Every year around scary season, GwG offers a menagerie of thoughts on some of our favorite video game monsters. If you’ve ever wondered what exactly a creeper is made of, we’re just as lost as you are, but we do have some ideas about why Minecraft’s most memorable character is, ostensibly, the villain.

Nathan Schmidt, Contributing Editor

Let’s play a game. I want you to look at the following image and tell me how many creepers are in it. Ready? Go.

This is the image that accompanies Target’s “Minecraft Kids’ Bedroom Collection,” and I will tell you right now that as a parent of an eight-year-old, I own an embarrassing amount of the merchandise shown above. Minecraft basically permeates my days, to the degree that I frequently feel like I am playing it by osmosis—especially because my kid watches a lot of streaming and has therefore started narrating every move aloud. (“Where should this conduit go? At the top of my roof! At the top of my roof!” These are the exact words which are competing with this article for my attention right now.) But there’s something particular about the way Minecraft is marketed: Minecraft’s most iconic character is the villain.

Look at that image again: one Alex, one Steve, and how many creepers? (There’s at least one in there that you definitely missed, by the way.) Halo’s most iconic character is Master Chief; Kingdom Hearts’ most iconic character is Sora, followed of course by Donald and Goofy. But Minecraft’s signature branding catchall is the creeper, the little green asshole who sneaks up on you and ruins all your shit. This is not accidental. In fact, I would argue that it’s exactly the right choice—that the creeper really is at the heart of what makes Minecraft work.

There are so many ways to play Minecraft that it is more or less impossible to offer a full account of them; the game is a “sandbox,” sure, and a lot of people use it as a vehicle to build impressive structures, but you could enjoy anything from narrative-heavy campaigns to using command blocks to emulate Pokemon Red and still be “playing Minecraft.” That’s the appeal of simulated worlds, after all, going all the way back to the “ limitless game” designed by H. G. Wells in 1913: “go anywhere, do anything.” Of all the giant open world games and unapologetic clones that have followed in its wake, Minecraft succeeds above all of them in its ability to make the dream of a limitless game a reality.

In its earliest iterations, Minecraft was a fine building simulator, but as a game it was lacking two things: danger and surprise. The creeper is the engine of chaos that gives meaning to what is otherwise a sterile and orderly world, the impish acknowledgment that the only tower worth building is one that can be knocked down. Without the creeper, Minecraft is a block-stacking simulator. The creeper gives the game stakes. One might object that the zombie predates the creeper and is therefore a more consequential development in Minecraft’s history, but the zombie only damages the player, not your hard-wrought buildings. The zombie only hurts the body; the creeper breaks your heart. It’s more famous than Steve or Alex because, even though you have to have a player character, an exploding monster in a building game adds the tension that makes the player’s work meaningful.

The creeper is also a uniquely original creature among game monsters, and that makes it stand out in a crowded cultural landscape. There are other exploding enemies, sure: the Flood “carriers” in the Halo series, Left 4 Dead’s boomers, and the Bob-omb, whose ubiquity rivals the creeper’s. But everybody knows what a Bob-omb is. It’s an anthropomorphic bomb with legs. The creeper is much more mysterious; a well-known anecdote reports that Notch, Minecraft’s originator, mixed up the horizontal and vertical axes on a pig model and ended up with a tall, creepy four-legged shape, but a sizable herd of questions still remains. Why is it green? Why did Notch say that the creeper is “ crunchy, like dry leaves?” What is it made out of? How does it explode? Is it inspired by sphagnum moss, a famously exploding plant? What is that facial expression about, anyway? Are the creepers resigned to their fate? Does the creeper accept that it experiences the life of a Roman candle, existing only to burn out its single brief spark of vitality in one final, epic conflagration?

Can the creeper love?

I may have gotten a bit carried away for a moment. I think it is significant, though, that in a world where video game enemies frequently have more narrative depth and background than all the other characters in the game, and where the very definition of fandom is frequently tied up in one’s ability to extrapolate meaningful explanations from trivia, the creeper maintains its secrets. Even Jens Bergensten, the Chief Creative Officer at Mojang, says, “But we're still debating - is it flesh? Or is it more like leaves? Or is it fur? You don't really know just by looking at the pixels.”

If I were to give you my final evaluation of why the creeper is such a beloved monster, however, it would be this: kids empathize with it. Minecraft is not a game just for children, of course, because Minecraft is for everybody. You know what is for children, though? Target’s “Minecraft Kids Bedroom Collection.” Sure, there’s some crass commercialism in the idea that we know what makes a game popular because of what gets marketed to kids, but I can’t deny my own parenting experience, which tells me that the creeper is hot stuff. Children are chaotic, and although a child may be chaotic good and the creeper may be chaotic evil, there is still something operating between the creeper and the child in which deep calls out to deep–put a child in a room with a card house and see how long that tower stays standing.

I recognize that I am universalizing what is by definition a particular experience–a childhood–and that there are definitely kids out there who would tiptoe delicately around the imaginary card house that I’ve conjured. But there is frequently something in children that delights in destruction and mayhem, and this is the part of being a child that is most frequently subjected to the highest level of management, control, and surveillance on the part of adults. The creeper, on the other hand, does not ask for permission. It simply runs around and explodes. That kids, who so often spend their days being silenced by the various institutional mandates of adults, latch on to this release of pent-up energy that erupts in the middle of an otherwise orderly world should hardly come as a surprise.

I can now, for example, hear my son outside in the yard. He is banging on the garage door with a stick. Can the creeper love? The creeper can be loved.

For more creature features, read Edcel Gonzalez on the ecodisasters of Super Mario: Sunshine, Christian Haines on the rats of the Plague Tale series, and Don Everhart on the abstract terrors of Tetris: Effect Connected.