Soumi Sarkar
Jun, 30.2021
Plenty of gaming fans would fail to recollect developments in the year 2010. However, something special
happened in September that year. It was significant even at that time and a woman by the name of Luna
downloaded the latest version of an indie game. It was an alpha by the name Minecraft, which she
downloaded on her laptop. She was excited about it and even tweeted. There are not many updates on
whether she played it or not, but what is known is that after the download she didn't purge her download
folder later.
These developments were more than a decade ago and today in 2021 we are once again referring to her
indie game download. Years later a group of archivists seems to be happy with what she has done. She
had backed up the user’s profile and saved it. It was only then she wiped out the laptop. Some members of
a group by the name Omniarchive who call themselves internet archivist collectives were eyeing this
short Minecraft Alpha 1.1.1 for a long time now.
The reason for Alpha 1.1.1 not lasting long was because of the presence of a game-breaking graphics bug,
but that just does not bother these enthusiastic archivists. They simply wanted to find Alpha 1.1.1 and
within their community, it was a long-standing joke. The other alternative these community members
could have laid the hands on the Alpha 1.1.1 was in the form of a download for scant three and a half
hours. Many believed that after years of searching that it would never turn up.
It happened this way that a member of this community suddenly stumbled upon that old tweet of Luna
dated September 18th, 2010. One could say that luck was on their side and the rest was easy. A member
of the community helped Luna in the search of her hard drive archive folder but it did not yield any
results.
However as she checked an old YSB external drive, they stumbled upon archived profiles from her old
laptop. It was among them that she searched and located several files that included a minecraft.jar. The
dates on the jar file give significant leads and stated September 18, 2010, 21:53 hour’s local time. The
members of the community helped her to travel to the file's guts later and then she was pretty sure she'd
located 1.1.1. The members of the Omniarchive verified it later and it was found after a decade.