Copeland's Herobrine Stream (lost "Minecraft" livestream based on "Herobrine" creepypasta; 2010)

Screenshot from the sighting

Status: Lost

Copeland's Herobrine Stream refers to a sighting of the mythical Minecraft character Herobrine by Brocraft streamer Copeland in 2010. The stream was among the first videos of Herobrine, as he had only appeared in still images prior to that. Although he later revealed the incident to be a hoax, the stream is credited with popularizing the myth into mainstream gaming. Screenshots from the incident and recreations have been released, but no footage from the original stream has ever been found.

History

Herobrine is a mythical creature theorized to be found in the video game Minecraft. It most likely originates from 4chan's /x/ board in August 2010.^[1] Copeland, at the time a relatively popular Minecraft streamer, found out about the story while browsing the /v/ board and started orchestrating a hoax involving the character by taking a screenshot and photoshopping Herobrine into it.^[2] After getting positive feedback from fans upon releasing this image, he started orchestrating yet another hoax on a grander scale, which involved him stumbling upon Herobrine during a livestream.^[2]

The stream, which occurred on August 30, 2010,^[3] was described by Copeland himself in an email; "I spent a little while in Photoshop putting an image of Herobrine on a painting (Yup - it was definitely a painting) and then put that painting up in a small room in one of my 'in-progress' houses. My map was small at the time, I think it only had 3 houses. Anyway, I started streaming and avoided that room for about an hour to 2 hours, to make it all seem more legit. I then happened to run into the room and directly in front of the door was Herobrine. I screamed and ran out of the house and turned off the stream."^[2]

At 3:55 PM that same day, Copeland would turn to the Minecraft forum, creating a new topic, posting a link to the stream and writing "Skip to the last 2 minutes."^[4] The thread blew up with reactions from the fanbase, ranging from disbelief to dismissal of the incident as a prank.^[4] All things up until the Copeland stream are considered "canon" within the Herobrine myth by most fans of the game and thus the stream achieved legendary status.^[1]

Search

The link for the livestream was kept on Livestream.com . Several people, ranging from the tens to potentially thousands of people, saw the incident when and after it happened, with the thread about the subject racking up 35 whole pages.^[4] It is unclear how long the stream was up on Livestream.com, as it wasn't properly archived. One of the earliest mentions of the stream being down comes from September 15, 2011, just over a year after the incident.^[5] Two screenshots by a user known as Calasmeer were posted onto the thread which are the only known surviving pieces of the stream known to exist today.^[4]

Though a frequently talked about piece of media by several YouTubers documenting the history of Herobrine, none were interested or aware that the stream was lost, and the stream was never searched for particularly often. In 2015, a remake was uploaded to YouTube, which was initially labelled as genuine, but eventually revealed by Copeland to be fake.^[6] This sparked some interest in finding the original stream to a certain extent.

On October 6th, 2020, Reddit user u/KRBSTUDIOS attempted to retrieve the stream by putting the URL through Wayback Machine, which failed as they were blocked from accessing the page, and with no way of circumventing this; they took to Reddit, which unfortunately yielded no viable results.^[7] Less than a month later, Youtuber Enderboss25 video talking about the subject,^[8] and found researching interesting, prompting him to make a second, more detailed part.^[9]

Enderboss25 then managed to uncover the third screenshot from the screen by pasting the Livestream.com onto Discord; he theorizes that this originates early on in the stream.^[9] Following this, he got into contact with Copeland himself in order for Livestream.com to legally retrieve the data from the stream. Though they managed to retrieve the original world file in which the stream occurred, the stream was deleted from Livestream.com's servers, meaning that it is not accessible through that website.^[9]

Gallery

Images

Screen where it seems copeland is building his house.It appears to happen a little after the "Thumbnail". This was discovered by MC4f#7900 on discord on the image hosting site gyazo.

Screenshot of the windows in copeland's house at daytime.This screenshot was taken a few minutes before the famous herobrine sighting.This was found By MC4f#7900 on discord

The photoshopped screenshot which prompted Copeland to orchestrate a livestream hoax.
The second verifiable screenshot taken from the stream.
Third screenshot uncovered by Enderboss25, which he theorizes is from the stream before the infamous meeting of Herobrine.
Screenshot taken after the stream, likely uploaded to Copeland's social media.