DynaBlocks: When Roblox Was Called Something Else

September 2003: eBlocks

According to archives of David Baszucki's personal websites recovered by the Lost Media Archive, the earliest known name for what became Roblox was eBlocks. Baszucki's site as of September 30, 2003 described his project as a "stealth mode video game company" under that name. No public builds from this era survive intact — "eBlocks" was more of a working title than a launched product.

December 2003: GoBlocks (briefly)

Sometime in late 2003, Baszucki experimented with the name GoBlocks. This name overlapped with the development of an early prototype, and it's referenced in some surviving founder correspondence, but it was abandoned within weeks. By all accounts, "GoBlocks" never reached a public build either.

December 2003 – January 2004: DynaBlocks

The name that actually stuck for a while was DynaBlocks. The domain dynablocks.com was registered by Jim Stevens on December 12, 2003. From late 2003 through January 2004, Baszucki and Cassel built the early engine under this name. There are screenshots and partial build dumps from this period preserved on the Lost Media Wiki's Roblox page.

DynaBlocks was not publicly accessible during this time — it was a closed development effort. A handful of early invited testers played around with it, but no public registration existed.

January 30, 2004: The Roblox rename

On January 30, 2004, Baszucki and Cassel renamed the project to Roblox. The reason, per multiple sources including Looka's history of the Roblox logo and BloxControl's deep-dive on DynaBlocks, was that "Roblox" was simply more memorable and unique. The word was constructed as a portmanteau of "robots" and "blocks" — reflecting both the building-block nature of the platform and the early aesthetic of blocky, robotic-looking avatars.

Mid-2004: Public beta opens

By the middle of 2004, Roblox opened a public beta. This is also when user ID 1 ("Admin") was created — Baszucki used it to test the publish-and-login flow before any public users existed (see our post on the oldest Roblox accounts). The platform itself was officially released to the public in 2006.

What about the Roblox account itself (ID 1)?

Confusingly, the user ID 1 account isn't called "Roblox" — it's still called "Admin" today, reflecting its testing-account origins. The account profile just labels it as a Roblox Corporation account.

The DynaBlocks era today

You can still find traces of the DynaBlocks period if you dig:

• The DynaBlocks page on the Roblox Fandom Wiki documents what's known about the early builds
• The Lost Media Wiki has a dedicated entry for the partial pre-2006 Roblox builds
• The Lost Media Archive maintains an early-clients page with screenshots and recovered files
• Some old "Powered by DynaBlocks" references survive in archived versions of the Baszucki family's personal websites on the Wayback Machine

If you've never heard of any of this

You're not alone. The DynaBlocks era predates the public Roblox by a year, and most current Roblox players (born after 2005) have only ever known the platform as "Roblox." The naming history mostly survives through dedicated wiki communities, lost-media archivists, and the occasional Bloxy News retrospective.

But the names still pop up occasionally — references to "the DynaBlocks era" appear in retrospective documentaries, and Baszucki himself has mentioned it in interviews. It's a piece of internet history that survives in the corners.