Internet Archivists Discover a Rare, Early Version of Minecraft

An online community of internet archivists have finally discovered an early version of Minecraft that has been missing for over a decade. 

The Alpha 1.1.1 Minecraft build was released on September 18th, 2010 but was replaced due to a bug that could turn the player’s screen gray. It was only available to players for 3 hours and 25 minutes before Alpha 1.1.2 was released.

Omniarchive, an online group of internet archivists, has been working to locate missing versions of the now-popular video game. Alpha 1.1.1 was just one of many updates released by Minecraft in its early days, but it had become the group’s white whale after years of searching.

Many of these earlier Minecraft versions that Omniarchive uncovers are still playable via launchers the group has created. The official Minecraft launcher also allows players to play a number of the older builds. 

Game developer Luna “Lunasorcery” was not previously involved or even familiar with the group’s work, but a simple tweet she made in 2010: "oooooohhhhhhh MineCraft update!," put her on the group's radar.

“In 2010 you played the missing Minecraft version Alpha v1.1.1, and I have good reason to believe that you may still have its .jar file,” archivist A.M. Avery wrote to Luna, identifying themselves as working with Omniarchive.

In a Twitter thread about the saga, Luna wrote that this was not the first time she had been contacted about the tweet, but something spurred her to finally go through the hard drives where she had backed up her old laptop’s data. 

She explained that she always had multiple versions of the game sitting on her laptop at the time, but still managed to find an old Minecraft .jar file with the exact date they were looking for. She told Motherboard that she suspects that she may have been downloading files off the Minecraft website to try and make the game run offline instead of in-browser as it did at the time. She shared her discovery with the Omniarchive Discord server. 

Luna said she was “shaking from the adrenaline” once the replies started pouring in. “It was just utter chaos,” Luna told Motherboard over Twitter. “I really didn’t understand the context of just how much of a seismic event it was until the yelling started.”

Alpha 1.1.1 had become a “long-running meme, even a holy grail of sorts” for the group, she later tweeted. 

She had multiple builds from those early days, including two more that were new to the group. 

“While this may ultimately just be one broken old version of a game, I hope the sudden attention around it might inspire more people to try to preserve what they can,” she says.