Maybe you remember a gamemode from the 1.8 days called Cores or under a different name. The one I grew up with was played in a German server called gommehd.net, the mode has been gone for years and they even declined to sell me the code and I could never find a different server with it.

Cores is similar to bedwars, but always only 2 Teams of various sizes, each team has 2 Cores (beacons) as long they exist you have infinite respawns and once they're mined the game is over. Mining a core take a long time and thus defending it is fairly easy and you have to build and attack with multiple people to successful mine one. This results often in either matches that are over in an instant or that go on for so long that all islands become fully build and overtime the battlefield starts looking like world war 1 trenches. There is some loot on the map, in middle and outer islands and at certain times other loot and bosses spawn, this makes it kind of similar to a moba, you can farm and make your team stronger which will often be needed if both sides are good enough.

I'll admid that the whole code will be mostly vibecoded as I can't code much but since its a fairly simple mode I expect it to work well, I already got the basics working and will open source or and host it on my own server aswell once it's finished. If anyone would like to help make maps for it let me know, you can see an example in the picture, its islands based.

Are there any other old gamemodes that have become lost in times you guys remember? After this I'm going to start recreating a nieche mode that was called bow bash, and I plan to make my server an archive of these old gamemodes of there's enough interest