THE TOP STORY
A Minecraft legend becomes real.
Herobrine is a legend in Minecraft, the star of a creepypasta not dissimilar to Slender Man. The character appears in singleplayer games, so the story went, where he does weird things like carving 2 x 2 tunnels in the rocks or cutting all the leaves off of trees; he looks identical to the default Minecraft skin, but with white, empty eyes.
First reported in a 2010 4chan post, Herobrine went unnoticed until a streamer named Copeland shared several images ‘proving’ the odd character’s existence. Stories of the spooky ghost miner began to rise to prominence alongside Minecraft itself in the early 2010s.
BRICKING IT
Like all good legends, this one had a hook in the real world: Herobrine was reportedly Notch’s dead brother, and theories veered from Notch coding a deceased sibling into Minecraft to preserve him for eternity, or a neglected brother’s vengeful spirit come back to haunt the game. Not that it matters because—spoiler alert—the whole thing was made up. Herobrine doesn’t exist and, for the record, Notch never had a brother. Minecraft’s developer tweeted about Herobrine several times before saying in 2012, “I don’t have a dead brother, and he never was in the game. Not real. Never was.”
Copeland then admitted his Herobrine material was a hoax, telling Minecraft Wiki editors that he
LIKE ALL GOOD LEGENDS, THIS ONE HAD A HOOK IN THE REAL WORLD
liked the original text post about Herobrine and got involved by posting edited screenshots of his own showing the ghostly miner. At the time, it got a big reaction.
Herobrine isn’t real. What is real, however, is the Minecraft world in which Herobrine was first seen. This became the obsession: The final proof, if you will, of whether Herobrine was miner or myth. Nobody knew which world it was: Specific Minecraft worlds can be perfectly recreated with ‘seeds’ but, if you don’t know the seed, you’re out of luck. It is possible to crunch the numbers to discover specific seeds, though: The Minecraft title-screen seed was discovered in July 2020, among many other fan-sought locations.
And finally, the Herobrine seed was discovered. This was announced January 16 by andrew_555 (Kminster), who’d found it with great help from members of the Minecraft@Home community. He posted on Reddit that it took “probably about 50 hours in total for developing/ writing the code back in September”, followed by months of debugging, until realizing “there was a wrong leaf in the recreation which had been the problem all along”.
Players then piled-in. Herobrine, of course, was not there, even if he lives on in the minds of Minecraft players spooked by the legend in younger years. Herobrine always had his skeptics, with shrewder players noting that the character looked like some kind of edited texture from the very beginning. Some even suspected it of being a prank started by Notch, not Copeland. Whatever the truth, Herobrine was never a ‘real’ part of Minecraft but, after a decade of legends and stories, has somehow surpassed any need for an in-game form.
Rich Stanton