Hey, everyone. The name’s Ossy Flawol. Herobrine. You’ve heard of this fellow, haven’t you? He’s one of the most legendary faces in the Minecraft mythos and has a huge legacy as he’s evolved through the ages. But, tell me: Do you actually know where Herobrine comes from? Now, you may think the answer is obvious: Herobrine came from a creepypasta post on 4chan’s paranormal board. The Minecraft Wiki even states this. It provides a link to the original image file and the timeframe it was posted in, being around August 19. Well, what if I told you that what everyone thinks is Herobrine’s origins is a complete lie? Through some research I conducted, the story about the 4chan post about Herobrine is becoming less and less certain. In fact, I’d say it’s entirely falsified. Now, I’m not an expert Minecraft YouTuber — I’m the Portal guy. I make videos on Portal things…? But I was a kid who grew up with Minecraft, and did hear of the Herobrine mythos in its early days, and supposed story of its origins. Let me start you from the beginning of these discoveries, because the true tale of Herobrine’s origins is more crazy than you may think, and has opened the book to a deeper rabbit hole. Now, the story starts, like, literally a day ago. I was messing around, trying to mimic the format of the original Herobrine post to make a fake image, mainly to troll people on Twitter (which worked, might I add). Anyways, that’s not important. What is important is that I wanted to try and fake a 4chan link that would also lead to a 404. But this got me thinking: how do 4chan’s image source formats work? Well, let’s take that Herobrine link. Do you notice anything in particular that stands out? To me, it was the numbers that make up the filename. These numbers are what is known as a Unix timestamp. The image sources of stuff that get uploaded to this website essentially get given a badge that says when the image was uploaded. If you take the numbers from the original Herobrine link and shove it into a Unix timestamp website, you get the date of… August 31st, 2010? you get the date of… August 31st, 2010? That makes zero sense. What’s going on here? The reason why we know the Herobrine post came from sometime close to August 19 was because of a tweet on that day that @’d Notch about the Herobrine story. So, needless to say, I immediately contacted my friend ToothpasteVixen, who had some knowledge on researching these types of subjects. One thing she pointed out is that the alleged link to the original 4chan post was added six years after the original Herobrine story. This made the mystery deepen even further, so we immediately got to digging, with our sights set on the Minecraft forums. We had to figure out what was going on. Now, the Minecraft forums have been around basically forever, and its search functions let us peek around the website at certain timestamps. We used this in combination with the Wayback Machine in the hopes some deleted forum posts were preserved. If you search for Herobrine-related forum threads around the time period of August 2010, you end up getting a lot of posts from the last days of August. Now, for context as to why, the Herobrine story became incredibly popularised on August 30th, 2010 due to the Copeland Brocraft stream incident, wherein a player named Copeland streamed themselves playing Minecraft and had some of the first ever Herobrine sightings occur on it. This stream shot Herobrine into legendary status within the Minecraft community, leading to hundreds of posts flooding the Minecraft forums all about Herobrine, a large majority of which got deleted after the stream. What is interesting though is that in some of these surviving threads, you can see forum members already sick of hearing about Herobrine, as if he’s already been around for a few days. But the most interesting thread came in the form of this one, of someone trying to explain Herobrine. Note however, the post doesn’t mention Herobrine’s name once. but it does mention other names, such as “Dead Notch” or “HIM”… …or, the most interesting: ”White Eyes”. ToothpasteVixen then found a post that absolutely blew the lid open on what we thought we knew about Herobrine. The post is called “I cannot take it anymore”, written by a user named Endorphine. Let me read this post in its entirety. (clears throat) Jesus Christ. I can’t do it. I can’t take it anymore. I can’t go back home. I can’t go into my mines. I can’t do anything anymore but slowly try and build something under the frozen ocean. And it’s all because of two little pixels. Two pixels. Two white pixels. I haven’t even seen them myself except in screenshots. I know it’s there, waiting in the mines. Watching me from my tower’s balcony while I’m outside. I can’t see it through the constant snowfall but I know it’s there, and I know it can see me. The white eyes myth surrounding ambient noises. It started a couple weeks ago, after a secret Friday update. Some people started reporting seeing a pair of white pixels whenever an underground ambient noise was triggered. I figured it was just a bug or something, maybe some way he did it to trigger the sounds themselves. I didn’t hear much more about it for a while. Then, all of a sudden, recently I’ve been seeing reported sightings everywhere, and a supposed screenshot of them. This is the picture. I can’t even bear to let it load. I had to do a quick tab, copy and close before I saw those eyes again. Those eyes. Jesus Christ. What I just read out to you is a post from August 1st. This post is two weeks older than the earliest possible moment the Herobrine image could have been made. Now, the Herobrine image is taken in version Alpha v1.0.16_02, which was released on August 13th, meaning this post is the earliest record we have of a Herobrine-like entity in a story. This thread only serves more fruitful, however, as we look into its replies. Most of them have been wiped, but Endorphine has replied to a few of them, preserving their contents. One of these early Endorphine replies featured a response to a comment explaining how the white eyes are due to a rendering bug that occurs in Minecraft that may cause the appearance of eyes. What’s truly fascinating is the response. No, you’re wrong. It’s “White Eyes” as we named her. …Her, huh? Yes, as it turns out, this beta Herobrine entity is simply called the “White Eyes”, and it is referred to as being a girl. The replies further down the thread get even more interesting when a user named Flaky enters the thread. Flaky here entered the thread and was incredibly interested in the concept behind White Eyes, to the point they would try and write a creepypasta based on White Eyes. They never actually wrote this creepypasta, but they did forward one onto another thread that was reportedly found on the /v/ board of 4chan, which did feature White Eyes. However, this is not what makes Flaky interesting. Flaky is interesting for the fact that they actually drew fanart for White Eyes. This fanart is quite possibly lost media due to link degradation. The first two fanart pieces they drew were hosted on their DeviantArt account, which they deactivated. The third fanart piece they made was instead on Tinypic, which deletes images after some time; there’s quite possibly zero way to recover these. We do have the URLs of the DeviantArt posts thanks to using inspect element on Flaky’s posts, but they just error out. While we don’t have Flaky’s fanart, the people in the thread did actually respond to the fanart, and mentioned details about the design, enough details that I was actually able to piece together a design of what they may have looked like. White Eyes was described as being spider-like, and part skeleton. It had an exposed ribcage, and what was said to be “scythes for legs”. A user named PillowTalk posted an image of the Spider Mastermind from DOOM, comparing the White Eyes design to it. As of the making of this video, I’ve seen plenty of people starting to put their own interpretations of the design forward, which is delightful to see. There is one final thing to mention about this thread, being the video that Endorphine links in the original post. It’s a rip of Disc 13’s sound file from the day after it was added, on July 31st. Why does Endorphine talk about this video as being “the picture” that he couldn’t bear to look at? Well, if we take a look at the video, it’s a picture of a dark cave. And, if you look closely, at the bottom left… you’ll find two white pixels, staring right back at you. July 31st, 2010. This was possibly the first time that White Eyes was ever seen on the internet. So, how does this all relate back to Herobrine? Well, pretty much entirely, actually. The concept of a figure watching you play Minecraft from a distance has been the subject of campfire stories for as long as Minecraft has existed. White Eyes is the first time, however, we’ve seen this figure be given a name, a face, even a gender. Horror in Minecraft only really became a prevalent topic in the community once the cave sounds were added to the game on July 7th. It became especially prevalent when Disc 13 was added to the game on July 30th. Also of note: This was around the time that Valve shouted out Minecraft on the Team Fortress 2 blog, leading to a huge influx of new users to the Minecraft forums. I mention this for a reason, because it seems to be correlated with a very slow uptick in horror stories about the game. We also need to talk about Endorphine. Endorphine is an interesting character. I think if there is anyone to credit for who created Herobrine, Endorphine may be the next best thing. I don’t think Endorphine himself wrote the famous Herobrine post, but I think he may have inspired someone, and whoever that someone is decided to pay homage to the person they were inspired by. I think Herobrine’s name, nonsensical as it sounds, may be a bastardisation of “Endorphine”. They sound incredibly similar, are associated with stories about a white-eyed creature haunting someone’s Minecraft world, and existed in a timeframe only two weeks apart from each other. I brought all this information up to Dahomey, who is recognised as being the Herobrine lore master for his history in the Minecraft community — he’s one of the few who even witnessed the Copeland stream. Dahomey was fascinated by all this information. It was news to him, and he said that Herobrine’s name being based on Endorphine’s may actually hold some truth to it. We talked for a while, and I thanked him for his time. We came out of the conversation knowing that while we may have discovered Herobrine’s predecessor, there was now more questions than answers. White Eyes was a new chapter we didn’t know existed in the Herobrine history books. There’s still a lot of questions that we don’t have answers to. What was the deal with Endorphine’s White Eyes story? How exactly did White Eyes evolve into Herobrine? How prevalent was White Eyes in the Minecraft community at this time? There’s actually a supposed White Eyes sighting left up on the Minecraft forums, but the image is gone. This at least shows that while White Eyes was niche, there was still some form of following — a following that was snuffed out by Herobrine’s popularity later that month. I have an investigative Discord now set up to research everything there is to White Eyes and the early Herobrine myths. We recently discovered what may have been the second-ever Herobrine story written on the Minecraft forums, several days prior to the Copeland stream. If you’re interested in where this research into White Eyes may lead us, I definitely recommend joining the Discord. I don’t know how long it will last, but I have plans to archive it once we have exhausted all there is to research, and I certainly don’t plan to do a followup video, considering… Well, I’m not a Minecraft guy. I’m the Portal guy. Stay safe, y’all, peace, and remember: she’s watching. Captions by Reese Rivers tech.lgbt/@reeserivers Video Information
This video, titled ‘The LOST Origins of Minecraft’s Herobrine – WHITE EYES’, was uploaded by Ossy Flawol on 2023-05-13 00:02:43. It has garnered 12065 views and 1195 likes. The duration of the video is 00:12:07 or 727 seconds.
Today, we’re going beyond the Source Engine to discuss a major breakthrough in Minecraft community history – I found the inspiration behind the Herobrine creepypasta. This is not an ARG, this is real information.
JOIN THE WHITE EYES DISCORD HERE: https://discord.gg/W4ukAYMb6a
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Hey everyone, the name’s Ossy Flawol!
