To clear up the matter, Olafsson explained that the Enderman vision characters were all supposed to have glowing purple eyes, just like the Enderman itself. But, he contined, “when it was rendered, one of the character’s eyes kept coming out white in the final rendered frames. So we wound up keeping it like that, because the VFX studio ran out of time.” In other words, it was simply a mistake, not a deliberate Herobrine reference.
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Herobrine, for those unfamiliar, originated on (blecch) 4Chan sometime in 2010, only shortly after the first Alpha build of the original “Minecraft” game. (The full version wasn’t released until 2011.) Some users had claimed to have seen a white-eyed version of Steve (the game’s default player character), only possessed of eerie, unexplained powers. Herobrine could bodily possess animals, for instance, or build structures extraordinarily fast. No such character existed in “Minecraft,” of course, but the rumors and myths about this mysterious figure continued to proliferate. The character became so notorious in “Minecraft” circles, in fact, that whole web pages popped up devoted to him.
Some fans began theorizing right away that “Herobrine” was actually a ghost that had snuck its way onto the server. Specifically, they claimed it was the ghost of Markus Alexej Persson’s deceased brother. Persson, better known to the video game community as Notch, is one of the original creators of “Minecraft.” The rumor asserted that his brother was nicknamed “Herobrine” and that his ghost began appearing in “Minecraft” as a white-eyed Steve shortly after his death. Someone even insisted they had emailed Notch, who confirmed that he once had a brother but that he was no longer with us.
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This rumor isn’t true, of course, as Persson doesn’t actually have a brother (or a half-brother or any other lost sibling). He does have a brother-in-law named Kristoffer Zetterstrand, but Zetterstrand is alive and well. Persson’s father met a dark end, but no one has (thankfully) incorporated him into the Herobrine legend.
As of this writing, Herobrine remains a meme and a myth for the internet age. They’re also not the character who shows up in the post-credits scene for “A Minecraft Movie,” for those who’ve yet to see it.
“A Minecraft Movie” is now playing in theaters.
