Remember: In Minecraft utility clients, "old" does not mean "vintage collectible." It almost always means "unpatched backdoor."

However, during 2021, the open-source nature of Meteor allowed for unofficial "backports." Several GitHub forks and third-party developers took the Meteor source code and recompiled it for 1.8.9. These versions were often labeled "Meteor Client 1.8.9" and circulated on Discord servers, YouTube videos, and questionable file-hosting sites.

Note: The following steps describe how users in 2021 would have sourced legitimate legacy forks. Direct download links from that year are now defunct or dangerous. Do not run unknown .jar files.

If you are archiving old software, here is how to verify a legitimate (albeit unofficial) build: