Top 9 Urban Legends of Gaming
Steve Barton
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Herobrine
Game: Minecraft
Minecraft can be a bit uncomfortable on its own, especially to new players who aren’t accustomed to the sweeping, often overwhelming expanses with no real resources to turn to (in the PC edition, at least) and the swarms of monsters that descend at nightfall. This creepy legend follows a new player as they create a fresh new world, ripe for creation. In the distance, the player spots another character with a default player skin. The spooked crafter investigated to ensure they weren’t actually in a multiplayer game (easy enough to check, and there was no name floating above the stranger’s head) and finally went over to see if he could follow the mystery user.
The other player seemed to have vanished into thin air, but in his wake were several obviously man-made structures like small pyramids, forests of trees with no leaves, and other unnatural creations that only another player could have made. Obviously the first logical step to uncovering the mystery was to approach other players in Minecraft forums to ask if they too had encountered any sort of similar phenomenon, and during the investigation the player received a strange PM from the username “Herobrine.” The message contained only one staccato command: “Stop.”
From there, the user was suitably terrified and began communicating with other forum users through email, who mentioned they had seen the very same user in-game. They encountered the very same man-made creations and brief glimpses of the other player as well. With that knowledge, the player was intrigued, and after investigating the issue further decided to message Notch, the game’s developer. It turns out the name “Herobrine” had previously been a handle used by Notch’s brother.
Notch finally replied to the user’s inquiry as to if he had a brother, to which Notch replied “I did, but he is no longer with us.” Chilling words — could Herobrine be a figment of the player’s imagination, or was he really captured in the screenshot widely circulated with the story? As if Minecraft wasn’t occasionally terrifying enough, right?
Game: Twisted Metal
Legend has it that in 2003, Sony began work on Twisted Metal: Harbor City, which was to be a follow-up to the popular Twisted Metal: Black. The draw for this sequel was said to be a series of highways that would finally offer players a seamless, open world ripe for exploration. Unfortunately, the project never came to fruition, as six of the founding team members were killed after a plane trip on March 13, 2005. The planned game was canceled soon after that.
On March 13, 2007, a mysterious note arrived at Sony HQ. The note begged and pleaded to Sony employees that fans should be allowed to play the levels the deceased team members had worked so hard on. Bizarrely, the note was signed with the names of all six members to have been lost in the plane crash.
Of course, it was ruled out that this note was nothing more than a very sick joke originating from some clearly disturbed fans, but it was ultimately decided the levels would be released to the public for play, stripped of its connective freeways or stories for each of the characters, and thus Sony offered an interesting challenge to players: complete all levels in the lost story mode of Twisted Metal: Head-On: Extra Twisted Edition, and you could see the note in its entirety. If you completed all levels in lost mode on the “hard” difficulty, you’d be able to “unlock its secrets.”
The note itself can be viewed online in its entirety, and has of course been revealed to be simply a riddle for uncovering the release of Twisted Metal on the PlayStation 3, but stranger things have happened, and this is a fantastic example of the makings of a great urban legend.
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