Minecraft archivists have found their holy grail

Back 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 she downloaded it and didn’t purge her download folder later.

A decade later, Luna made a group of archivists very happy due to one thing: She backed up the user profiles and saved them before she later wiped the laptop. The members of Omniarchive, an internet archivist collective, have been after the short-lived Minecraft Alpha 1.1.1 for a long while now. Alpha 1.1.1 didn’t last long because it had a game-breaking graphics bug. That’s not what matters to the archivists, though: They want everything. Finding Alpha 1.1.1 was a long-running joke inside this Omniarchive community because it was only available for download for a scant three and a half hours. It seemed unlikely that, after years of searching, it would ever turn up.