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GHOST IN THE MACHINE
HEROBRINE: a decade-old Minecraftlegend both exposed and made real
Your opinion on Herobrine likely has a lot to do with how old you were in 2010. .
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.”