This is Herobrine. He’s an urban legend from the early days
of Minecraft, and billions of people recognize him – probably including you. But have you ever heard of herobrine.com? Well, for years, if you ever made the mistake
of visiting it, this is what you would see. Yet today, herobrine.com is innocent as can
be. So, who’s behind this website? Why were they terrorizing the Minecraft community? And most importantly, what happened to Herobrine.com? Let’s go back. Back to around, say August 2010. Minecraft was still in Alpha, but after a
huge Youtuber named SeaNanners covered the game, hundreds of thousands of new players
were all flooding into the Minecraft community. But they weren’t entering into the peaceful
blocky world they had seen in a SeaNanners video, no, something else had captivated their
attention. The story of White Eyes, also known as Herobrine. It wasn’t anything too crazy, just your
standard creepypasta, but it was interesting, and when players like Copeland brought the
story to the next level with live streams and fan fiction, it was the perfect storm. The legend of Herobrine spread like wildfire
across the Minecraft community and millions of players began experiencing their own Herobrine
encounters – even if it was only in their heads. It was a phenomenon, it still is, and Herobrine’s
been a household name in the Minecraft scene ever since… but right as this was all blowing
up, before it had even hit the mainstream, an anonymous man decided to register a website. A website called herobrine.com. At first it was completely empty, just a landing
page and later a blank page, but by 2014, it looked like this. “The first day of my job, I was a little
late, but it’s okay. I just came for training. I think it will be a good opportunity to improve
myself. I really want to learn something new. Be happy, be healthy!” So, how did we get from an innocent Chinese
blog to this disgusting creature? Well, that story is actually pretty interesting. All throughout the rest of 2014, the site
was just that same sweet Chinese man blogging about his life – working, travelling to
the USA, all that good stuff. But at some point, in 2015, that blog disappeared
and it was replaced with a link to a website called Shafou with a funky little maze game
on it. Check it out! See, back in the late 2000s, early 2010s,
the internet was a very different beast than it is today, and shock videos ruled the web. Whether it was gross, gory, or just goofy,
there were literally thousands of these websites and videos meant to grab your attention for
better or for worse, and the king of them all was the scary maze game. It was just a simple flash game where you
navigate your way through a maze, but on the third level, it starts getting pretty difficult
and you have to focus. And that’s exactly what they want, because
right as you’re about to finish the level? Boom. It gets ya. Shafou.com actually was a mirror of the Maze
Game site, only without the game itself – it just says “The Maze!” and then tries to
give you an aneurysm. A few years later, Herobrine.com became its
own screamer site, and it didn’t look back for years. But why did Herobrine.com ever link to this
random screamer site in the first place? Well, if you go through the Internet Archive,
you can see that for its entire history, herobrine.com and shafou.com have been pretty much the same. They both kept going back and forth between
these Chinese blog and a screamer site, and sometimes they’d even just redirect to each
other. Apparently, Shafou and Herobrine were both
made by the same guy – a prolific Chinese shock site owner whose only goal is to scare
the internet at all costs, and there’s no better way to send little kids into a panic
than by jumpscaring them on a Minecraft website. So, now we know the why behind the Herobrine.com
screamer, but I’m still blanking on the who. Who would want to actively terrorize kids
just for a quick laugh? Well, I mean, most people, cause it’s fun,
but nobody’s going through this kind of effort! If we want to crack the identity of the mastermind
behind Herobrine.com, we’re going to have to look a little deeper. The archives of Herobrine have run their course,
so instead, let’s take a look at shafou.com. Just like Herobrine.com, it started out pretty
empty, but by March 2011, the original owner said he was selling the domain and the website
turned into the screamer we all know and hate. So now we know that there were two owners,
the original blogger and the later shocker, right? Well, you might think so, but take a look
at this: just after that message about selling the website, in its place, another link appeared
to a website called TMDChina.net. And wouldn’t you know it – it was a Chinese
blog just like before. But Aidan, you might say, maybe they had some
sort of agreement where the new owner could promote the original blog! And to that I say there’s literally 2 girls
1 cup on the blog page, if you don’t know what that is, don’t look it up, trust me,
it’s so, so, so much worse. I don’t know what little game this guy was
trying to play but you’re not fooling me, buster, the ruse is up, you never sold the
website at all! Yeah, I know it’s kinda wild to say, but
the guy telling us “be happy, be healthy” is the same as the one trying to give us all
a heart attack. And apparently he didn’t try to hide that
very well, because just a few short months later, the guy even linked his personal Facebook
account right on top of the website, facebook.com/snsunzhen. Now, we have a name to look for, but honestly
I can’t really find much on this guy. We know he must’ve been around in the early
days of Minecraft considering how fast he made the website after Herobrine went viral,
but other than that? He’s got accounts in all sorts of places,
but most of them are dead, and the only actual post I can find from him is one where I think
he’s excited about a Chinese browser updating, not exactly riveting stuff. But that’s not the point, the point is we
got him, we figured it out, we know the man behind Herobrine.com and we know all about
his scheme to spread these screamer sites across the net and spook as many people as
he could. But if it was all going so well for him…
why stop? I mean, there are hundreds of thousands of
views across the reaction videos to these sites, clearly his plan was working, but by
2020 the site had started winding back down into the blog it is now. In other words, what happened? Well, we’re never gonna know for sure, but
I do have a theory. When the site got rid of its screamer, it
replaced it with an AliPay QR code, which is sort of like the Chinese equivalent of
putting your CashApp in your bio. You’re encouraging people to donate to you. A few years after that, both shafou.com and
Herobrine.com were replaced with a notice that the websites were being sold for 99,000
yuan and 1 bitcoin respectively, which is around $14,000 and $68,000 bucks – pretty
steep prices, if you ask me. But the reason why he was doing all this becomes
clear, I think, with what the site has now. Today, if you visit Herobrine.com, you don’t
get a screamer. All you see is the sun setting over China
with a dense, foggy mist invading the city, and if you read the text below, it’s no
secret what this is. “It can make you unable to breathe. It causes a stabbing pain on the left side
of the chest. Over time, the heart becomes diseased, and
can start to fail. This is all caused by air pollution. My heart aches, and I live in depression every
day.” Sadly, it seems like it’s not all fun and
games anymore for the owner of Herobrine.com. Air pollution is a very real problem in China,
and there’s over 2 million deaths every year because of it. He was fighting something a lot scarier than
a screamer – he was fighting real life. And with all that to deal with, suddenly,
keeping this troll site up seemed a lot less important. It was time to close the book on Herobrine.com. Thanks for watching, and I hope you enjoyed. Have a good one, peace peace.
