Herobrine first appeared in a single image detailing an encounter. It was posted on a thread in the forums, and gained very little attention. It stated how Herobrine had appeared in someone's single-player game, littering the map with various pyramids and tunnels.

It was only later that Herobrine grew in popularity, when the Brocast staff staged a hoax in one of their live-streams. Herobrine was introduced to the stream here (at 20:45).

Later on, there was another video showing Herobrine in a user-made lava field. The livestream went down after the player ran and saved, only to resume ten minutes later, where Herobrine had disappeared.

During this stream, the player can be heard talking to his wife, stating he was trolling, which flooded the livestream chat with outrage. The player then faked a game crash.

During this crash, all watchers were redirected to another page, featuring Herobrine's face, but with real, frantically rolling eyes in the place of his block eyes, modified to be completely black.

When viewing the page's source, there were a jumble of characters and letters. after removing all non-alphabet characters, the following message was revealed.