they FOUND Minecraft Alpha 1.1.1?!

Minecraft alpha this is the era where i started playing it’s an era where many people discovered the game for the very first time try to imagine for a moment that absolutely no versions of minecraft classic indev imfdev alpha or even beta survive to the present day imagine that those versions only exist

In our memory well thou would suck this is why archiving exists the act of preserving data for historical purposes on october 31st 2018 i made a video about the single biggest archival effort in the entire minecraft community simply dubbed omni archive from 2017 and onwards they’ve spearheaded the effort to ensure

That every single piece of minecraft’s history as released by mojang is archived and readily available as the years have passed however options for finding currently lost versions of the game have been on the decline i mean the latest version of minecraft alpha was released over 10 and a half years ago it feels

Entirely possible that all of the options have been exhausted at this point however there does exist a rare breed of missing versions that remain current for a significant amount of time perhaps long enough that some sufficiently self-respecting data hoarder may have noticed it and saved it for a rainy day

Is it possible that someone vigilant about backing up their data might just be a carrier of such a fabled piece of code and i wouldn’t be making this video and speaking these words today if there wasn’t something i had to show you let me tell you a story about keeping the past alive

The story of aversion thought lost forever a version that was seemingly cursed let me tell you the story of how minecraft alpha 1.1.1 was found the day is september 18 2010 a day just like any other the time is 5 29 pm utc and not just just released another build of minecraft

That being alpha 1.1.1 this new version of minecraft would change the game forever this was the exact build of minecraft that introduced crouch walking this secret saturday update is also noteworthy for having introduced these five paintings fishing rods a slider for mouse sensitivity sound volume and music volume notch was

Clearly pretty excited for people to try this update and as such he was hyping it pretty hard at 5 41 pm just 12 minutes after release notch posted this tumblr post announcing the update followed by a twitter post just two minutes later alpha 1.1.1 release was rough

First off the sudden rush of traffic to minecraft’s update server effectively ddosed the update server at 6 48 pm just 79 minutes after the update users on the polish minecraft forum craft portal began discussing the update even talking about download speeds as low as 0.01 kilobytes per second

In order to download this file’s total 876 kilobytes at a generous 0.5 kilobits per second you would have to wait nearly 240 minutes for the file to download minecraft alpha 1.1.1 was only public for 205 minutes the clock was ticking time was running out if you didn’t start downloading this

Update right when it was released before the server started to crash you very likely did not finish the download you weren’t playing minecraft at all that night the servers were in such disrepair for so long that players actually began sharing their copies of the game amongst each other and what for alpha 1.1.1

Had a crippling bug due to a gamma experiment that caused any users not using an intel integrated graphics card to have their entire screen turned completely gray for as long as the game was open at 8 11 pm 162 minutes into the update resu posted an image to reddit documenting this

Very problem and 43 minutes later after only 205 total minutes notch compiled alpha 1.1.2 and sent it to the update server immediately afterwards the gray screen bug was fixed and alpha 1.1.1 was officially no more it’s hard to gauge where the next part of our story really begins because archiving old versions of

Minecraft dates all the way back to the days of the mc nostalgia mod which i reviewed in october of 2011 on this youtube channel because distributing up-to-date versions of minecraft was and mostly still is against minecraft’s terms of service mc nostalgia would instead patch existing versions of minecraft

To load up as older versions if you didn’t already own and have a copy of the game mc nostalgia wouldn’t work and this is how playing old versions of minecraft went for a little while you either had to have a backup of your own old versions

Or you had to use solutions such as mc nostalgia however mojing would step in during july of 2013 when they pushed a launcher update allowing for not only the creation of multiple game instances but the selection of older versions of minecraft itself alongside this brand new version of the

Launcher came a handful of new versions some the mc nostalgia project had some that the project never managed to save and on top of that several never-before-seen pre-release versions of the game created days before the first public testing version classic 0.0.11a was even released on notch’s original tig source forum thread

From may of 2009 a video for which i’ll also provide in the description down below mojang would continue collecting old jars and adding them into the launcher for the next few months or so this slow trickle of versions began stagnating though and it wouldn’t be until august of 2015

When the concentrated effort to archive old versions of minecraft in their original jar file form really began at the time luigi 2600 posted an archive that they titled minecraft the hidden versions containing a bunch of old classic indev imfdev alpha and even beta versions of the game that the new launcher did not

Have while many of these versions were later found to be fake and luigi has even since spoken about it stating that they didn’t know those versions were fake without luigi’s archive it’s very possible that the events that follow may have never happened following the release of luigi’s hidden versions

Zelenator stumbled across the archive in late 2016 and added luigi’s versions to his own already expanding private collection it was also around this time that zelenator got in contact with me to share information on a glitch that ultimately i made a video about titled most bizarre chunk glitch ever in minecraft

Just over three months after that video zelenator would again share new information with me in the form of luigi’s hidden minecraft versions and on april 7th 2017 i made a video about the quote unquote rarest versions of minecraft based off that collection and then on april 13th 2017

I made another video this time about minecraft in dev it was specifically because of those two videos of mine that a user by the name of half of a kebab would get in contact with zelenator to share their versions amongst each other and five months following their initial

Contact half of a kebab would go on to found the archive effort known as omni archive alongside zekken and darken moon if you want to watch a video all about omni archives archival effort i’ll have a video linked on the top right of the screen and in the description

Down below throughout the year since omni archive have made every effort imaginable to preserve minecraft’s history if there’s a version that they don’t have that has proof of existing they will track down and exhaust every single possibility to recover it minecraft alpha 1.1.1 was among the holy grails of missing versions

It was out for multiple hours a lot of people played it over a dozen individual download links for that version specifically made their way online but by the time omni archive was founded every single one of those download links were dead this is why the hunt for alpha 1.1.1 was so

Mythical it should exist someone should still have it and as it turns out on one fateful day in late june of 2021 after years of their combined effort professor apple one of omni archives many different archivists would send this tweet to twitter user luna

Asking if she still had a jar file for a missing version that she last played over 10 years ago it sounds insane but what happened next is incredible following professor apple’s request and knowing that it couldn’t hurt to take a look luna dug around to see if she had a copy

Of the fabled missing version the reason why luna was specifically contacted was due to this tweet that she posted a mere eight minutes after minecraft alpha 1.1.1 was released wherein she shared her excitement for the new minecraft update again the archivists at omni archive follow every lead meticulously after a few unsuccessful searches

She ultimately did find an old version of minecraft on an old external usb hard drive she joined omni archives discord server stating she really felt she had this long lost missing piece of minecraft’s history shortly thereafter she provided a screenshot with a time stamp of her jar file

And what was the time 8 53 pm utc a mere two minutes before alpha 1.1.1 would forever become no more two minutes and think about it it took luna 195 minutes out of the total 205 to even complete the download yeah after she inspected the jar file with a hex editor

She was able to verifiably ascertain that this was in fact minecraft alpha 1.1.1 and then she deleted it i’m just kidding after verifying it was indeed the long lost fabled version she sent it to the omni archive team and the rest is history now before moving on with your life consider

Giving thanks where thanks is due thanks to the omni archive team for meticulously archiving minecraft’s history their discord server will be linked below if you want to assist in the finding of other versions which still remain missing then consider joining also thanks to luna for rummaging through her old

Backups out of the kindness of her heart her twitter’s linked below too and thanks to you for watching if you enjoyed this story please consider passing it along if you want to dig deeper into minecraft’s past i’ll have all of the sources for this video linked in the description down below

Along with links to the videos i’ve mentioned as well however as far as this story goes that just about does it for me for now that’s about it thanks for Watching You