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Herobrine is a legend that’s nearly as old as Minecraft itself, first being referenced in the game’s alpha before stories of the character proliferated in the early 2010s. The question with Herobrine, especially if you were on the younger side in those days, was always whether he was real and could be found in the game: or whether it was just a meme that refused to die.
There’s an enormous amount to unpack about Herobrine’s story over the years, but the short version is that he’s supposed to be a ghost that haunts the worlds of singleplayer games, and the subject of endless creepypasta accounts of how he’s interfered with players’ worlds. Herobrine looks like Steve, who I guess we could call the main character of Minecraft, except for one detail: blank white eyes.
A Minecraft Movie features what seems to be an unmistakable nod to Herobrine and I’m going to explain what happens so, if you want to see the movie spoiler-free, maybe stop here.
Halfway through A Minecraft Movie the character Henry (Sebastian Eugene Hansen) meets an Enderman at the Woodland Mansion, who casts some voodoo and makes Henry have visions of Steve (Jack Black) saying nasty things to him. But the version of Steve in this scene has glowing white eyes.
Given that this is a movie that’s been made in co-operation with Mojang and features endless in-jokes and Easter eggs about the game, this seems like a fairly obvious nod to the ultimate Minecraft urban legend. But Mojang Studios’ creative director Torfi Frans Olafsson, a producer on the movie, claims it’s unintentional (thanks, GR+).
“It’s super strange that all of their eyes were supposed to be purple,” says Olafsson, “but when it was rendered one of the characters’ 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.”
Hmm. Far be it from me to question someone who actually worked on the movie but this just doesn’t seem plausible, and Olafsson clearly likes teasing about Herobrine specifically. In response to someone asking about Herobrine being in a possible sequel, Olafsson jokes: “I think Herobrine was patched out of the game a very long time ago. Repeatedly.”
So call me a cynic but it seems like this is a Herobrine nod that, in deference to the actual myths and backstory of the character, the creators have decided is best left unacknowledged. It just got in there somehow. The VFX people ran out of time. Herobrine wasn’t supposed to be in A Minecraft Movie and yet, somehow, there he is.
We’ll see: perhaps the white eyes will be corrected for the streaming release, but I’m betting not. A Minecraft Movie has proven to be a tremendous success so far, even if the film itself is a bit of a mixed bag, so a sequel (and another Herobrine cameo) feels like an inevitability. The director himself says he’d love some more money to make a sequel: “It’d be amazing!”
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Kurt Indovina
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