When it comes to video game preservation, there is a ton of groups out there that are actively searching for any content that can be uncovered and preserved. It’s quite the task but it’s quite a bit of ordeal for fans of massive franchises when an early build of a game is uncovered or scrapped projects surfacing that highlight just what the studio had originally planned. For instance, Minecraft is such a massively popular game that you would think that it’s an immense success, all of the past content and builds would have been handled with care and preserved already.
That wasn’t the case as it was uncovered an early build of a game from an old USB drive. The story goes that the Minecraft 1.1.1 version was a quickly patched game. Originally, the version hit the market back in September of 2010 where the game was quickly found to be problematic for plenty of players. A bug surfaced that forced the game to hit a grey screen which the developers were able to rectify in just a matter of hours. When later that day a patch was released putting the game in 1.1.2 which most probably didn’t think much of anything about 1.1.1 afterward.
However, a group by the name of Omniarchive has been trying to uncover this build for years. What’s even more interesting was how the group managed to get a build of the game. It was uncovered a user tweeting about the Minecraft update back in 2010 which prompted them to reach out to see if by chance this individual still had the files for the old Minecraft 1.1.1 build.
After scavenging around and remembering that they had a backup USB flash drive for files, they found that there was a build of Minecraft that they were after. It’s quite a surprise to see the build to be considered lost for nearly a decade was uncovered by an old USB drive which was found by a Minecraft player from when the game build first came out into the marketplace.
Source: Rock Paper Shotgun, Twitter
