Many know of the infamous Minecraft entity "Entity 303", an old tale of a Herobrine wannabe. Many also know that that Entity is pure and utter bullshit. Of course, this does not leave the world of Minecraft free of such terrors, all sunshine and rainbows. No, in the creation of Minecraft, an entity much worse than conceivable came to be. And I know of this story, because my father worked at Mojang.
Around the time Minecraft's structure was just being created, 2010, Indev, Infdev, Alpha, there were talks going around the small staff at Mojang at the time of including a major enemy in Minecraft, worse than spiders, worse than creepers, something that would truly challenge the player or terrify them. Something humanlike, but in the uncanny valley. This is where the project codenamed "Annihilation" came to be. Annihilation itself started out as a few useless zeroes hidden in the code of early Minecraft versions, both as an easter egg and as a future reference for where the developers would write code for the entity.
Work on Annihilation began mid-Beta Minecraft, where features really began pumping into the game. The skin for the entity was procedurally generated, much like a Minecraft world, using grayscale colors and shades of red. The skin that came out of this computation looked nothing like a human, yet was pasted onto the Steve model. At first, the entity was given the not-so-terrifying AI of a zombie, but over time, Mojang workers adapted the zombie AI into something more like the Enderman AI we see today, not terrifying but incredibly unnerving.
The entity was being distributed behind-the-scene in Minecraft versions now, but of course was not able to be spawned using any stock game feature (spawn eggs wouldn't exist until after beta and release 1.0). The only way the entity could spawn was if exactly 8 zeroes were entered as the seed. Annihilation could only spawn at a specific coordinate in this "zero world". Even I did not discover what that coordinate was.
As Beta progressed, and as Mojang began to write out the official story of Minecraft, as it would be in 1.0, the staff locked the code of Annihilation entirely while working on features such as The End and the dragon that inhabits it, saving the entity for a future post-release update. The main developer of Annihilation, my father, noticed that the complex Java code of Annihilation had reverted to just zeroes in it's place, yet the entity would still spawn in a zero world at it's coordinates as intended in a test environment.
Annihilation was left almost abandoned following the release of Minecraft, where Mojang took a little break themselves from Minecraft, knowing their game had finally reached it's moment. However, in the rush to release Minecraft at Minecon 2011, no one in the developing team found the bug in the code that allowed Annihilation to merge itself into the main branch of Minecraft's code, giving it access to every bit and byte of the game.
Upon returning to their desks at Mojang office, the Minecraft team noticed that the code of Minecraft, which was a specific number set at Release, had grown exponentially in their absence. My father took a peek at the code he had written, and noticed that Annihilation had completely overhauled it's own code, even extending it using Minecraft's procedural generation engine and grabbing bits from other AI's code. When he tried to edit this code, it would immediately revert to zeroes and cause an error in the environment, before going back to Java code once again.
There was no one to blame for Annihilation going out of their hands. The Mojang office had been locked with the room empty before Minecon. My father was commanded to cease work on Annihilation until further notice, only attempting to find ways to remove its code from the game. Mojang couldn't afford to release versions of Minecraft with Annihilation's unplanned release, so Jeb took a few steps to at least lock the code of Annihilation so that it couldn't be ran in a Minecraft environment.
To the Mojang staff's relief, they were able to release Minecraft 1.1, the update that added spawn eggs, without any code for an Annihilation spawn egg, furthering their retention of Annihilation from the public. One night, however, Notch himself discovered the lie that would cause my father to lose his job. According to my father, Annihilation had plugged itself into my father's Mojang user, and edited the code for it's name, changing it to zeroes, making it look like he was the one to attempt to bring Annihilation back. Notch would not take any bullshit, and fired my father, removing him from the Mojang staff.
YOU ARE READING
forbidden demonic arcane
Fantasy"everything that can be read and known cannot be known to those who do not know how to understand it is the secret of the Universe everything I'm going to teach here needs to be understood and if you try to do it you need patience because it will ta...