ALPHA STRIKE

MINECRAFT archivists finally uncover the rarest known build of the game

- Nat Clayton

One woman’s habit of never deleting files may have made her a legend in the Minecraft archival scene, after it was discovered she was still holding onto an ultra-rare piece of the game’s history.

In 2010, Minecraft was still in alpha, updating on an almost weekly basis as the game found its feet. One of these builds, Alpha 1.1.1, added fishing rods and ducking, but also came with a nasty bug that crashed the game with a gray screen. A mere 3.25 hours later, that issue would be remedied by Alpha 1.1.2. Between its brief lifespan and buggy release, the previous patch was all but forgotten. Not so by Minecraft’s archival scene though. Blocky historians have spent years trying to account for every part of Minecraft’s development history, and Alpha 1.1.1 was one pain point. Few people downloaded it, fewer still kept it around given its crashing habit.