History of Minecraft: Herobrine

The mysterious and terrifying story of Herobrine is one of the longest-running urban legends created by the Minecraft community.

The tale of Herobrine is a creepypasta, which is a horror story that was copied and pasted across the internet.

Herobrine was said to be a ghost or human-like entity that exists in the world of Minecraft. According to lore, he looks like he has the player skin of a Steve, but with bright eyes that serve as a light source.

When entire chunks of blocks would go missing near a player's base or when trees would be found without any leaves, Herobrine was often rumored to be the culprit behind these actions.

This article will take a deep dive into these claims and separate Minecraft fact from fiction.

History of Minecraft: Herobrine

Who is Herobrine?

Canonically, Herobrine is rumored to be Notch's dead brother who, by some act of the supernatural, was actually embedded into the Minecraft code.

Herobrine was said to act in creepy and dangerous ways. Claims include pyramids being found in the middle of the ocean, tunnels in mountains that looked like they were made by a player and trees being found without any initial leaves.

The following is the oldest mention of Herobrine ever, which was posted on the 4chan's /v/ board, but did not gain much traction. This dates the first documented mention of Herobrine back to August 30, 2010.

Image via Glitchunpatched / Gamepedia.com

The story of Herobrine gained a great deal of traction with the popular Brocraft live-streams and playthroughs. Herobrine was seen making multiple appearances, causing mischief and game disruption. Unfortunately, all of this was a giant hoax as Herobrine was simply a retextured painting. At the end of the day, Herobrine was used as reasoning to explain the unexplainable.

In truth, the actions that were prescribed to Herobrine were most likely caused by two things. Herobrine was popular during Minecraft's early days, which was a period of constant updates. It is strongly plausible that missing blocks or strange occurrences in-game were caused by bugs from update to update.

Secondly, content creators of the day loved the drama that stories of Herobrine induced, and the player base ate up every second of produced content.

Notch himself has tweeted on several occasions that Herobrine is not real and never was in Minecraft. The Minecraft update patch notes that mentioned removing Herobrine were simply jokes played on the reader.

However, just because Herobrine may not be real does not mean that the idea of him is insignificant. The player base of Minecraft was able to theorize this entity into existence and that is what is truly incredible about this story.