Herobrine is an obscure, false myth in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.
Description[]
Herobrine is an obscure myth and supposed entity that originated from various legends about his supposed existence in the game Minecraft, and was soon after claimed to also appear in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.
After the birth of the Herobrine legend on various Minecraft related forums sometime around 2010-2011, rumors of his appearance in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas began circulating in GTA related forums, and other forum based websites, such as Reddit, Gamefaqs and 4chan.
Visually, Herobrine appears nearly identical to how he is said to look in the original Minecraft legend, which is a default Minecraft skin (known as Steve) but with pure white eyes.
According to the various accounts over the years, he's often described as appearing anywhere from very far away and barely visible, to extremely close to the player, however; most accounts do not include him attacking the player directly. Instead, he is known to either stare at the player, crash or freeze the game upon seeing him, or rarely, flying around in the player's vicinity. Based on all "credible" accounts (ones that weren't clearly written as a joke), in all of these scenarios (except for the game crashes), he almost always disappears within 20 seconds of appearing. The freezing/crashing scenario has been noted as being strangely similar to a Saint's Row 2 myth known as The Freezer, although there doesn't appear to be any real connection between the two besides this single detail.
In some accounts of Herobrine sightings, they were preceded by a sighting of Herobrine in Minecraft first. This has supposedly happened in at least two of the notable encounters throughout the history of the myth. This has also led to speculation that Herobrine is only capable of appearing in San Andreas after a Minecraft encounter, due to the fact that there are no known firsthand accounts of any Herobrine sightings where the poster was not aware of what Herobrine or Minecraft was before posting. In addition, some have speculated that even the accounts where he was not seen in Minecraft first, could be the person having in fact encountered him in Minecraft prior to the San Andreas sighting, but not knowing it. Proponents of this theory believe this could also explain why there are so few sightings of Herobrine in San Andreas, despite his popularity within the Minecraft community, as it would require someone to not only own both games, but to experience a Herobrine encounter in Minecraft first, and then play San Andreas a short time afterwards. This theory is often disregarded as entirely false due to its "paranormal" basis, and is seen as implausible and akin more to pure legend as opposed to anything based in fact, although this theory is important to the history of the myth.
As mentioned before, in most early supposed sightings, Herobrine was not known to act aggressively to or directly attack the player. However, he acts aggressive in most if not all existing mods that add him to the game, and by extension any claimed sightings of him after these mods were posted and soon became popular (around mid 2013.) This is most likely due to a shift in the Herobrine legend within the Minecraft community, from him being a ghostly entity that stalks the player, to a godlike being that attempts to wreak havoc on the game world.
History[]
To date, the earliest known post about Herobrine in reference to his existence in San Andreas is a post on 4chan's /x/ board that was created in 2011 by an anonymous user. However, it should be mentioned that this may not be the true first claim of Herobrine in San Andreas; one person who commented on the thread mentioned a supposed earlier post about the Herobrine legend in San Andreas. This post has to this date, never been found.
The first post in the thread was made by an (as mentioned previously) anonymous user, claiming to have spotted a "blue figure" near Grove Street a small handful of times during foggy or rainy weather. Interestingly, the user claimed that this only happened after they had first experienced similar sightings while playing on a Minecraft server with friends the previous month. The user began speculating about the possibility of them being connected, and the chance of it being Herobrine, who according to various accounts of his sightings in Minecraft, supposedly has supernatural capabilities, such as modifying game files, causing glitches, and manipulating hardware. Speculation soon began about the possibility of Herobrine, having originated in Minecraft, somehow jumping games and appearing in San Andreas.
Even stranger, the original poster had claimed to have experienced these sightings on a PS2 version of San Andreas, while the Minecraft sightings were on a Laptop. This further fueled speculation about Herobrine's supernatural capabilities and powers, as if true, not only could he travel between games, but between physical hardware.
Around half a year later, now deleted GTAForums user Realblake97 made a post about a supposed encounter with Herobrine. He claimed, similarly to the 4chan poster, after experiencing a sighting of what he thought was Herobrine in a Minecraft world, he had started seeing him in San Andreas. He described this as "being stalked" by him in the game. According to the user, his first appearance was during the mission "Badlands", where he spotted a figure resembling what he saw in Minecraft (matching general descriptions of Herobrine) near the forests of Angel Pine, before "teleporting away" (or possibly despawning) after around 2 seconds.
It is unclear what platform Realblake97 was playing San Andreas on, but he described the game sometimes crashing, requiring him to "restart the system" directly after a sighting. In one of these instances, he claimed to have been riding a Sanchez near the cabin at Mount Chilliad, when Herobrine suddenly appeared or spawned in to the right of him, and the game froze for a few seconds, before cutting to a black screen. The user claimed he would see Herobrine seemingly randomly, with no clear pattern as to when or where he would appear, up until the last sighting during the mission Are You Going to San Fierro? in which he said that he saw Herobrine flying through the woods for a few seconds during the weed burning section of the mission. He claimed that after which, he did not see Herobrine throughout the rest of the game.
Although a large majority of users who replied to the thread dismissed it as either an elaborate troll, or a creepypasta (one user even reportedly replied saying "BOGUS! LOL", a few users took it seriously, and referenced previous forum posts on various different sites describing similar encounters with Herobrine (none of which were archived, or have been found.) One of these includes a supposed Gamefaqs thread from sometime around late 2011-early 2012 about a Herobrine sighting on the original Xbox version, with the commenter referencing it claiming that the original poster of that thread stated that their controller became unresponsive, but the game did not crash when they saw "the minecraft thing".
Sometime in late 2012, a now deleted Reddit post was made on the r/sanandreas subreddit detailing a sighting of Herobrine, with supposedly an image included. The events described and the image have since been lost, as the post was deleted, and all known mirrors/reuploads of the image now lead to dead links, with only little information being able to be pieced together from comments on the original post, and references to the post in other discussions related to Herobrine in San Andreas on other sites. With what little information could be gathered, this post supposedly described an encounter of Herobrine that the poster experienced with their sister. All that is known is that, like in Realblake97's encounters, the game crashed after he appeared, and that it might have been in one of the 3 cities within the game (users replying to the post commented on the perceived absurdity of the encounter being in an area with large buildings). The image attached to the post might have been taken with a low quality phone camera, webcam, or similar device, as opposed to the image being a direct screenshot or screen capture. It's possible that this means that the sighting occurred on a console version.
One of the few surviving images of a Herobrine sighting from the early period originated on a 4chan thread in 2012 about creepy easter eggs and mysteries in games. An anonymous user posted an image of Herobrine hovering above the ground, while the player aimed a Rocket Launcher at him. The commenter said that, while he had some basic mods to modify the hud, he had no such mod that added Herobrine to the game. This post was also made before any of the earliest known uploads of any Herobrine mod online.
The poster detailed the supposed encounter with Herobrine. According to the poster, Herobrine appeared suddenly near him and quickly started floating around above him, moving erratically while slowly floating up. After only approximately 15 seconds, Herobrine disappeared or despawned. The poster then reinstalled the game, attempting to get rid of whatever caused this to happen.
After being questioned by other users, the poster said:
"i have no fucking clue how that thing showed up in the game. i did install some mods, yes, but none of them fucked with any of the peds or anything like that. and CERTAINLY none of them added a fucking herobrine or default minecraft skin. i don't know, maybe you could say one of my hud replacements for some ridiculous reason included this thing that would spawn in and do that, but there's no way. i'm not the most familiar with modding the game, but i know for a fact that thats not fucking possible. there were no extra files that should have done that with any of the shit i downloaded"
It is unknown whether or not this quote from the poster is authentic or not, as there are only second hand sources for it from several years after the thread went defunct, with no know existing screenshots of this message.
The image that was included with the poster's first comment in later years was dubbed the "rocket image" (named due to it being taken while the player was aiming a rocket launcher.)
Later history and tangential evidence[]
A now deleted video uploaded to Bilibili, a Chinese video hosting platform similar to Youtube, in early 2013 discusses the legend of Herobrine, focusing mostly on Minecraft, but references his supposed ability to appear in other games, and makes reference to his sightings in San Andreas.
The text during this part of the video, roughly translated, read:
"some have said that the herobrine Demon can show himself in another video game. players have seen him in the call of duty games, grand theft auto games, and team fortress 2 games for example." It is unknown if this is referring specifically to the sightings in San Andreas, or sightings in other GTA games.
By mid-2013, the earliest known Herobrine mods for San Andreas were uploaded to the internet. For this reason, images claiming to be sightings of Herobrine after this point are generally assumed to be modifications, due to the ease of faking them with mods that are readily available online. However, there are a few known images of Herobrine from before this period that do exist, and were archived, unlike the previously mentioned lost one from the first known Reddit post. One example is the previously mentioned 2012 4chan post containing the so called "rocket image".
In March of 2015, a user on Reddit posted a comment replying to a post discussing PS2 GTA bootlegs, stating that they had seen "a weird ass 'gta vice minecraft storys' (sic) bootleg" for sale on Ebay at some point, with one of the image panels on the cover art featuring a "very low quality and poorly cropped screenshot" of Herobrine in CJs house. Supposedly the bootleg had originated from "some south american country" that the commenter couldn't remember, according to the Ebay description. It is unknown if this comment was simply a fabrication or joke or not, as no such bootleg has been found online. However, it's possible that this is due to a lack of online information on such an obscure bootleg. It's also possible that the Ebay listing did not have the title of the bootleg anywhere on the actual page, possibly being titled something along the lines of "GTA PS2 Game" or something else nondescript, making it impossible to search for if it did in fact exist.
In 2016, a video titled "UNUSUAL MAN IN GTA V [HEROBRINE SIGHTING!!!??]" was uploaded to youtube. The video showcases a strange masked NPC that appeared next to the player in a GTA Online match. In the video, the uploader claims that no players were near him when it happened.
In 2024, a video titled "Minecraft Herobrine in GTA San Andreas" was uploaded, showing someone finding Herobrine at Grove Street. This video was almost certainly faked using a mod.
In early 2025, a different youtube video titled "Minecraft Herobrine FOUND in Gta San Andreas", showed a supposed encounter with Herobrine at one of the rural trailer parks. However, the description of the video states that it is a mod.
Authenticity[]
Almost certainly, most, if not all of these encounters can be chalked up to urban legends and creepypastas. Much of the original Herobrine legend within Minecraft was faked to begin with, including the infamous theory of him being Notch's (the creator of Minecraft) dead brother. In addition, the possibility of something like this existing in the game is very slim, as many of the details simply are not plausible, especially the more supernatural and paranormal abilities that Herobrine is reported to have. Yet another crucial detail that can immediately debunk this myth is the fact that Minecraft was developed and released several years after San Andreas, so the possibility of Herobrine being even just an easter egg put in by the developers is impossible. Additionally, no files in the game resemble Herobrine's appearance.
While there do exist some screenshots of supposed Herobrine sightings from before mods of him existed, these could simply be mods that were either lost to time, privately made mods that were never uploaded and only created for the sake of faking these screenshots, or photoshops.
Additionally, some have suspected that the Realblake97 profile and post, and by extension replies in the thread and the story, may have never even existed in the first place; the only existing archives of the thread are transcripts and only a small handful of screenshots (these screenshots are not known to have been posted), both of which may be fabricated, with no such pages existing on the GTAForums site, or even any archives on archive.org's Wayback Machine. Defenders of the legitimacy of the Realblake97 story argue that it is possible that the thread was lost either due to improper indexing, server hosting issues, or that the moderators deleted the entire thread for one reason or another, possibly thinking that it was a joke like many of the users who replied in it, which it likely was. It is unknown where any of the Realblake97 story may have even originated from, if it is indeed faked.
Along with the very clear downright impossibility of this myth even existing in the game in any form at all, many of these historical threads and posts may have been faked as well in recent times, as previously mentioned with the Realblake97 story. Due to the lack of many concrete archived sites and known original sources, including a lot of the original posts and images of sightings having supposedly been "deleted" or otherwise lost, it is certainly possible that many of these accounts may have never existed in the first place, and have been fabricated in recent years, either as a joke, or in an attempt to make an "ARG" (alternate reality game,) or creepypasta.
Video and photo evidence[]
https://youtube.com/shorts/R1zHnGIXsQo
https://youtube.com/shorts/qEu0H8U71kM
