The exact origin of this version of the story is unknown, with the earliest known instances of it being from a comment in a Minecraft Forum thread on August 30, 2010, and a now-deleted image posted on 4chan's paranormal /x/ board on August 31. At some point before August 19, a similar altered version of the story surfaced: 'White Eyes' gained the name 'Herobrine' and was now described as the deceased brother of Notch (in reality, Notch has never had a brother ), taking the form of a human entity with white eyes. On August 24, a modified version of the story appeared, in which 'White Eyes' was now a default player model with whited out eyes.

The 'White Eyes' story began spreading through the Minecraft Forum, either stemming from or being popularized by the aforementioned thread. The phenomenon was attributed to 'White Eyes', a female creature who would stalk the player from afar with no visible traits other than her blank white eyes. The same video was linked as an example of an appearance of these white pixels. The following day, Forum user Endorphine posted a thread recounting a myth surrounding the ambient sounds added to caves in Alpha v1.0.3, in which 'a pair of white pixels' would appear whenever these sounds would play. This story is the first known instance of the concept of a creepypasta regarding a white-eyed paranormal being in Minecraft. One supposed instance of these eyes was linked in the comment, being a YouTube upload of '13' posted the previous day (the same day that the disc was added to the game), where a screenshot of a dark cave with two white eyes can be seen. On July 31, 2010, Minecraft Forum user Flaky posted a comment, supposedly copied from a post on 4chan's /v/ board, containing a story of a player encountering an entity with glowing white eyes after listening to the '13' music disc. For more detailed information regarding the Brocraft events, see the Minecraft Wiki's interview with Copeland and his recounting of the events. Zoomed-in excerpt of Herobrine in the original image. The popular story and screenshot detailing a Herobrine 'encounter', posted on 4chan's /x/ board on August 31, 2010. The original screenshot which inspired the 'White Eyes' story, from July 30, 2010, with an enhanced excerpt below. Any appearances of Herobrine are caused by either mods being installed or because of another player using the skin. It is not possible for Herobrine to have ever existed in any unmodded clients or servers.

There are no references to him at all in the source code, and there is no code to allow for any entity to act like Herobrine. Herobrine is not in vanilla Minecraft, and never has been.

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