Minecraft has come a long way from its initial Java builds, and frankly speaking there is very little reason for most of the Minecraft player base to ever go back and play on said versions. Besides bugs and lack of quality of life features, however, there is still merit to having versions of software at different points in time available for download. And for the archivists who love this kind of stuff, they finally hit gold—a version of Minecraft that was only available for download for less than four hours back in 2010.
Per Kotaku, back when Minecraft was still in Alpha stages, Mojang pushed out a 1.1.1 update but quickly pulled it after it was discovered that an issue could lead players to a grey screen.
The original Java build of Minecraft was released back in 2009 and then went through multiple stages of development and release. In 2010 the game was in its alpha stage and updates were frequent and sometimes released with no warning. These secret updates were usually dropped on Fridays. However, on September 18, 2010, a secret update was released on Saturday. This was the 1.1.1 update and while it introduced some important things, like fishing rods and ducking, it also added a nasty bug that could lead to a grey screen. So Mojang fixed the bug and quickly updated the game. Very quickly in fact. According to Minecraft experts and archivists, alpha 1.1.1 was only available to download for 3 hours and 25 minutes. After that 1.1.2 was released, which fixed the bug.
Zack Zweizen at Kotaku.com
Since it was up for such a short period of time and because very few people wanted to keep a broken version of their favourite game around, it quickly became a rare piece of Minecraft history. And it was only until recently that someone was able to find the elusive 1.1.1 build sitting on an old external hard drive. Consider giving the full article a read if you are interested in finding out more about the discovery. Who knows, maybe it might be worth hoarding everything and anything digital.
Source: Kotaku.com
