Minecraft was first worked on by Notch sometime in 2009, making the game five years old. Most of that time it was in Beta and Alpha, with a small feature set and limited gameplay. But recently the Minecraft Launcher has added support for running nearly every release of Minecraft, including an alpha release that never saw the light of day. This version, named 'old-alpha rd-20090515' by the launcher, is the oldest version of Minecraft that can be played. Thanks to the efforts of Notch, who hasn't done much Minecraft development recently, the version was dug up and uploaded for play.The game is from May 15th, 2009 as noted in the title. We opened the game jar open to have a peek at the dates, and the Minecraft player skin dates back even farther to April 5th, 2009. But what about the actual game? Well, upon starting you will be greeted not with a title screen, but a world. There's not much you can do beyond walking around and spawning other people by pressing 'G', but it's fun none the less. There's no graphics options (or any options for that matter), and the resolution is stuck at a 1024x768 window. We even extracted the textures file, and there's not much to it:
It really shows how far Minecraft has come. From a simple idea of building blocks in a game to a full survival/creative/multiplayer experience. It's amazing.