Minecraft (Image courtesy of Minecraft)
Minecraft was first released on May 17, 2009, and recently, there have been countless updates. In order to preserve the precious history of Minecraft, fans have been attempting to dig out all the updates once available in the past. However, one version, Minecraft Alpha 1.1.1, was believed to be completely buried in the dust of time.
In 2010, the game was still in its alpha stage. Updates were so frequent that sometimes there would be no announcement of a new version, which was the case of Alpha 1.1.1. It was secretly released, introducing several important functions like fishing rods and ducking. But 1.1.1 was only available for 3 hours and 25 minutes due to a severe bug that quickly led to a new update. It was already difficult to retrieve data from a decade ago, let alone a version that was only available for such a limited time.
That being said, this challenging condition doesn’t discourage Minecraft fans. A few months ago, someone spotted an old tweet about an updated version of Minecraft, suspecting it to be Alpha 1.1.1. After the internet archivist reached out to the tweet’s poster Luna, Luna started a thread detailing her journey of unearthing this long-lost treasure.
Luna first checked her “Laptop Backup” in search of 1.1.1, but nothing was found. She then went through her USB hard drive and found the .jar file that matched the timestamp. It is confirmed to be the legendary Alpha 1.1.1 version. The whole server exploded after learning of this discovery.
The attention of this incident led to more people checking their old files, and luckily, more lost builds have been retrieved. Both in-20081231-2 and inf-20100616 were found on June 26.
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