Terrifying Secrets of Old Minecraft Kaktus

it’s November 10th 2010 you’re scrolling through YouTube late at night when you come across a video with the title very strange house in Minecraft that I did not build the video has just come out and is uploaded by a user named dead skin mask you’re curious as to what he means so you click play you watch as he showcases a house he has discovered in his world that he claims to not have built or to have ever seen before I have a little bit of a weird video here right now I don’t know where I am but the first thing I noticed whenever I popped out was this Cliff over here in between the trees in the distance right where my cursor is there’s like a like a little uh walkway made out of um dirt and there’s torches on it and I have never been over here I’ve only been on one place on my Island to understand how this mystery remained unsolved for almost a decade it’s important to first understand the context behind it Minecraft has a surprisingly long history with horror aspects being in the game the old versions of Minecraft have a way of sparking the imagination into thinking up strange and uncanny things this has resulted in the creation of many horror or Creepy Past myths about the game being made throughout its lifetime with the height of the these being in the game’s early years the most famous of these myths of course is Herobrine Herobrine’s first sighting dates back to August 31st 2010 only 4 months before dead skin mask uploads his video the original Herobrine 4chan post is now synonymous with the idea of horror in Minecraft detailing a mysterious entity that would stalk the player create pyramids and 2 by two tunnels Herobrine personified for many players a feeling they got from playing the old versions a feeling that someone lking just out of sight was watching them the post writer also said they had attempted to write about this entity on the Minecraft forum but that their posts had been repeatedly deleted until a user with the name herob Brien told them to Simply stop this would come to popularize the idea that Minecraft particularly the old versions were in some way cursed the law of Herobrine expanded on this by claiming Herobrine to supposedly be not’s dead brother whose Soul was trapped in the game in reality of course Notch does not have a brother the idea of an element of horror within Minecraft began to become more popular and people began to expand its most popular myths and create new ones this reuse of ideas meant that some myths were left behind in favor of expanding others predating Herobrine as the myth of the white eyes originating in July of 2010 the myths feature an entity that would appear after the player played dis 13 or any of the other cave sounds that would play in the game then two white eyes would appear and watch the player from the corner of the screen green sound familiar Minecraft horror would continue to evolve with the creation of horror maps which integrated elements of the pre-existing Minecraft horror law as well as direct influences from other horror media fast forward to the present day and even in the modern Minecraft climate elements of horror have persisted despite the game going in a direction of a more light and friendly atmosphere the warden contains elements of horror although I don’t think it is able to capture any of the same elements that made Minecraft originally so unsettling to me the warden is more just a moment of tension in an otherwise peaceful game the horror elements have been watered down and whilst at times you might feel a sense of loneliness in the modern game it does not reach the same levels as the old versions newer mods like from the Fogg and cave dweller have tried to bring back the more explicit feelings of Horror by adding new horror Soul creatures to the game and including jump scares these mods have become extremely popular however this is where I think there is a divide and fundamental difference between the modern Minecraft horror and the old horror of the game this difference is important for understanding the nature of the very strange House video and its mystery the video is rooted in the time of its upload and the other versions of Minecraft horror surrounding it at the time simply it could not exist at any other time of the game but I’m getting ahead of [Music] myself Minecraft’s original World Generation was empty it’s empty to the point where the world is almost dead there’s only one structure in old Minecraft the dungeon compare that to the newer versions of the game which are full of structures Villages ancient cities desert and jungle temples pyramids Ocean Monuments igloos wooden mansions M shafts Nether fortresses and strongholds plus the new trial chamber now granted some of these structures are also dead or abandoned however the inclusion of them changes the original feel of the game present in the earlier versions this is because their presence still removes The Emptiness of the game along with making the player less significant in the world these structures imply a life outside of the player who then becomes insignificant in old versions of Minecraft it could be said that the player is tasked with Reviving The World they find themselves in as they are the only thing that is able to create change this immediately creates more opportunities for a horror element to take hold of the imagination as there is a harsh silence that accompanies large parts of gameplay time this along with the player supposedly being completely alone in the world creates an unsettling feeling from which a question can emerge what if you are not alone and I actually found a house up here that is furnished like I had been using it I’ve never been over here before to add to this the overall look of the game was also much rougher and less refined than the new modern textures the old versions also lack a key feature sprinting if you thought that something was following you or watching you there was no Escape other than a slow walk giving plenty of time for whatever was lurking in the darkness to catch you the Indie look and feel as Minecraft was an indie game after all adds to the horror appeal since low budget and horror often go hand in hand looking at the Old Worlds of Minecraft has been equated to looking at images of lemon or spaces commonly a place of transition in somewhere we are not meant to be for any long periods of time these are in between places not meant to be looked at or paid much attention to therefore when we do it creates a strange feeling and intentionally or not the worlds of old Minecraft can sometimes morph into these places this sense of liminality is greatly enhanced by the fog that is ever present in these old versions the fog is inescapable everywhere you go it’s there covering the world in a layer of mystery not even torches have much effect the fog has become synonymous with the old versions of the game comparing screenshots is easy to tell just from the fog which are from the new version of the game and which are from the old whil the fog can be almost removed by having the higher render distance the old versions were around a time when computers were nowhere near the level they’re at now graphics cards and CPU cores and L leagues better than their counterparts in 20110 whilst the feelings of horror mystery and liminality were all there in the original days of these versions otherwise things like Herobrine and The Mysterious House video were not have become so popular the sense of nostalgia now generated by these old versions has only served to enhance these feelings the explosion in popularity of Lial spaces was not just because it made people focus on places they had never paid much attention to before but because of the Nostalgia that was linked to many of the most popular Lial space images this has led to Lial space as being heavily linked to the idea of nostalgia and place a scen in childhood that now live on the edge of conscious and unconscious thought the old versions of Minecraft fit this perfectly as they remind many of a time when they were younger and life was simpler this combination of horror and Nostalgia has again been capitalized on in the form of analog horror which has extended itself into Minecraft videos of old Minecraft footage featuring nostalgic music in places coupled with a VHS filter have become popular recently and a lot of these also have a horror element to them ignoring the fact that by 2010 VHS was long gone these videos are nostalgic for a time in Minecraft’s history when many could believe in strange occurrences happening in the game whil the internet wasn’t exactly new by the time Minecraft was instead they often chose to believe what they heard or saw today Herobrine might just be a joke but at the time lots of people genuinely believed he was in the game so now we come back to dead skin masks video very strange house in Minecraft that I did not build it’s taken a while for me to get to the mystery because as you’ve probably figured out by now I found the context surrounding the video and it’s placed within the history of Minecraft horror to be just as interesting as the mystery itself when the video first came out the most common answer due to the time of the video’s release as to who built the house was that it was herob Brien this would then later develop into the common belief that the video was faked as people began to realize that Herobrine wasn’t real now the video being faked wouldn’t be surprising considering the amount of fake Minecraft horror videos however today it now seems more likely that the video is in fact real you might have noticed the glitch chunk borders in the video the house is built inside these glitched chunks and these pieces of evidence prove to be the most important in solving this mystery being a work in progress Alpha is notoriously buggy from generating holes in the Bedrock to leaves not decaying in some versions another bug that was present during the version that this video was recorded on Alpha 1.2.0 02 was a bug that involved duplicating chunks from previously deleted worlds and servers that you were joining this glitch has become the most popular explanation as to where the house came from and why dead skin mask has never seen it before because it was from a server he had joined Minecraft is a game with an unlikely history of horror and the old versions especially have an interesting relationship with it for what most consider to be nothing more than a kids game hopefully you enjoyed the video and I hope to see you in the next one goodbye