What do you think of this fact?
Hiss. Boom. If you’ve played Minecraft, you know the creeper: green, silent and very good at blowing up the house you just built. What you might not know is that it was supposed to be a pig.
Tall instead of long
In the early days of Minecraft, its creator Markus “Notch” Persson was building a model for a pig. Something went wrong. Mojang developer Jens Bergensten explains on the official site Minecraft.net that the creeper “was supposed to be the pig, but Notch mixed the height and the width values.” Instead of lying long and flat like a pig, the model stood upright.
Notch himself described the moment in the 2012 documentary Minecraft: The Story of Mojang, as quoted by Kotaku: “And I accidentally made them tall instead of long, so it was like a tall thing with four little feet.”
A bug with a job
Instead of fixing the mistake, Notch kept the strange creature. According to Kotaku, he gave it a green look and aggressive behavior. Minecraft.net says the model, combined with an AI that watched the player, seemed creepy enough to turn into a monster. According to Kotaku, creepers were the first hostile mobs in the game’s survival test in 2009.
Today it’s one of the most recognizable characters in gaming. Even the Victoria and Albert Museum in London has a creeper sweatshirt in its collection. Its catalog entry says the creeper was “apparently created accidentally” because Notch “wrongly programmed the code to create a pig.”
Bonus fact: According to Minecraft.net, a creeper explodes once it gets within three blocks of you.
The most feared creature in Minecraft is, technically, a pig with a posture problem.