In 2010-2012 – before the introduction of Mojang Accounts – the account creation process was different:
- You chose your Minecraft display name when you created your Minecraft account – this reserved the name
- You then paid for the account and it became a 'premium' account – or, you did not pay for the account and it remained a non-premium account.
Either way, the Minecraft name was taken. Whoever registered the account named 'Cow' in the very early days never paid for the account, so it remained unused as a non-premium account.
On January 12, 2015, Mojang announced the introduction of Minecraft name changes.
They also announced that old unpaid accounts would be deleted and the names made available for everyone. So I created a list of names currently taken by non-premium accounts that I was trying to get – Cow
as #1 on that list. I also followed a bunch of Mojangstas on Twitter to get all the news.
A few weeks later, on February 3, 2015, Marc tweets that name changes should be available the next day. The next day, Thomas – another Mojangsta – tweeted that name changing should be deployed in the next couple of hours.
About two hours later – 2 minutes before name changing went live – he tweeted It's happening
. And roughly 2 minutes later I managed to change my name to Cow. 🐄