Minecraft Alpha 1.0.16 Versions

On the 1st of August, 2021 3 videos were published to an unremarkable YouTube channel called Minecraft Alpha 1.0.16 Versions. Those three videos may look like normal Minecraft Alpha gameplay at first glance, but dig a little bit deeper, and you find yourself at the entrance to a rabbit hole, known as AlphaVer.
It all started back in 2010, when a player under the nickname xorcist6898 got unknowingly accepted as a playtester for a closed branch of Minecraft, titled "16.05". After exploring the jars for some time, they start encountering weird things, such as their builds vanishing, unnamed players joining their world and iron doors that appear out of thin air. They share the jar of one of the versions (Alpha 1.0.16.05_06) with their friend, dj_p155, which leads to both players having their accounts "temporarily suspended from Online play". dj_p155 gets a hold of xorcist6898's account. After some time, xorcist6898 gets unbanned and encounters another feature of the new versions - a server, that connects worlds of all players of those versions and allows travelling between them. While trespassing through the halls of the server, he briefly sees the lead developer of the closed branch - [0]. Upon exiting the server, xorcist6898 starts a new world, which he continues playing even after the development of the branch was stopped due to the disbandment of the team.
On May 5th, 2015, another user from the group, Vivivern, stumbles upon a YouTube video, featuring a strange structure that has spawned naturally in a Minecraft Pocket Edition 0.9.0 alpha build 1 world. The same structure was last seen in Alpha 1.0.16.04, which, apparently, is a project codenamed [RD], that the closed 16.05 branch was taking inspiration from.
During 2020's the team behind the channel managed not only recover recoordings of those events, but also some of the versions that were either planned to be shown at conferences like E3, or were made for Quality Assurance playtesting. The versions are available for download through links in some of the videos' descriptions. One of the versions, though, was a bit different from others. During the period from November 2nd, 2021 to May 26th, 2022, some of the recruiters (aka Shadow Players) have consistently been joining one of the community servers for the version. During the encounters, cryptic messages were sent. Some examples are:
* walk upon derelicthalls (<> Sighting)
* 1 theseblocksarefake 2 theyarenotofnature 3 theyarespecialcreations 4 artifical (artificery Sighting)
* 3 thestaircasetoknowledge (construction & obstruction Sighting)
Some of the messages, despite seeming to be cryptic, have a clear meaning. Meaning of others was understood only with the ARG's development. Yet a bunch of messages remain undeciphered to this day. 
After the 13th sighting, the encounters stopped. And while the team continued to recover more and more footage of more versions and features, it seemed like there will be no further interaction with the audience. Although, there was a community post on July 8th, 2022, when the team was contacted by [3] and managed to publish the second volume of the branch's OST. But on October 8th, 2022, the gamerunners resumed the interactions, this time via the Discord server of RetroGamingNow (one of YouTubers, who has covered the ARG). The event got later called "The Dev Raid Incident". A lot of questions were answered that day, yet twice as much were born. From that day on, one can still occasionally spot some of the gamerunners online. 
----The ARG continues. New mysteries arise to this day. What was the 16.06 branch? How did malevolent architecture appear in an MCPE build 3 years after the development was ceased? What is the meaning of the paintings? Who were the 16.05 developers to Mojang? These questions are yet to be answered.
Category:ARG
Category:Versions