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Minecraft version 1.1.1 was released on September 18, 2010 with a bug that could result in a gray screen. It was only live for 3 hours and 25 minutes before version 1.1.2 was released and fixed the bug. That’s fine for most people, the game is working now and we can move on. But there is a group of Minecraft catalogers called Omniarchive trying to preserve every byte that has ever gone through Mojang’s game, and version 1.1.1 proved to be an elusive target. It had been missing for over a decade.
That was until an Omniarchive member spotted a tweet celebrating the start of a new Minecraft update within the timeframe it knew was live. They contacted the tweet writer Luna and asked her to look for a backup of that particular version of the game. Could it be possible they kept this file for that long?
As reported by Kotaku, Luna missed the first attempt to reach her, but a follow-up caught her attention and she decided to take a look. She said, “I booted up my PC and checked. I couldn’t find the backup. I knew I had a « Laptop Backup » folder in the root directory of one of my drives, but it was nowhere to be found. ‘
In order not to be put off, she remembered an old USB stick that she had. After writing a search script to find all of the ‘minecraft.jar’ files, it found many hits including ‘a file with the exact date you were looking for!’
It required verification, but it was confirmed that this was indeed the missing Minecraft alpha. And there was a lot of cheer on a Discord basis. There was more to come. Luna’s drive also contained the only ‘clean’ (unmodified) copy of version c0.29_01 that Omniarchive had come across.
It seems amazing that a game influenced by Minecraft could lose something, but this was back when the Mojang developers were a one-man team, so it’s an understandable mistake. And if it hadn’t been lost, that story, which spanned a decade and included some notable coincidences and detective work, would have been lost too. But thanks to Luna and Omniarchive, Alpha 1.1.1 is now kept on archive.org for anyone interested in Minecraft’s past.
Craig Pearson
I love square sausages, cats and climbing rocks.
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