lot of work into making sure that all the cool stuff we’ve done for the in-game audience, we’ve relayed back into the game,” Tom says, “so people watching the individual streamers will be able to see moments happening in the show, and follow along with the story and context.”
Catering to both online and in-person audiences at once comes with additional challenges. “When producing an MCC for a live stage environment, you’re going to have more downtime,” Avondale says. “It’s just the nature of IRL productions – they have sponsor reads they need to do, they have cut-ins from commercial breaks, involving the crowd, that takes more time. Everything about it is going to take longer. The first few iterations of this were solely about how we make it work in this environment at all – nowadays we’re getting to stuff like how do we turn bad downtime into good downtime?”
“When you look at how you actually consume an MCC broadcast, typically you’re watching from your favourite streamer,” Avondale continues. “For this one, you have the opportunity to watch a central broadcast, which is a bit different an experience – if you want it. Most people would probably have their streamer up on the side and also the Twitch broadcast. The Twitch broadcast has an easy time during downtime, because they’re the ones running their commercials – the streamers have a tough time because they have to entertain their chat for longer than normal in an environment that’s strange to them. We have to think about how we can provide things that they can do and interact with and talk about during that downtime, that makes it better for them, and I think that goes a long way towards improving the viewing experience at home. There’s nothing like seeing it in person, but having the centralised stream is a big win, and we can’t get that if we’re not together.”
The Twitch Rivals version of MC Championship does have a few distinct differences to make this balance possible. “I think we have cheated a bit – like the version of MCC you see on the Twitch Rivals stage, we’re limiting what games you’re able to choose, for example,” Tom says. “Battle Box is one of our favourite games to run in the event, but it presents such a big challenge for anyone watching on a central stream, that we just can’t run it. Different games present different challenges, and we just try and steer clear of the ones which are too complex for us to figure out truly.”
Having games that are easily understandable in the live format is important for both viewers and the staff working on the event. “Adapting the event down to six games was the biggest step just to reduce the amount of time and load on the people working on the event backstage, who will come in and have been observing Fortnite or chess matches right before this – they haven’t got a full background in Minecraft like we do. So just making sure we can present the event to anyone working on the event with us in a way that they can understand and do their best job with – that’s the overarching challenge. As long as they understand, they can make it happen.”
“The ultimate cheat code is that this is our fourth Twitch Rivals,” Avondale adds. “It’s getting easy because we know they know how the show runs. Time is always the biggest enemy – like Tom said, we’re compacting the format to try to produce it into a limited window. They’ll turn the power off on us if we don’t get it done in time!”
The adaptations that have come with making an event like Twitch Rivals have also contributed to improvements to the main event and its infrastructure – including mcc.live, a website viewers can use to track teams and scores, both before and during the event. “It’s improved so much as a direct feeder into things that we need for events like this,” Avondale says. “The scoreboards that run during the event on Twitch’s side feed directly out of our stuff through an API that our team has developed to make that easier for them.”
With so many moving parts to the production, rehearsals are important. “We do a rehearsal before every show,” Avondale says. “We obviously have the testing that we run online all the time, and before these live events, some of the Twitch team and the esports engine teams that work on the show will come watch along and take notes for the observers for camera angles and stuff like that. Then when we get to the event, all of the shows that happen here have a rehearsal time at some point in the days leading up to it. So everything gets tested at some point in time – it’s not all in the right order, it’s not all synchronised – sometimes they test the audio for one thing while testing the lights of something else – but they make the show happen and it’s honestly incredible.”
“I remember in Las Vegas a couple years ago, I walked in and there was nothing there but a pile of curtains on the floor and some bleachers folded up and parked somewhere on a dolly,” Avondale continues. “The first show was Friday morning, and that was Tuesday night. You walked in the next day and the stage existed, and then the day after that the bleachers were up, and then they had a show. Real people who are really really good at what they do make that possible.”
Whilst it does of course present extra challenges, there are also some things that the live format makes easier. “Contingency planning is way easier at Twitch Rivals than it is hosting an MCC online,” Tom says. “When you’re hosting online, there’s forty different people in forty different places with essentially forty different issues. At Twitch Rivals, if someone’s computer goes down, we’ll know instantly – unlike in an online event where if say someone’s internet goes down, you can’t get in contact with them or check how long it will be until the problem’s resolved. I feel less worried about something going catastrophically wrong at Twitch Rivals than I do elsewhere.”
Outside of the event itself, there’s lots that Noxcrew can look forward to at the convention. “TwitchCon is just about meeting people I think – it’s a really good opportunity to meet people that we work with,” Tom says. “We work online fully remotely so you don’t get to see your colleagues every day. You also just get to meet people who are excited about MCC as well.”
“To put a face to the name,” Avondale adds. “It’s the people that are the best part about TwitchCon. Conventions are cool, but cool people are cooler.”
You can watch MC Championship: Colour The World today (1st June) at 1:30pm BST / 2:30pm CEST (Rotterdam time) / 8:30am EDT. The central stream can be found at twitch.tv/twitch, or you can find the individual streamers’ links at mcc.live
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