The story of my first Minecraft account

In classic Redstone fashion, I go on a ton of tangents throughout this post. This is mostly just me rambling about my life at this point but oh well.

This story begins sometime in the mid 2000s... I had a friend at the time, who really wasn't a friend by choice, but a friend in that my mom was dating his dad and they forced us to always hang out since we were the same age. This friend had his ups and his downs. It was fun playing sports with him, but when it came to card games and video games, he was extremely pretentious. Any time I wanted to show off Pokemon or Yu-Gi-Oh cards that I had pulled from packs or found at garage sales, he would always kill my excitement by pointing out that the card I liked wasn't very valuable, and/or wasn't competitively viable. He also really wanted to be as annoying as humanely possible when it came to video games. Unironically, he had been a "PC master race" type guy since the age of 7. Frequently I had friends over and we would all playing Mario Kart, sports games, or various fighting games on a console. Any time we invited him to play with us, he'd just respond with "I prefer to play real games" as he silently played some pixelated war game on CD on his dad's laptop. Every now and then, he'd try to convince me to buy some of these games he played, but none ever seemed too interesting to me.

In 2009, things changed a bit... My friend had been pretty into Wurm Online, but I never dared to touch it. One of the developers of this game happened to be Markus Perrson, or as you know him best, "Notch". As Notch began work on what would go on to become Minecraft, my friend kept very close tabs on what he was doing, and my friend was constantly hyping up Notch's current project as something that would "change gaming forever". Needless to say, I was quite skeptical and kept brushing off his comments. As YouTube videos and more pictures of the game began to pop up through 2009, my friend made sure I saw every one and did his best to get me excited about the game, but I never broke.

While I was at his dad's house around Christmas time, he revealed to me one of his Christmas gifts would be a Minecraft account for me and him. At the time, Minecraft cost $7.99 USD, so the game basically took the place of stocking stuffers for us. Instead of a couple packs of cards and some candy like I usually got, I instead got a game I wanted nothing to do with (as well as some candy). To appease him and our families, I tried playing it for a few hours with him, me on his dad's home office computer, and him right next to me on his laptop. I didn't understand anything about the game, and quite frankly found the game extremely frustrating and stupid at the time.

Throughout 2010, I tried playing the game every now and then, but could just never get it into it. As I was still brushing the game off, tons of changes were being made. In October, the nether was added, which initially got me to play the game a bit more, but still not enough to get me into it. Heading into Christmas of 2010, Minecraft formally entered into their "beta" phase. A few of my friends I had made at this point in 7th grade ended up getting Minecraft this Christmas, which officially began my time of caring about the game. We intentionally started having sleepovers at one of my elementary school friend's houses just because his family had two computers in their office, meaning at least two of us could be playing Minecraft at the same time.

Once the summer of 2011 hit, my life really began to evaporate. My mom had just bought our first home officer computer for the house, and I spent way too long figuring out how to setup and moderately configure the server so that my friends would be able to join. With us now being able to play together whether we were physically together or not, my friends and I started spending a significant chunk of our time playing Minecraft.

While all of this was all going on, I had also got extremely into YouTube. In 2009, me, my two brothers, and a various slew of our friends had put together our first YouTube channel (there's some seriously painful cringe in here, I'm sorry if anyone actually checks this out). Any time I wasn't playing sports, playing games, or doing school stuff, I was probably searching through the deeps of YouTube. One of my favorite types of videos to watch tended to be Call of Duty videos, which lead to me finding most of the YouTubers I still watch to this day. I found prosDONTtalkSHIT (now known as CaptainSparklez), Muzzafuzza, Syndicate, Jericho, and various other creators. Some have gone on to become amazing creators, others had more... controversial situations for various reasons... *cough cough* Tmartn, Whiteboy7thst, xJawz *cough cough*.

With creators like Syndicate and Yogscast playing Minecraft on YouTube since 2010, the idea of being a "Minecraft YouTuber" became more and more a possibility in my mind.

By 2011, I decided I wanted to be a famous Minecraft YouTuber. On August 4th, 2011, the day before my birthday, I created the account you see today, RedstoneTrails. At this time, Minecraft was somewhere around $15-$20 USD. You could not change your Minecraft name, so if you wanted a different name you had to buy a new account. If it were still $8, I probably would've been able to convince my mom to buy it, but with it now being rather "expensive" relative to my family, I made it a birthday wish, and my dad ended up being the one to claim that gift off my list. Shortly after returning to my mom's house, I began the process of starting my YouTube career. I made a new channel, created a real crappy avatar, banner, and intro GIF for videos.

After my mom watched me nearly fail the first semester of 8th grade due to me not doing any homework or projects, she took away our computer, and stored it at my grandpa's house. This effectively ended my Minecraft YouTube career. Unfortunately for all of us, I deleted all of those videos and the channel after getting the computer back out of fear of kids at school making fun of me, and realizing my mom wouldn't let me spend the time needed to build a meaningful YouTube presence.

Even though my YouTube dreams had been crushed, I still liked the username I had made, and RedstoneTrails became my main Minecraft account to this day. Over this duration, I had also lost the login credentials to my original Minecraft account, and the email tied to it, but didn't really care too much about that loss.

In 2017, as I was getting ready to move into my first apartment, I did a lot of cleaning through my mom's garage and attic figuring out which things I wanted to junk and which I wanted to take with me. Among those things, I also happened to find a piece of paper that said "Minecraft" along with a password. I tested it out with my old username, and it worked! I migrated my account to a Mojang account, setup to one of my newer school emails, and made sure I had all of the login information saved.

I never really did anything with the account after I migrated it, but still felt better knowing I still had it around. Occasionally I'd let friends use the account if they were over and wanted to try out Minecraft with me on my laptop.

Joining back into Skyblock in 2019, I quickly got addicted to the server, and wanted to progress as quickly as possible. Something I noticed was that the use of alt accounts would let me farm resources and keep chunks loaded, even while I was away visiting other people's islands or logged off. Knowing this, the first alt I tried to add to the server was my OG Minecraft account.

However, when I tried to login, it told me that the email/password didn't match. I knew that they were right. I waited an hour, tried again, still failed. Waited until the next day, tried again, and still failure. I ended up giving in and chose to reset my password. I never got that password reset email, though. I knew it was the right email I entered since I still have the email from 2017 telling me I had successfully migrated my Minecraft account.

Though 2019, 2020, and some of this year, I tried every way possible to try and figure out how I could get back into my account. I had managed to get back into my Yahoo account that I first created the account with, but due to me not using the email in many, many years, all of my emails had been wiped, so I no longer had the email from Minecraft telling me I had bought the game.

I've tried making Reddit posts, various Minecraft forums posts, and at least 20 Mojang support tickets, but I've never been able to get the account back.

Over this time, I went through the various stages of grief. I spent a bit too long in the "anger" phase. I was upset and Mojang for locking my account without giving me a reason, or any way of recovering the account. I was angry and Reddit and forums users, accusing me of lying about my story, or that I had actually just bought and migrated a cracked account, and therefor deserved this. I just felt so hopeless having an account that I knew for sure was mine, and was always mine, but having no way to access it, topped with people online questioning everything about me and the choices I made as kid.

I'm not sure why, but I woke up this morning and decided I'm finally done with the situation. The account is gone forever, and there's nothing that can ever be done about it. I'll still always be a bit sad about the account being gone, but the nostalgia just isn't worth all of the effort and frustration I was putting myself through.



Anywho, there's a random story of my life. Just thought I'd share since this type of thing doesn't generally come in up conversation lol.

 

Thank you! And it's all good. I think I've burnt out every route. I've spoken to many different support agents, provided all sorts of information about the city it was purchased in, date, name on the card, original email, everything I could. I have no real need for the account, the account never played on any real servers, just small ones with my friends, so I'm not actually losing anything of value.

May try again one day, but for now I'm content. I can't see that I'd use the account again if I got it, so it's just a lot of fighting over what boils down to childhood nostalgia. Plus, I at least get the comfort knowing nobody can hack the account haha.

 

Its interesting to have stories about accounts like this. For me I simply had the cracked version of MC. I could joined cracked servers but to me it wasn't as fun. When I finally got a new laptop in 2013 that could handle MC I decided to get an account. At the time I didn't have a card or anything so I used cash and got a gift card. Then I named my account and I still happily use it. Though I have thought about retiring the account and using a different one as a main because weirdly I don't have much nostalgia attached to this account.