Over ten years after its release, a unique early version of Minecraft was believed to be lost. Minecraft Alpha 1.1.1 was released in September 2010 for the first time in Java Edition. It was only available for three hours. Gaming archive experts have discovered it.
There have been hundreds of versions of Minecraft throughout the years, and fans have meticulously saved and archived a lot of them for the sake of preservation. One version, Alpha 1.1.1, or Seecret Saturday was believed to be lost. While it introduced sneaking and fishing rods to Minecraft, it was discovered to have a game-breaking glitch that caused the screen to turn completely gray. It was replaced in a matter of hours by version 1.1.2.
The whole story of its discovery was shared on Twitter by the user @lunasorcery (via Kotaku), who found the lost Alpha 1.1.1. Luna clarifies that Alpha 1.1.1 was a common meme or holy treasure in Discord Omniarchive's Minecraft archiving Discord Omniarchive. None of them thought they would find it.
Someone found one of Luna's old tweets, and inquired about it. She finally discovered an archive of minecraft.jar that was the same date as Alpha 1.1.1's release on September 18, 2010. Luna verified that the file was Alpha 1.1.1 and shared the information on Omniarchive, which then went down.
So I made a post on the Omniarchive server and it's not overstatement to say that a few people noticed.
The reactions are enough to show how important this discovery is. Modded minecraft servers begin shaking.