Minecraft archivists have found their holy grail
In September 2010, a woman named Luna downloaded the latest version of an indie game, an alpha called Minecraft, to her laptop. She was excited, so she tweeted about it: “Oooooohhhhhhh MineCraft update!” . Who knows if she played it. All we know now is that he downloaded it and didn’t download his download folder afterwards.
A decade later, Luna made a group of archivists very happy because of one thing: She backed up user profiles and saved them before wiping the laptop. The members of Omniarchive, a collective of archivists on the Internet, have recently been Minecraft Alpha 1.1.1. Alpha 1.1.1 didn’t last long because it had a graphical game-breaking bug. It’s not what matters to archivists, though: They want everything. Finding Alpha 1.1.1 was a long-term joke in this Omniarchy community because it was only available for download for a while. three and a half hours. It seemed unlikely that, after years of research, he would ever appear.
Then a member found Luna’s September 18, 2010 tweet about the new MineCraft update.
So let’s talk about video game preservation, data collection and Minecraft. (🧵 thread)June 26, 2021
The rest, as they say, is history. Luna dug into the hard drive’s archive folder, to no avail, but checked an old external USB drive. There were, a pile of profiles archived from his old laptop, and in them I searched and found some files that included a minecraft.jar-kids, yes, Minecraft was once a game made in Java, no, I can’t explain that now. This .jar file was from September 18, 2010, at 9:53 PM local time. A quick trip into the fugitive’s gut afterwards and Luna was pretty sure she had found 1.1.1, which the Omniarchy community verified later.
“You will literally be a legend in this servant,” he said a commenter on the connected Discord server.
Oh, and it turns out it’s not the only rare construction of Luna. It also had a .jar of c0.29_01, which the archivists had only in part a modded download. They had a clean up now, though, all pushed to archive.org.
Moral of the story: Never Eliminate Anything. (They also help the archivists, they are doing important work)June 26, 2021
Sweet found, Kotaku.
