The TRUE Origins of Minecraft’s Herobrine: “White Eyes”

July 7 2010 cave sounds are added to Minecraft in the release of Alpha version 1.0.3 this is the first time for everyone in the small yet tight-knit Minecraft community that anything relatively spooky was seen in the game a month before this Notch started releasing what he liked to call secret

Friday updates these were weekly updates in the infidev and Alpha stages of Minecraft’s development that often made pretty big changes while updates were usually made to Minecraft every few days with no schedule these secret Friday updates which ran from June to September of 2010 often guaranteed huge changes to

The game such as snow boats large trees Redstone Minecart spawners chickens fences the option to crouch and most importantly jukeboxes when jukeboxes were first added to Minecraft on the 30th of July 2010 there were only two music discs obtainable via dungeon chess where creepers killed by skeletons 13

And Cat that same day a YouTube in Minecraft forms username Kira posted a rip of the Minecraft music disc 13 to YouTube this discs Eerie audio was accompanied by a dark look quality image taken from the inside of a Minecraft cave amongst dark blocky jpeg artifacts were two white pixels strongly

Resembling eyes the inclusion of the music disc 13 and its Eerie Ambiance inspired many users to start working on their own scary campfire stories based on the disc namely this huge work of fiction by I am a hedgehog posted to the Minecraft forms in the early hours of

The 31st and a repost of a story supposedly taken from the V Board of 4chan where a man goes insane after hearing 13 and seeing two white eyes in the darkness of a cave on the 1st of August user endorphine took to the Minecraft forms to repost the video

Along with a short story 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 Minds 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 white pixels I haven’t

Even seen them myself except in screenshots I know it’s there though waiting in the mind 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 then all of a sudden recently I’ve been seeing reported sightings everywhere and a supposed screenshot of them this is the first time white eyes was mentioned as a whole entity or creature and it became its own thing Shifting the focus of the new wave of Minecraft Creepypastas off the disc 13

Over the next few days the Minecraft forms would be filled with copycat stories and Fan Art of the white eyes Mythos with many of them being lost at time as a result of the closure of online image hosting service tiny pick including three pieces of fan art and

One sighting image and users of the form were already getting sick of people mentioning white eyes by the 2nd of August with replies that Creepypasta s post like oh God and thread for this fallacy the thing is white eyes did have some validity to it Minecraft had a graphical bug where

White pixels would sometimes appear at random often outlining blocks being in a dark cave and seeing this glitch occur in the corner of your eyes and mistaking it for something else was something that likely happened to some players one thing to note is that it’s not like

White eyes is slowly based on one’s story instead it was a myth passed around with details changing every time it was retold from two detached white eyes in a cave Shadows chalked up to be the player’s head Playing Tricks on them to a female Cryptid similar to a spider

Jockey hiding in the caves of your Minecraft world into a player with empty white eyes a post made on the 24th of August by goty is a good example of this talking about horror in Minecraft as well as providing their own white eyes based story about a deadly encounter

With a player with empty eyes foreign the now forgotten white eyes myth which is conserved by many that know about it to be the first Minecraft CreepyPasta ever is how the Herobrine urban legend came to be though Herobrine did not have his name yet in the timeline we’re in the middle of August

2010 though this is where the history of things starts to get cloudy with misinformation dead links deleted form posts and more blocking our view historically this image taken from 4chan has been cited as the very source of the Herobrine myth which isn’t 100 true and it’s almost entirely certain there were

Multiple posts with this same image the version of Minecraft this image was captured in was available from the 13th to 19th of August 2010 meaning the image was likely taken and uploaded online in that time frame to back this up tweets dating back to the 19th of August

Mention Herobrine by name as well as parts of the Mythos that originated with this image I personally believe this image is responsible for bringing the white eyes now called Herobrine urban legend out of obscure threats from the depths of the Minecraft forms and to a much larger General Video Gaming

Community either way the story details a player with empty eyes staring at op to render distance fog and weird structures it had created including two by two tunnels sand pyramids and trees stripped of their leaves when mentioning it across different forms looking for answers Opie received a message from a

User named Herobrine telling them to stop it provides this Infamous screenshot of Herobrine and calls it Notch’s dead brother the story here is very clearly inspired by the white eyes myth in multiple ways while I wouldn’t call this the origin of Herobrine it became the centralized story for the

Myth and popularized the Creepypasta instead of the story dying and being forgotten in the depths of the Minecraft form archives in 2010 the internet wasn’t like it is today Creepypasta wasn’t as mainstream it was nearly Uncharted Territory to most people YouTube was different social media was different and live streaming

Was especially different you have Titans in the live streaming industry like twitch Kik and even YouTube nowadays though in 2010 these either didn’t exist or didn’t allow users to start live streams back then user live streaming was restricted to primitive sites like blog.tv Ustream livestream.com and Justin.tv

Most of these live streams were webcam based and gaming live streams were nowhere near as popular despite this a streamer named Copeland was making a name for himself through daily Minecraft streams as a part of a small streaming Collective named brocraft later known as ghost in the Stream in 2010 through the

Primitive streaming site livestream.com only a few screenshots and recordings as streams from this Collective still exist but it’s pretty obvious they were well ahead of the their time quite a variety of people stream to this now obscure bro craft.net website including notch on a few different occasions throughout June

2010 though these streams are lost to time after seeing online discussion of a mysterious Minecraft player with white eyes Copeland decided to pull a prank on his viewers live on air he posted a picture to social media of his house with someone in the corner just barely

In view which got a lot of reactions out of his fans on the morning of the 30th of August 2010 Copeland would start a bro craft stream after about 20 minutes of working on his base he would enter a room he’d avoided going into previously

And see this quickly he’d run out of the room or walk out because Minecraft Alpha didn’t have running and the stream would abruptly end as Copeland was screaming not that many people were watching but all of them were quite confused and quite scared before the stream Copeland

Edited a picture of Herobrine onto a painting’s texture and placed it on the wall of the room he avoided going into shortly after the stream Copeland said he was experiencing technical difficulties and posted links in the chat to a page on the brocraft website named him.html containing a gif of

Minecraft Steve’s face with dark and realistic eyes quickly darting around with a strange hidden story at the bottom of the page hours later Copeland would make a post on the Minecraft forms titled video proof of him with a link to an archive of the stream the stream

Itself has now lost media with only a few dark low quality screenshots remaining and as far back as late 2010 people have been searching for a recording or a re-upload of the stream the post was huge with the thread garnering nearly 30 pages worth of replies within the first month or so

Before it was locked and later deleted this stream and the subsequent form post which didn’t mention Herobrine by name only referring to the player with empty eyes as him was a huge deal in the growing Minecraft Community after the stream Copeland returned to the world and changed his texture pack back and

Revealed that he had disappeared back then it was much harder to believe something like that could be faked on live stream those I started a new save of my game and it was haunted and Hyper realistic blood was everywhere type Creepypastas weren’t so overdone either padamus another member of brocraft did

Their own stream within the next 24 hours using an iron door texture with Herobrine on it instead and falling into a pit of lava this stream is also a piece of lost media with only one or two screenshots remaining in comparison to the Copeland stream this one is mostly

Forgotten as he admitted it was fake during the exact same stream ruining the little immersion there was shortly after people started making their own fake Herobrine sightings and videos and the 4chan posts from earlier would start gaining a lot more traction some people were making their own Herobrine

Encounter videos within hours of the video proof of him thread being created people like sharp th were making screamer videos about Herobrine referred to as him which garnered millions of views people like jamuck formerly known as watermelon movies made compilations of Herobrine sightings including screen shots from the Bro craft stream which

Have millions of views today Minecraft’s Community was becoming much larger by 2010 and 2011 and the story of Herobrine blowing up online coinciding with it made the Herobrine Creepypasta’s growth in popularity even faster one of the most popular Herobrine citing videos ever was a Minecraft Pocket Edition

Video by the YouTuber space waffle from 2012 with over 70 million views on many occasions Notch Had publicly stated he had never had a brother and that Herobrine was not real in August and September of 2010 he made multiple jokes alluding to it being real however which

Made a lot of people confused in May 2011 for the release of Minecraft Beta 1.6.6 Notch added a small bullet point in the very end of the update changelog removed Herobrine for the next few years Notch added removed Herobrine to almost every update changelog for Minecraft Java Edition as recently as the 1.20

Cave update Herobrine and white eyes having Origins dating back to July 2010 predates the major majority of video game urban legends and Creepypastas by a year or two Creepypastas wouldn’t go mainstream for another year or two and Herobrine even predates many of the most popular video game related Creepypastas

By at least a few months such as Ben drowned in Sonic.exe Herobrine’s influence and future Creepypastas is clear and has its own Spa in the Hall of Fame of online horror since I almost never talk about Minecraft on this channel I’d like to talk about one story for Minecraft’s

Early history that I find very interesting which caused the end of the secret Friday updates that I was talking about earlier by late 2010 and early 2011 Minecraft was gaining more popularity than it ever had before and this started to cause some unforeseen issues it’s the 18th of September 2010

Minecraft Alpha version 1.1.1 was just released Notch was intending on releasing different biomes in this update which never happened as he couldn’t get it to work in time Alpha 1.1.1 was intended to be secret Friday 10 though because he couldn’t get biomes to work its release was delayed by one

Day and it became the first and last secret Saturday update instead already a bad start it added a few new paintings the ability to crouch and added fishing rods though the act of fishing itself hadn’t been implemented yet so it was basically useless there was just one

Problem quite a lot of the day one players of this update experienced an issue that turned the gamma and contrast sliders all the way down on their computer’s graphics card all the way to zero causing their entire computer to Output a gray screen this happened almost everyone who didn’t have the

Exact same kind of graphics card that Notch Had in his computer this was caused by debug code left in the Minecraft update for a brightness slider that never got finished at the same time Minecraft on that experienced a huge wave of traffic after the update’s release which essentially fried the

Server it may as well have been ddosed despite the entire jar file for Alpha 1.1.1 being only 800 kilobytes the size of a couple low resolution image files everyone was having a very rough time attempting to download this update we’re talking download speeds of 0.02 kilobytes per second which is one

Kilobyte every 50 seconds and multiple hours to download the update there was only a very small minority of people who were able to download the update in time some people were even uninstalling the update and attempting to reinstall it in an attempt to fix the gray screen bug

Some people were uploading the alpha 1.1.1 update to different file sharing websites temporarily so that other users could download it though these links would expire shortly after being posted in just 205 minutes after possibly the roughest rollout of a Minecraft update up until that point it was replaced by

Minecraft Alpha 1.1.2 2. this version is essentially the same thing without the gray screen bug and like that Alpha version 1.1.1 of Minecraft became lost media with the majority of players upgrading to version 1.1.2 as soon as they could to try out the new features for the rest of the weekend Minecraft

Became free to make up for it Notch released a bug fix update five days later 1.1.2 underscore 01 which made it so resources like music and sound effects are downloaded from an Amazon cloud service instead of directly from minecraft.net if you’ve ever attempted to play an alpha version older than this

In the Minecraft launcher you’ll notice that sound does not work at all in the Halloween update of October 2010 Notch would get the biomes he planned to release working this is the same update that released the nether over the next couple years talk about archiving old Minecraft versions with slowly ramp up

In 2009 shortly after the game was first released Notch updated it quite frequently and because there was little the no one playing the game at the time or at least actively versions that were only available for a few days or less would become lost very quickly some

Versions are so obscure that the only proof they ever existed come from 14 year old IRC chat logs of Notch mentioning them once by name and never again because of its story Alpha version 1.1.1 which had been lost for at least nine years by this point became a holy

Grail of Minecraft lost media all that existed of it was the story of its troubled rollout a few screenshots a few tweets about it and one sole YouTube video showing Alpha 1.1.1 gameplay without the gray screen bug of course fast forward 11 whole years to June of

2021 a user representing Omni archive a large Minecraft archival Community contacted someone who had tweeted about the new Minecraft update when it was released the person they asked just so happened to be very much in a date of preservation had been playing Minecraft since late 2009 and had multiple lost

Versions of Minecraft on her old hard drive one of these versions was classic 0.29 underscore 01 a very small patch update available for only one day which only really did things like fixed bugs with hitboxes and player name tags all that existed of this version previously was one low quality recording a

Screenshot of someone showing off an early texture pack in this version and one screenshot of someone running the game at 7 frames per second the other version she had laying around was the infamous 1.1.1 downloaded only a few minutes before 1.1.2 was released and replaced the old version this was a huge

Find at a huge lesson to many always back up your files if you think you’re gonna need it thank you for watching if you enjoyed do things you do after you finished a video you enjoyed and I’ll see you in the next one Thank you