Meme History: The 5 best Minecraft memes
In early April 2025, A Minecraft Movie overtook Greta Gerwig’s Barbie in terms of opening weekend box office sales. By some estimates, the popular game has over 200 million active players worldwide.
Here are our top 5 Minecraft memes of all time.
Parkour Civilization
On October 5th 2023, a Minecraft Youtuber posted a video entitled, “Minecraft but I join PARKOUR CIVILIZATION.”
The idea is that you play as a prisoner-like “parkour noob” who’s only goal in life is to subsist, and maybe one day become a “parkour pro.”
The whole world is only navigable by jumping from block to block, hence “parkour civilization,” and in order to survive, you need to eat once a day. It's an easy one block jump for raw chicken or a more difficult one block vertical jump for beef, providing the user a potential half a hunger block more—at the risk of their very life.
Memers compare Parkour civilization to life in North Korea, or life in the world of Mad Max, or the ambitiousness of a Vice Presidential candidate.
Minecraft Guy
It’s an image macro posted to HALOLZ in October 2010, originally captioned “Wake up on island / punch trees.” This is a reference to one of the ways users commonly farm wood in the game—see also the “Punching Trees Gives me Wood” meme.
Pretty Minecraft-core, usually Minecraft Guy references common tasks in the game, and makes fun of how absurd they would be to do in real life.
Herobrine
In 2010, users on MinecraftForum[dot]net started a thread collecting stories about a mysterious figure who had appeared to separate players across single-player Minecraft sessions.
Originally referred to as “HIM,” and popularized by a 4chan post submitted to creepypasta.com, one user claimed to have been contacted on those message boards by a user named “Herobrine,” who first urged them to stop posting about it, and then whose profile threw a 404 Not Found message.
So for a while, this guy was like the boogeyman of Minecraft, spawning livestreams, mods, and even in-game altars and totems created for the express purpose of summoning this weird demon.
Rumors abounded that Herobrine was the ghost of the dead brother of game developer Markus Persson (aka Notch). But in due time, the apparition became so much of a thing that reportedly Notch himself had to set up a filter on his email to autoreply to anything containing the word “Herobrine,” presumably because so many people ask him about it.
I Am Steve
Steve and Alex are default character skins in the world of Minecraft and have been for a long time. However, our first glimpse of Steve in live action came in the teaser trailer for the Minecraft movie, where, appearing to the main characters in a ball of fire, Jack Black announces, “I am Steve.”
Whether it was for the purposes of dissing Roblox people, stanning it via in-game recreations, or suggesting that Minecraft was the way to bring political harmony to the United States, he’s kind of been everywhere since the movie’s release.
Chicken Jockey
If you don’t know, a Chicken jockey occurs when a baby zombie spawns and then mounts and rides a small chicken. In the movie, this happens when said baby zombie drops out of a container above, and onto a chicken for the purposes of ring-fighting Jason Momoa. Steve dubs him the “Chicken Jockey.”
In theaters, this has been causing cheers, food thrown from fans, actual chickens snuck into theaters, quiet sighs from theatre employees who have to suffer through it over and over again, and in at least one instance, such a ruckus that police were called to calm everyone down.
The Boomers had “Dammit Janet,” Millennials have “You’re tearing me apart Lisa,” and now Gen Z/Alpha has “Chicken Jockey.”
Don’t overthink this one.
So there are our top five.
Spanning the game’s inception to its toppling arguably the biggest toy IP of all time at the box office, we tried to give you a pretty wide swath here.
Now, everyone can go back to punching their trees.
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