My First Minecraft Experience: PCGamer 2011 Demo Disc

I’ve always known my first Minecraft experience was playing some sort of PC demo version and then later getting the full game after thoroughly convincing my family Minecraft was not a virus that would take their debit card money, but I was not expecting to get gutpunched today that this was a 2011 PCGamer demo disc of all things!!!!!!!

I’ve always assumed my whole life it was the trial version you got off the Minecraft website and that I got it around 2012 or so, but this demo has the exact seed I remember with an elevated chest from the spawn, it being a double chest , there being a greeting sign, an ocean being behind you , there being these greeting cards every in-game day helping you figure out the game…

Truly amazed here that this is what I had!!! I was NOT a magazine kid but I just so happened to just be gifted PCGamer magazines every once and a while that I’d just kinda glance through- no real nostalgia for them but I’m surprised this is how I got my hands on the game!!! I weirdly do not remember the PCGamer retextured cows that’s a very awesome change I think I’m gonna forever have in my texture packs now.

Sadly I do not remember anything about the world I made within that time. I remember knowing already how to craft a pickaxe from Yogscast videos and thinking crafting was so cool, but that’s about it.

Back then I thought all the mods I saw were actually in the game and I remember in the full release trying to craft the wheel from the airship mod and being just so utterly heartbroken to find out what a mod was.

This is finally getting me to remember that I did actually have a good solid amount of hours in Minecraft on PC before Xbox consumed like 99% of my total playtime. If only I remembered what my old Mojang account name was!!!

Update: I managed to dig out the old PC I played the game on. Thing is full of viruses but I sadly don’t have a donor PC to safely extract the files from. Best Buy has file transfer services for $99 which holy hell that’s way too much. I will figure out some way to extract the files soon without turning the PC on and risking things getting erased.

In other news, the reason I even discovered this stuff was because I was looking for Minecraft textures to use as emojis on here and found the PCGamer cow texture. Have some fun Minecraft emojis from beta textures!