Herobrine: the Minecraft creepypasta that never died
Herobrine was never coded into Minecraft, yet millions of players grew up convinced otherwise. The white-eyed figure, said to dig tunnels in the dark and strip trees of their leaves the moment nobody is looking, traces back to a single forum post from 2010. Fifteen years on, it is still one of gaming’s most durable urban legends, one Mojang keeps referencing in its own patch notes.
An anonymous post, back in the alpha days
The story begins in 2010, while Minecraft was still in alpha. On the 4chan imageboard, an anonymous player described spotting a white-eyed figure staring at them through the fog in a freshly generated singleplayer world, before it vanished. Soon after, they noticed structures they had never built themselves. Worried, they tried posting about it elsewhere, only to find their threads mysteriously deleted. Eventually they received a private message from a user called Herobrine that read simply: “stop”.
The post went on to claim that other players filled in the backstory: Herobrine was supposedly the alias of the brother of the game’s creator, Notch, real name Markus Persson. Asked about it, he had apparently replied, “I did, but he is no longer with us.” Not long after, a second anonymous post described a similar encounter, this time in a cave, after listening to the game’s in-game music disc “13”: a white-eyed entity nicknamed White Eyes, which the community quickly folded into the same myth.
Two streamers gave the ghost a face
The text alone would likely have faded like countless other forum stories. What pushed Herobrine into pop culture were two streamers, Copeland and Patimuss, broadcasting on the platform BroCraft. In Copeland’s stream, detailed by PC Gamer, he plays casually for about two hours before walking into a room he planned to furnish. A white-eyed figure stands there, motionless, staring at him. He screams, turns around and cuts the stream. Viewers later claimed his computer crashed twice while he tried to go live again. Patimuss, in a separate stream, spotted Herobrine standing over a pool of lava before just as quickly shutting the game down.
After the stream, Copeland’s viewers were directed to a page called “him.html”, showing a face with moving eyes and text claiming the reader was “living in a fantasy world” and needed to “wake up”. That page is where Herobrine picked up his other nickname, HIM. Years later, Copeland admitted he had simply retextured an in-game painting to fake the sighting. He also told PC Gamer why the story caught on where others hadn’t: “Unlike Slenderman or anything else, it was Minecraft specific. […] Nobody would care about a Slenderman sighting in Minecraft.”
Notch denies it, Mojang keeps the joke going
Markus Persson has denied the story repeatedly over the years. On May 26, 2012, he wrote on Twitter: “Getting loads of tweets and emails about Herobrine again. I don’t have a dead brother, and he never was in the game. Not real. Never was.” Mojang, on the other hand, never really tried to bury the myth. For years, the game’s own patch notes have quietly included the line “Removed Herobrine” among the changes, as can still be read in the 1.16.2 patch notes published in August 2020.
In 2024, marking the game’s 15th anniversary, creative director Jens “Jeb” Bergensten lifted the veil slightly without fully settling the question, telling Brazilian outlet G1: “It’s a mystery and a community horror tale about this character. […] We don’t really confirm if it’s true or false.” Which keeps the story alive rather than closing it.
A legend that refuses to die
Herobrine long ago outgrew the status of a simple forum meme. In 2013, he ranked 46th on Guinness World Records’ top 50 video game villains of all time, out of more than 5,699 votes cast. In 2021, a group of players calling themselves Minecraft@Home tracked down, after years of searching, the exact seed of the original world where the first sighting screenshot was taken, as reported by NME. And in July 2024, footage from Copeland’s very first stream, long thought lost, finally resurfaced on YouTube, uploaded by a viewer who had kept a copy since 2010 without realizing anyone was looking for it.
The myth also spread into the game itself through mods that make Herobrine genuinely hostile and summonable, and into a fan novel, The Legend of Herobrine. More recently, in April 2025, a scene in A Minecraft Movie showing Steve with white eyes was instantly read as a Herobrine nod, until Mojang’s creative director Torfi Frans Olafsson clarified on Twitter that it was actually a rendering glitch: the eyes were meant to be purple, but the VFX studio ran out of time to fix it.
Why him, and not some other creepypasta
Other similar legends have circulated in the community, like Entity 303 or Giant Alex, without ever getting close to Herobrine’s fame. The difference likely comes down to what Copeland himself pointed out: Herobrine wasn’t a generic threat imported from elsewhere, but a figure built for a game where every world is unique, where the idea of an invisible intruder quietly tampering with your own save file taps into something specific to the medium itself. An ordinary forum ghost story would probably have faded within weeks. This one attached itself to the game’s own mechanics.
With a library spread across several platforms and decades of hours logged into Minecraft, it’s easy to lose track of exactly when you last played, or which version ran on which machine. Radion won’t make Herobrine appear in your world, but it does bring your Steam, Xbox, PlayStation and Nintendo libraries together in one place and keeps a record of what you’ve actually played, which is a fairly concrete way of not losing track of your own gaming history.