Bite-Sized Game History: Rare Version of Minecraft Found, Ralph Baer’s Dollar Coin, and a Color-Changing Xbox

If you’re someone who plays a lot of video games, odds are you’re also someone who loves to collect things. A lot collectors like to gravitate towards high-priced retro games, but with billions of pieces of game-related ephemera out in the world, there are always other aisles to explore.

For this edition of Bite-Sized Game History, let’s look at three recent finds that were very exciting for collectors…

You can find a lot of dedicated video game historians on Twitter, and in 280 characters or less, they always manage to unearth some amazing artifacts. Bite-Sized Game History aims to collect some of the best stuff I find on the social media platform.

Minecraft has received hundreds of updates since the launch of the Classic Edition in 2009, and the good folks at the Omniarchive have made it their mission to preserve each and every one. This can be a challenge for a game that’s patched as often as Minecraft is, but sometimes the search can take you on a wild ride.

While several early builds still elude the group, Alpha 1.1.1 proved to be particularly tricky to track down, as it was available to download for just a little over three hours on September 18, 2010 before it was replaced by Alpha 1.1.2 due to a bug. Some members of the group thought it was lost forever, but earlier this year, it was found by Twitter user @lunasorcery.

The details of how the group found her and how she found the files on a discarded hard drive were recounted in this thread:

People love to say that “the Internet is forever,” but the truth is the bits and bytes that make up the modern Internet are incredibly fragile. And it’s only through the efforts of pack rats like @lunasorcery and the Omniarchive that we can preserve our digital past for future generations.

While digital archiving is a relatively recent phenomenon, the origins of coin collecting stretch back just a bit further. Historians have theorized that numismatics (people who study currency) have been hoarding coins for thousands of years, and that newly minted collectors likely got their start shortly after the first coins were used in Lydia in 700 BC.

This history-lesson-within-a-history-lesson brings us to today and the US Mint’s “American Innovation” series of dollar coins. Beginning in 2018, the series encouraged each state to submit a design that symbolizes “the willingness to explore, to discover, and to create one’s own destiny.” While some states chose to celebrate the invention of the telephone (Massachusetts) or the discovery of the polio vaccine (Pennsylvania), New Hampshire chose to honors Ralph Baer’s creation of the Magnavox Odyssey.

I think they made the right call and I love that it somewhat resembles an old arcade token:

The color green has been associated with the Xbox brand from the very beginning, and barring odd variants like the translucent green Halo Special Edition, collectors of old consoles know that Microsoft primarily used black plastic during production of the original Xbox console. But what if we’re all wrong?

You might want to sit down, because Benj Edwards recently set the world straight by pointing out that the original Xbox was actually a very dark green:

Collect yourself, but that’s all I’ve got for this edition of Bite-Sized Game History. Though you can always follow me on Twitter to stock your mental display shelves with more game trivia in the future.

Author: VGC | John

John Scalzo has been writing about video games since 2001, and he co-founded Warp Zoned in 2011. Growing out of his interest in game history, the launch of Video Game Canon followed in 2017.