Herobrine was popularized in 2010 by a video game streamer called Copeland in a hoax on Brocraft, his livestream channel of the video game Minecraft. In an email interview with Minecraft administrators, Copeland credits the /v/ thread on Reddit with the origin of Herobrine, who first appears in a creepypasta, a genre of online horror fiction.
In the original creepypasta, an anonymous Minecraft user reports running into another character while playing in single-player mode. This other character had “empty” eyes and ran away whenever the user tried to pursue him to get a closer look. The user then noticed small, unexplained occurrences in his world—tunnels, sand pyramids, and trees without leaves—which the user attributed to the spooky, elusive character with the empty eyes.
The user created a forum topic to ask if anyone else had had the same experience, but the post was always deleted no matter how many times he tried to publish it. He then received an email from someone calling himself Herobrine telling him to stop posting. Through investigations with another Minecraft forum poster, the user discovered that the brother of Markus Persson (aka Notch), the creator of Minecraft, was named Herobrine. The user says that when questioned about his alleged brother, Notch replied that his brother was dead and presumably haunting the game. Notch has since denied this claim.