back when i was much younger, i wasn't really allowed to play video games except some random phone games on my iphone 4s.
that changed one day when i met some new friends at school, who later came over to my house, with a copy of minecraft on a usb drive.
we plugged it into my computer, but it turns out the copy of minecraft they had was for windows (i was on an apple mac mini).
instead of doing the thing i would now do (download a mac version of minecraft off of the website), i instead set up wine on my computer
(or maybe i had already set it up, unsure) and managed to get minecraft working with that. a few days later, i had gotten really into
the game, playing almost all day on some days. of course, sometimes my friends would come over and take turns playing.

one day, when we were all at my house, i decided to try the hardcore mode (which i never really tried, cause i preferred creative mode over survival).
at the time, i didn't really know what the "seed" was. i had no idea about how random generation worked, so the seed box was pretty much the
"put a random word or phrase in it" box. since we all lived in the united states, i randomly just decided to put the seed "usa"
(or some variation of it, could've been capitalized or with dots or both, still unsure).
the game loaded in, i think it might've been only my first or second time playing survival (great time to start playing hardcore, i know lol)
so i was incredibly unsure of what i was supposed to do. my friends instructed me through the process of building a small, two block tall house
made out of birch, and as i had not known to get wool to make a bed, i ended up surrounding myself in wood to survive the night.
after a lot of waiting, the morning comes. i break myself out of the birch covering, and begin to explore. something seems slightly off,
there seems to be a lack of entities, but mostly i just remember a sort of off feeling inside me. could've just
been the fact that i didn't know what to expect from a survival world.

eventually, i came across what appeared to be a huge hole in the ground. it didn't seem like a normal hole though, it was very large and square,
and in the middle of a mountain. my friends quickly educated me on what had happened (probably to the delight of the people reading this
screaming at me that it was just an unloaded chunk), and i started to look around the unloaded chunk, being careful not to fall in.
however, i soon found something that to this day, i cannot explain. there was a huge grid of zombies, all layed out in the somewhat flat
plains biome. they were all lined up with a block of space in between each one, and they weren't burning in the sunlight.
i cannot say for certain, but i think one of my friends might've said a minor swear word when they saw that.

of course the first thought of my friends was that it was herobrine (if you don't know about herobrine, look it up),
i didn't know what herobrine was, so my friends told me that he was a secret creature in minecraft that could mess with your game.
i think they might've also compared him to slenderman, but i didn't know who that was either (i was not very aware of internet culture at the time).
we logged off of that world since we were scared to go on it, and one of my friends volunteered to search for herobrine in a creative world.
he went into the nether, which i only seen once or twice before, and started flying around trying to look for him.
i was getting a bit doubtful about his ability to find anything, but a question still lingered in my mind.
what really happened?

if you'd like, feel free to attempt to recreate the scenario to try to figure it out. as i've said, the seed was something like "U.S.A",
the version of minecraft was somewhere around when 1.7.10 came out, maybe 1.7.9.
honestly, my theory is that it was probably just a glitch with running minecraft through wine, or just a minecraft glitch in general.
but that isn't as exciting as the possibility of herobrine haunting my copy of minecraft i got from a usb drive from my friend.


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