A Podcast By Callum Ellis
On April 24, 2021, Callum Ellis launched the first episode of the Minecraft Short Stories podcast. Since then it has had hundreds of thousands of plays and expanded into having merch and a YouTube channel. This unofficial Minecraft show is dedicated to expanding the world of this game through stories. Join Callum each week as he delves into the mysteries and lore surrounding everyone’s favourite game.
What was the inspiration for the podcast?
When I was nine-ish years old, I was bored one day (big surprise) so I decided to start writing a story about my favourite game at the time: Minecraft. The story started with “One day Steve walked down a hill,” and I worked on it on and off for about two years. Eventually, that story evolved into “Minecraft Chronicles”. The story has been featured on the podcast before and you can find it as “Minecraft Chronicles: A Four-Year-Old Story”.
Minecraft Short Stories isn’t actually my first podcast. In May of 2020 when I was 12 years old, I started a podcast about my favourite subject: Pokemon. Only one episode was ever released. That episode consisted of me going through all the basic water-type Pokemon in my Deluxe Essential Pokemon Handbook and sharing my thoughts about them.
The first episode was released and the podcast was dubbed The Pokemazing Podcast. I planned to do further episodes centred on the evolutions of those Pokemon and subsequently their final evolved form.
The Pokemazing Podcast only got three views: one from me and two from my grandma. I quickly moved on from podcasting due to my lack of interest and being twelve. A little less than a year later I had re-gotten into Minecraft and was regularly listening to The Withering Effect and The Spawn Chunks: both Minecraft news and talk shows. It was April of 2021 and at the height of COVID-19, so besides school, there weren’t any extracurricular activities to preoccupy my time. I brought up the idea of me having another go at making a podcast to my Dad and he thought it was a good idea. My initial concept was to copy the podcasts I listened to, The Spawn Chunks etc., but as my Dad pointed out, there were already multiple podcasts with a large audience doing that (in this case, Minecraft News). I needed something niche and original. My Dad came up with the idea of combining creative writing and Minecraft because I had been working on Minecraft Chronicles.
Thus, the Minecraft Short Stories podcast was born.
We didn’t create a new Anchor account, we just renamed the Pokemazing podcast to Minecraft Short Stories and deleted the one episode we had published (still only 3 views).