Hello. I am Monninen, a Minecraft archivist. I'm from Omniarchive, a archival group that archives old Minecraft version jars. I decided to send this message into this forum because the original Minecraft thread from 2009 (version 0.0.11a) was released on the Tigsource forums.
About us:
We are a group of approximately a thousand people who like the old Minecraft and its features. A small portion of us searches for versions. We all like old Minecraft versions from Alpha, beta and pre-alpha.
Our search has not been useless, as we have already found, with the help of old players, even versions that were out for under a day. Even some that were out for a few minutes!
Versions of Minecraft:
Minecraft was created on 10th of May 2009, by the game maker Markus "Notch" Persson. After the creation of the game, the first phase of the development of the game started. It was called
Pre-Classic. Pre-Classic was never released for the public until 2013, when Notch's ex-wife Elin "Ez" Zetterstrand gave Mojang old versions of Minecraft. There is a small possibility of other people that Notch and Ez weren't the only ones who played Pre-Classic during 2009.
After Pre-Classic, came
Classic. When Pre-Classic was very early testing, after that week of development the first version was released for people who wanted to test it. This version was later named "Classic". After 0.0.9a that was a testing version and 0.0.10a that had a critical bug and was unplayable, Notch, after a week of making the game, released it here on Tigsource. This version was called 0.0.11a, and I know many tigsource members played it. After 0.0.11a was out for 3 days, Notch added liquids in 0.0.12a. Most likely due to bugs, many versions were released on the same day, up to 0.0.12a_03. The second large update was 0.0.14a, that added trees and ores. Again, it was probably not out for a long time, as many versions up until 0.0.14a_08 were released the same day.
In late may, Minecraft took a large step forward with update 0.0.15a. It added multiplayer and servers. A few versions later skins were added. Up until 0.0.19a, most versions from 0.0.15a added new commands. 0.0.19a, released in late June, added sponges and glass. Latee that day Notch also released a new update named 0.0.20a, that added wool, mushrooms, flowers and blocks of gold. The next few versions until 0.24 SURVIVAL TEST were bug fix versions.
Minecraft broke into two parts, Survival and Creative, when 0.24 SURVIVAL TEST was released on 1st of September 2009. Again, this first version was buggy and was out for about an hour, only because it took Notch time to fix all the bugs. Survival test added Creepers, pigs, skeletons, zombies and later spiders. It also added slabs, signs and arrows.
Survival test ended in 0.28, that was once again a Creative version. After a few versions released mostly to fix bugs, 0.30 was a really stable version with almost no bugs. It was on the Mojang site for years.
Classic is considered the most unknown phase in the history of Minecraft, for it was made for only one pers(s)on, for only a few thousand of people.
After 0.30, Notch started testing "Indev" meaning In Development. Because the community wanted to see these test versions, Notch released a new version of "0.31" almosy every week. These versions did not have name changes until 0.31 changed to "Indev". In Indev (and 0.31) a lot of new features were tested, for example torches and fire. Indev had mobs designed by an artist called "Dock", but Notch decided to add the old mobs back in early February 2010. After all the testing, it was time for infinite world testing. About Indev, we are missing about 10 versions.
Infdev (Infinite development) was the next phase. It was mostly about Notch trying to make infinite worlds work. It took months. Infdev added Infinite worlds, but also other features such as stairs, minecarts, doors after Notch got rid of game-crashing flowers and caves cutting trees into parts, causing giant lag.
After a few months of Infinite development, Notch finally released Alpha. As someone mentioned yesterday, Alpha was like an extension pack to Infdev. It added lots of new features, but new features do not come without new bugs. Some versions such as Alpha 1.1.1, known for the bug called the "gray screen" and Alpha 1.2.3_05, called "creeper mode" for a large amount of creepers spawning everywhere, caused Notch to get twitter-spammed. These two versions were out for 3 hours (a1.1.1) and 40 minutes (a1.2.3_05)
Beta we have already completely found, and to get more versions, we have launched something called 20by20. It means that our goal is to find 20 new unique versions before 2020. This is our index of all versions:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1OCxMNQLeZJi4BlKKwHx2OlzktKiLEwFXnmCrSdAFwYQ/htmlview#If you want to help us get really rare versions, you can give your jar files to us. It is not illegal, as Mojang has officially said it is fully legal to share jars and give them out. Of course you also need a Minecraft account to play old versions, too. If you know someone who could have jars, please ask them. It is important for us that no jar file will be lost.
Thank you and happy christmas,
Monninen,
Omniarchive.
Player
