Who Is Herobrine? A Minecraft Movie Easter Egg Explained

This post contains mild spoilers for "A Minecraft Movie."

In the middle of Jared Hess' hit film "A Minecraft Movie," the young Henry (Sebastian Hansen) has to sneak into a distant stronghold to retrieve a magical widget called the Earth Crystal. This proves difficult since the crystal is stored in an archive guarded by black, stone-like ghouls with long limbs and glowing purple eyes known as Endermen. Indeed, Henry is caught by an Endermen while lurking through the stronghold's archive, which prompts the creature to unhinge its eerie jaw and begin screaming. Its scream, combined with the Enderman's hypnotic stare, in turn causes Henry to have nightmarish visions implanted by the monster.

In his visions, Henry sees the people he knows and loves treating him with cruelty and hurling insults at him. They question Henry's resolve, along with his talents and capabilities. Scariest of all, his loved ones all have glowing eyes, giving them a demonic appearance. Even his new friend Steve (as played by comedy superstar Jack Black) has glowing white eyes. Ultimately, though, Henry is able to shake off the visions and attack the Enderman with a sword.

When Steve appears on screen with glowing white eyes, fans of the "Minecraft" video game are likely to perk up. Longtime players of the game are likely savvy to the urban legend of Herobrine, a character who's said to have mysteriously appeared, without warning, in certain "Minecraft" games. Herobrine looked, essentially, like an evil twin of Steve, only with a darker color palette and glowing white eyes. Herobrine was not a part of the original "Minecraft" programming, but took on a life of its own thanks to backwoods online postings and eerily proliferated creepypastas. 

For a moment, it seemed like the makers of "A Minecraft Movie" had cleverly — via a white-eyed Steve — inserted Herobrine into their film. Sadly, however, producer Trofi Frans Olafsson has since clarified on Twitter/X that the white-eyed Steve is not meant to be a Herobrine reference. Rather, it's merely the result of a strange visual effects glitch that made its way into the final cut of the movie.

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.

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.

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.