Minecraft’s OLDEST Note Block Song Has Been FOUND!

About a month ago, I got a recommendation on  my discord server to find Minecraft’s oldest   recorded note block song. At first,  I thought hey, that’d be super easy.   Probably won’t even be interesting enough to  make a video on. Little did I know though,  

This journey would be full of twists,  turns, wrenches, and excitement,   as well as bringing a great group of people  together to preserve a noteworthy (pun intended)   piece of minecraft history. And well, spoiler  alert, we did it. We found the oldest note block  

Song ever created and recorded in Minecraft.  And this is the story of how that happened. I posted a call to action video a few weeks ago  to enlist some people’s help in the hunt, as well   as present my research so far on the topic. I  recommend watching that real quick first, but  

Here’s a real quick summary of the early research  I did – I found the oldest note block map posted   to planet minecraft, but it was 3 days after  beta 1.2, the verison note blocks were released.  

I found the oldest video posted to the minecraft  forum, but it was 1 day after beta 1.2’s release.   I found the oldest note block youtube video,  which was posted on the DAY of the update. I  

Figured this must be the oldest song, or at least  super close to it, but realized I needed some help   to dig deeper, so I asked my relatively small but  amazing community for help. And I did not expect  

To be flooded with so many inspired subscribers  who helped shape this story into what it is now. Now what is that video I mentioned? It  is called “First song to be played in   minecraft beta 1.2 on note blocks”, and was  posted by user ChoclateSailor on January 13,  

2011. This was found by searching for minecraft  note blocks before january 14, 2011 on youtube,   and scrolling to the bottom after sorting by new.  The video is just over a minute long, and features   ChoclateSailor playing Mary had a little lamb  on the note blocks on some sort of multiplayer  

Server. The video itself is filled with nostalgia,  like the skype message noise playing every few   seconds. I mentioned in my previous video that  if this is the first, it would be poetic, because   the first recorded audio on Thomas Edison’s  phonograph in history was him reciting Mary had  

A little lamb. I wanted this to be true so bad for  minecraft history. The story was writing itself.   But, we still had a lot of work to do. I knew  there might be something older, so we had to do  

Our due diligence and look deeper into this. And  secondly, I wanted to talk to ChoclateSailor. I   wanted to ask questions about the video, why they  chose to post it, if they still had that world or   server stored away somewhere. There was so much  we wanted to know. However, they hadn’t posted on  

Youtube in over a decade, didn’t have any socials  linked, and the username “ChoclateSailor” turned   up nothing in google searches. This person had  seemingly disappeared off the face of the earth. And thus, the Discord team split into  two groups. We had people looking for  

ChoclateSailor, and people looking for  older videos. Let’s start with the wild   story of locating the long lost ChoclateSailor. Thanks to user ‘cate’ on Discord, we were able  to dig up the metadata for ChoclateSailor’s   video using an online tool I’ve linked below. It  was posted January 13, 2011 at 18:16 UTC. What’s  

Interesting is that Notch’s changelog for beta 1.2  was posted just an hour earlier on tumblr at 17:12   UTC. We tried for a very long time to figure  out when exactly beta 1.2 went live, because  

It had to have been before the changelog, but that  timeframe had to be the baseline point for now. So   after digging through a few of ChoclateSailor’s  videos, we found their MC username during beta   1.2 – GMFreak. Using this newfound username, we  found what probably was the server from the video,  

GMFreak’s anarchy server. However, that has  been down since late 2011. The Minecraftforum   account attached to the username GMFreak was last  active in December 2011. The next thing we tried,   and thanks again to cate for this, was to see  what the minecraft username is now. And well,  

Using namemc, which is a program to find just  that, we found that the GMFreak account has quite   the history. The username has been changed 11  times. We ended up coming to the conclusion that   the account probably changed ownership at some  point. After searching through all of these names,  

The only one that came up with anything was um,  well..yeah, I’m not going to say that out loud.   This led me to a forum post in 2016 on badlion  applying for a spot on a server whitelist. The  

Individual says they are 13 years old in that  post. Meaning, if this were still the original   GMFreak, or ChoclateSailor, they were 7 or 8 ish  years old when posting that note block video,   amongst other fairly sophisticated minecraft  videos, and hosting an entire anarchy server AND  

Another non-anarchy server. Possible I suppose,  but in 2011 Minecraft wasn’t really that popular   for the young age demographic at all. A piece of  evidence to support the change of ownership theory   is that the GMFreak Minecraftforum account  posted that they are 15. Multiple times.

Okay so, not only is the ChoclateSailor  Youtube channel inactive, but the minecraft   account and all related forum posts  were too. With all hope seeming lost,   we started researching some of the  names in ChoclateSailor’s videos.   Most were in the same boat, seemingly  vanished, until we found yokcos700.

Thanks to Discord member ‘Aurora Borealis’,  we were able to locate yokcos’s twitter page.   Also I’m probably butchering that name so  I’m sorry about that. Seeing that it was   active sent a rush of dopamine to my brain, I  knew we were getting close now. We had finally  

Found an OG person who wasn’t inactive. So,  I @’d him and waited. While I was waiting,   discord member ‘Thornless Shelf’  located yokcos’s patreon page. There,   we located his discord server. So I joined, sent a  message explaining our situation, and he responded  

Incredibly quick. Much to my disappointment,  he didn’t remember much about that time,   and had no clue who ChoclateSailor  was. He was able to send me a link   to another still-active member of the GMFreak  server, so the bread crumb trail continued.

However, once we reached this point, and  before we could look into that other member,   something completely unexpected happened. *sigh*Yeah. All that hard work locating someone  without a digital trace for a decade was for   nothing. Discord member ‘jamie64’, who was  leading the effort to locate older recordings,  

Discovered something absolutely wild. Jamie  found a video that is TWO MINUTES older than   ChoclateSailor’s. This video, “Minecraft  music blocks”, posted by Rox, was posted   at 18:14 UTC on January 13th 2011. Remember,  ChoclateSailor’s video was posted at 18:16 UTC.  

TWO MINUTE DIFFERENCE. It is a 3 minute video of  Rox messing with noteblocks and showing them off,   creating a really cool and catchy custom tune  from them. So thus, the weeks-long search for   the elusive ChoclateSailor screeched to a halt.  All efforts pointed at getting in touch with  

Rox. And well, I wish I could say it was an epic  journey like the ChoclateSailor saga, but after   discord user Thornless Shelf discovered Rox’s epic  games username, I was able to easily locate his   twitter. And to all of our delight, he had tweeted  earlier that day. The true holder of the oldest  

Recorded note block song was still active.  I @’d him asking if he’d be willing to chat,   and shortly later, he responded. We then connected  on discord and well, the rest is history. I asked my Discord hunters what they would like  to ask Rox, as well as a few questions I had  

Originally planned for finding ChoclateSailor. Due  to time zone differences and scheduling conflicts   though, it was going to be really difficult to do  this in a voice call. We agreed to have a brief   interview over text. I asked Rox if he remembered  making that video, and he does not, but he does  

Remember the world he created it on. I asked him  if he remembers rushing to make that video when   beta 1.2 came out. He mentioned something I’ve  brought up a few times before. Back then, we   didn’t have a lot of information about minecraft  to scour through like we do today. It was valuable  

To post something that demonstrates how things  work, and that was the initial goal for his video.   He also mentioned just wanting to share these  bits of things with his friends, never intending   to have an audience. So then…the big question.  I asked Rox if he still has that world to this  

Day. It is a massive piece of minecraft history  after all. And well, I received good news and bad   news to this question. The good news was, he was  actually able to locate the world on an old hard  

Drive he had. And he was willing to send it to me!  The bad news – the site of the original note block   song from the video has been destroyed. This is  where it would’ve been if it was still around. So  

While the note blocks are gone, the video remains  a time capsule of minecraft history forever. …BUT. While I was talking to Rox, I made  sure the Discord team was still hunting,   juuust in case. And Jamie had one more tiny wrench  to throw in my gut. We found a forum post that was  

Posted on the minecraft forum at 16:42 UTC the  day of the update, so about an hour and a half   before Rox’s video. The title was “quick view of  note blocks” however, the video was unavailable,   meaning it was either privated or more likely,  deleted. It was posted by someone named illford  

Baker, but all efforts of finding this individual  were futile. They haven’t been active nearly as   much as even choclatesailor, and you all saw the  attempts to find him. The wayback machine could   not locate the video. Illford fox, who i believe  is illford baker, last streamed 7 years ago, the  

Last time they were on the Minecraft forum was 10  years ago, and their youtube channel, or at least   what I think is their youtube channel, hasn’t been  touched in years as well. They are essentially   unfindable. We spent many hours looking,  but I eventually threw in the towel. Plus,  

The chance of them even having the video still  is probably extremely low. So while it may have   contained the technical first note block song, the  fact that it’s deleted disqualifies it in my mind. The search isn’t over though. Despite  my great community’s excellent efforts,  

There is the obvious possibility of an  older song. If you come across anything,   leave a comment below. Remember, we are needing  something older than Rox’s video posted on   January 13, 2011 at 18:16 UTC. If you have a  world verifiably older than that, or can find  

A piece of media older, head over to my discord  server and let us know. Special thanks to cate,   jamie, creeperkiller, aurora borealis, and  thornless shelf for their huge help in the hunt,   as well as anyone I forgot to name. This was  so cool, and I’m excited we’ve cemented yet  

Another piece of minecraft history into  the books. Thanks so much for watching,   subscribe for a potentially endless minecraft  experience, and I’ll see you all in the next one.