IGoByLotsOfNames – The Search For Minecraft’s Long-Lost First Account

It is so obvious that the first person to play minecraft is the creator aka marcus person and his account which is named notch the video should end now now if you were to go outside and walk on the streets and went to a guy and talked to a guy

And ask the guy do you play minecraft there is a three percent chance that guy will say yes but if you asked him do you have the oldest account in minecraft there is a 99.999999999999999 percent chance he will say no but why bother trying to find the first minecraft account

Minecraft has one of the largest player bases in the entire gaming community with 200 million accounts and 140 million monthly players while roblox has 10 times the accounts the first roblox account is easily findable having the user id of one the oldest minecraft account is much trickier to find

However with each account being assigned a random string of characters as their id with the id having no connection to creation date many people have attempted to identify the first minecraft account but most of these attempts don’t really go anywhere there is no certainty on who exactly the oldest account belongs to

The debate has gone back and forth for 11 years with many different answers but today me and some of my friends will attempt to find with 100 certainty one of the rarest accounts in the gaming community the first minecraft account but in order to find the first minecraft

Account we first need to know how to check the creation date of any account this information however is quite secret there is a method to check the creation date of your own account using inspect element on your profile page but it doesn’t show how to check the creation date of other people’s accounts

So that was very sad in order to find the creation date of someone else’s account you must access the mojang database which is done by making a mojang api request luckily this is quite simple there is a vid made by x in a box which

Shows you how to make an api request to see the creation date of any account by using api.dashcon.tab mojang and then the user you want to check but the downside is that this only shows the creation date of the account the first minecraft account was most

Likely created on the same day as a bunch of other accounts so we will need to use a more specific api request a request that not only gets creation date but gets creation time to get that you need the profile name change request which gets the exact creation time the

Problem is that this command uses microsoft’s api which works differently from mojang’s api to access microsoft’s api you need a specific access token to get this access token you need to complete several extreme trials of patients first you log into microsoft azure this will generate a link that contains an authorization

Code then you take an oauth 2 client id and client secret along with the microsoft code and you can get a microsoft authentication token but that’s not all with this token you must request an xbox live token which will give you this with that token you can request an xsts token

Which will give this with the info in this you can authorize yourself with microsoft which gives you your minecraft access token with this you can now finally request data from microsoft’s minecraft database the thing is this process is quite gimmicky and complicated and i could not seem to get this to work

So i consulted a friend named jackson who had most of the developer tools needed to do this process and it failed because as it turned out this command doesn’t even let you check the creation times of other people’s accounts it only gives you your own data also this process only works with accounts

That have been migrated from mojang to microsoft so that was another failed method that was when another man called sully showed me a program from github created by jomo it uses a command called timestamp to uuid which is from mojang’s api it returns the uuid of the account holding the

Specified username at a certain timestamp but it can be used for something else the command returns 200 if the request was successful but it returned 204 if the username did not exist at that timestamp timestamps are in the form of unix time which uses exact seconds

Which is what i’m looking for the way the program works is that it first tests if the account existed at 2016 which is between today and 2011. if it returns 200 that means the account was created earlier than 2016. if it returns 204 which means account didn’t exist back then

It means the account was created after 2016. so let’s say the first check returns 200 it then checks if the account existed between 2011 and 2016 which is around 2013. if it returns 204 it means the account did not exist at 2013 so it checks if the account existed between 2013 and 2016

And so on after 27 checks it will find the exact second the account is created there are several catches however the program only checks for dates past january 2010 which is six months after minecraft accounts were introduced so i decided to change the code so it would check dates after may 21

2009 12 a.m which was around the time and date that accounts were introduced not only that but the mojang api is very buggy and can be inaccurate by several years it glitches if you change your name and it just randomly spazzes out but i decided to try it anyways after

Copying and pasting the code into node.js and entering notch it returns 1.24 billion converting this timestamp to date and time returns may 22nd 2009 12 a.m exactly at gmt time i then tried entering my own name the name easy and some others according to the program all these accounts were created at the

Exact time and date which was obviously not true i then looked at the github page and saw that other users faced the same issue they were talking about a change to the mojang api that broke the code after taking a look at the mojang api the suspicions were confirmed

Since november of 2020 no matter what timestamp you provided the api would always return 200 meaning the command is always successful you could enter 200 a.d and the api would say that your minecraft account existed during that time the github program was basically made useless now

There were no other methods that i could use to track down the exact time and date of an account creation we had to resort to just date so i went back to the x in a box method which as it turned out was also very buggy due to recent changes to mojang’s api

It did work for some accounts though i tried it for some og names notch easy bob okay however all of these names returned the same creation date of january 10 2010. this creation date makes sense as these are very og names but then i realized something these creation dates actually make no sense

First of all it’s very unlikely that all four of these accounts were made on the same day second of all january 10 2010 is around the time minecraft hit 100 000 registered accounts you’re telling me that 100 000 people registered and not a single one of them had the idea of sniping

These names before that date these og accounts had to be made before january 10th of 2010. january 10th of 2010 must have been the oldest date that the mojang api can go that means that using the mojang or microsoft api to find the oldest minecraft account is pointless minecraft accounts were first introduced

In may of 2009 six months before the mojang api began tracking creation dates all dates before 2010 will just show up as january 2010. the past few days of research were gone and it was a bit of a trolled moment I could have just went along with ending the vid here and saying the notch had the oldest minecraft account while this may be possible there is no proof it could be anyone i could not sleep at night thinking about it what started off as a silly joke video

Project had evolved into a serious search effort by me so it was time for another method to track down the oldest minecraft account that didn’t involve the api speaking of api while it stands for application programming interface it also stands for please subscribe our new sub

Goal is x cubed where x is our current sub count which is 2 quadrillion can we reach this anyways back to the vid i went onto the official minecraft game pedia and went to the minecraft timeline maybe it could be some help after going to may 2009 the time that accounts were first

Introduced i found two tumblr post links on tumblr on may of 2009 around the time that minecraft accounts were first released notch released the links to the minecraft account registration page and the minecraft forums as well both of these links take you to the present day minecraft homepage

But by using the wayback machine you can see what these links used to take you to there are hundreds of archives dating back around 2009 to 2010 most of them being archives donated to the wayback machine by alexa internet scrawling services and these archives had lots of interesting info

I started off on the minecraft forums archive even though the forums still exists today there was an older much slower version of the forums hosted by php as it turned out in 2004 the minecraft forums used to be the forums for another game developed by notch and his friend worm

Called worm online which was repurposed to the minecraft forums in 2009. the earliest archives show the latest registered member but that’s just forum accounts not actual minecraft accounts i tried to access the forum posts by clicking on the minecraft link but instead of taking me to the posts it

Redirected me to the mojang web page where i stumbled upon hundreds of archived pages now this is a bit of an interesting website the first archive dates back to 2004 which has a broken image page it then becomes a website with the mojang specifications logo and a list of some old mojang members

A flash game that no longer works and then the website is gone replaced by hi this is mojang.com after that are some 404 errors and then an interesting short story written by notch which gets deleted later due to its disturbing nature finally it becomes the official mojang website after minecraft development begins

While this is interesting there were no leads on the oldest account in minecraft so the old minecraft forums and mojang website were bust the forums still exist today so i went there the new minecraft forums were a replacement for the old forums due to the old forums being quite bad

Now you may be asking why am i looking through these because it is said that notch reads through these posts and if i was lucky enough these forums could have someone wondering who the first account was and maybe notch would have an answer so i searched around these forums

There was nothing then i decided to go to the oldest posts on the forums and look around there nothing here either i tried searching for posts made by notch but it returned nothing the forums did not have many useful leads and i was a bit doubtful about the

Source so i decided to check the old minecraft home page which had two archives around from 2009 this was back when minecraft was a browser game you could play for free and back when minecraft accounts required you to log in using username instead of email the oldest minecraft account made on

This website would still work the same as an average mojang account today even after many migrations and price changes and so on a lot of these og minecraft accounts have been deleted on february of 2015 due to them being old accounts that did not upgrade to premium which is currently the normal account

Type which explains why a lot of the og names today have been sniped on february of 2015. but anyways back to minecraft.net after going through the two archives on 2009 i did not find much info except for a link to notch’s dev blog which i saved for checking out later

There was also a list of servers but this was not really useful i moved up to 2010 and found several interesting archived links unfortunately the more stats link did not give much useful info so i went to the community link which contains his dev blog several minecraft

Forums and some irc channels i started off on the forums the world of minecraft forums still exists today so i went there and searched up oldest minecraft account nothing was found the same could be said for the other community forums however the community tab showed two ircs per tags

Esper is kind of like discord except there is only one server with hundreds of text channels and you connect to one text channel specifically after connecting to the minecraft channel i found out that messages aren’t archived you could not look at other people’s conversations it was useless

So i went back to the archived home page going back to the minecraft homepage and going forward in time the communities and posts got more and more irrelevant to the search for minecraft’s oldest account although i did find an interesting post about how minecraft.net almost got permanently deleted due to

Notch going on vacation while his credit card ran out so far over the past few days there had only been dead ends and not many leads but now it was time to look at the links i set aside notches developer block notches developer blog as it turned out

Was the tumblr page i skimmed over earlier in the vid but now i decided to take a closer look his page still has all of his original posts today and i had an idea there might be a chance that he posted the first account ever created on his tumblr page

Or there may be a few other leads if not i would go back to searching the internet archives so i decided to scroll all the way down on tumblr while finding some interesting posts along the way including a post where he talks about meeting c418 in real life

And saying that he will go far after reaching the post where he talks about minecraft account registration i took a look at the posts that came after here’s what i found minecraft used to have a level system by registering your account you can save the world you build in the game

As levels these levels can then be accessed by anyone else by typing your username and the level id in the minecraft.net link not released a level but accessing this link in the wayback machine will just give a blank screen on june of 2009 several screenshots of minecraft skins were posted

And test accounts used for the skins named test van and mezzo it was a bit of a stretch since this was a few weeks after minecraft accounts were introduced so i ignored it a few weeks after that notch links one of the oldest vids of minecraft multiplayer containing several of the most og

Accounts out there and then the name of the 100 000 player to register is published notch says that while he does not keep track of the registration number he keeps track of login times and dates to find the 100 000th account he just sorted the database by login times

And searched for the 100 000th account created which was just vice 3d this implies that the other 99999 accounts are also in the database which includes the first account ever created i’m assuming that this data is only available to notch as the public mojang api only started to

Keep track of creation dates on january 10 2010 if all else fails only notch would know who the first account was but even this is doubtful as most of the oldest accounts have been purged due to them not being premium after going further through his tumblr

Page i could not find much to support the search while we had found a lot of useful info so far and had gotten rid of a lot of dead ends there was still a lot of research to do up until now in this vid i had avoided simply googling the oldest account

As i had done it before and did not find anything useful but i decided to try it again I googled oldest minecraft account not expecting to find anything helpful one of the first things that popped up was the only other person then me to ask the question who was the first person to buy minecraft except i was looking for the first registered account

Not the first person to buy the game so the google search continued i went several pages out clicking on several links only to be met with irrelevant information and then something caught my eye an article written on pc gamer about the first moments of minecraft so i decided to read through it

And i found something interesting this article had a link to one of the first appearances of minecraft on the internet it was a thread started on may 17 2009 on a website called tig source which is where indie developers can find play testers for their game

I had not heard of this thread before and my interest was peaked so i went there and in this thread was the link to the minecraft.net browser game here we find the first person to test the game other than notch whose name was scht however these forum posts were made a

Few days before you could register an account so this isn’t the first account registered this thread extends for about 100 pages up until 2017. i decided to look through these pages until i found the posts that corresponded with the time that accounts were first introduced these were the first people who knew

About minecraft so they would probably follow along with the project and be the first to sign up eventually as the thread continues i found several relics of the past the first minecraft screenshot ever taken which was a picture of a stone bridge the first pixel art and quite possibly the first ever

Drawn in minecraft but that’s a topic for another vid i had a pretty good feeling that this thread would give me the info i needed and i was right on may of 22 he announced level saving on the thread a day after accounts could be made

The next post made by nick eka said that he was registering now this is one of the first confirmed people to register but forum usernames are not the same as in-game user names due to the fact that you needed to have an account to save minecraft levels beyond this point

It’s safe to assume that all of these people with levels were registered users and if you remember level links contained usernames of registered accounts after someone asked everybody to share their saved levels level links began to be shared all over the place among these levels were ones made by solix scamper sport dragoon

Zion jai guru evil ville omidius baldyro and there’s way more although they came way later while these leads are promising all these accounts were made over a day after notch announced that you could register minecraft accounts on his tumblr page and this previous announcement did not go unnoticed

After further inspection i noticed this thing called notes which are basically replies and reactions to the post and i found two people reacted to this tumblr announcement smitty black and let’s play minecraft while these may look like the first people to know about account registration i was not fooled that easily let’s play

Minecraft only replied in 2018 and smitty black’s tumblr account had its first post in 2011 although it might have been created earlier smitty black could potentially be the first person to know about account registration besides notch even though it was not possible to find the time and date that smitty black’s

Blog was created it was possible to find the timestamp when he reacted to notch announcing account registration using the tumblr api if it was indeed on the same time and date as the post and not on 2011 then smitty black will be confirmed as one of the most og accounts

So to access the tumblr api and do whatever this is i got an api key went to postman.com found the post id of the announcement with inspect element took notch’s blog id smashed it all together and the result smitty black only reacted on 2011. anyways back to the forum thread going

On to minecraft.net on may 21st would ask you to register but nobody on the forums at that date said they registered maybe they did make accounts but we do not know plus registration was only optional at that time and interestingly notch’s account was only created on may 22nd at the earliest

When he released his own level which required an account to release since this threat is one of the first appearances of minecraft on the internet these people were the only people to know about the game besides whoever was following notch’s tumblr page at that time and nobody else the tumblr page and

Forum thread are separate notch announced account registration on tumblr but not on the forum thread notch did not post his tumblr page on the forum thread so the only way to find it was to go on to minecraft.net and to click on the developer blog link

And it is unsure how many people found it and were aware of account registration before the thread members so using the same tumblr api method from earlier i decided to go look at notch’s older tumblr posts from before account registration i was going to try to find those who were

Potentially the first to stumble upon his blog and might be the first to find out about account registration by finding whoever reacted to notch’s posts on 2009 on notch’s first post the first to react was on april 2011. on the third post it was december 2010 after searching several other posts

Results have been found on this post where he asked if he should add blood to the game two guys by the name of lemal boat and pixel scum replied on may 19 2009 on another post about health and food pixel scum and lemal boat returned along with some new guys

It’s safe to assume that these were followers of notch on tumblr and were checking out every post he sent they were also probably the first to find the account registration announcement this time g threat daidoji jgggg john mead mudkeeps and everyone up until this point replied

Between may 20 and may 22nd of 2009 and that’s basically all the confirmed tumblr users who came before may 21st so let’s recap the oldest possible accounts so far are notch nikica scamper the level sharers the first forum posters on may 21st and the people who were aware of project

Such as those following notch’s tumblr page in the forum thread there were no other sources to look through this was it we had gone through everything all the sources all the archives everything that could be useful now it was time for the next step while that was the general group of

People i could narrow it down to after searching through all of the archived resources and stuff that was relevant to this search it was time to try to narrow it down further notch could potentially be the first account but that is unconfirmed the earliest proof of his account

Existing is on may 22nd 2009. the first confirmed registered person was nikki saying he would register just four minutes after level saving was introduced but we do not know his ign as he never posted any levels the first registered person besides notch to post on the thread

Whose ign we know is tyrion who went by the ign of scamper while this ign still exists today it is unknown if the original scamper account was purged and if this is a new person who sniped the username so basically we have scamper notch and nikita we are sure have registered there are

Many other accounts with known igns but they started showing up hours after scamper baldyro and solix were the second and third people whose igns we know that showed up on the thread in what order they registered however is unknown next we have other possibilities that are not as likely

But are still possible while scamper has certainly registered on may 22nd he has posted on may 21 as well which was when registering was optional and there was not much of an incentive to register by a slim chance scampers account might be older than notch keyword slim made even slimmer by

The 11 other people who posted during may 21st their forum names are they use the same account names as forum names is unknown next we have people who are aware of minecraft’s existence who might have been following along with notch’s tumblr page in the forum thread

We have no clue what their igns are or if they even registered but they are these people feel free to pause the vid to read these names finally we have the people who know it exists but do not say anything about it posting nothing on the forums and reacting to nothing

If i were to guess i’d say there were around 100 people who knew about minecraft up until may 21 2009 since we are just going by forum post times and that it is nearly impossible to check the creation dates of these minecraft accounts due to most of them being purged

Some of these igns being sniped and the mojang api only going back to 2010 there is no definite way to list these people in order of when they created their accounts so even though we know which group of people was the most likely to be first there is no definite confirmation of who

Was really the first to sign up for an account it is a bit disappointing but it is what it is no it is not what it is it’s not over just yet there are still a few ways to continue the search that i have not gotten to yet

While the mojang api does not reach back far enough it is possible that notch still has his database of the creation times of the first 100k people which can be used to find the first account ever created whether it even still exists today or how to access it

Is unknown if you have any info on the oldest account feel free to share it with the comment section i will be moving on to other projects for now but if there are enough new leads a sequel might be made and maybe the oldest account will be found after all

So stay tuned and subscribe the first account ever created in minecraft may still be a mystery but we got pretty close to solving it keyword we not me special thanks to jackson and sully for helping in beginning this search and to the channel member supporting this aforementioned channel

If you want to watch other things click on the video box thingies here but anyways that’s all for now goodbye thanks for watching goodbye that’s all for now but anyways goodbye