Minecraft characters: History of all protagonists and when they were added

In Minecraft, players can choose among different characters to play as. However, the only difference between them is their appearance. Ever since Mojang Studios released the block game, it has offered only basic character skins to choose from. While players were given the ability to create their own character skins and add them to the game, the default ones are iconic.

Here are all the official character skins, their history, and more.

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Every official character skin in Minecraft: History, story, and release date

Steve

Steve is the first character ever created for Minecraft (Image via Mojang Studios)

Steve is essentially the face of Minecraft. Whenever people think of the game's main character, their familiar face pops up. This character was designed by the creator of the game, Markus "Notch" Persson.

Steve has dark brown hair, a goatee, and blue eyes. They wear a light blue top, blue pants, and black shoes. When the block game was still in development, Notch initially created this character as a mob that would spawn in pre-classic and classic versions of Minecraft. At the same time, it was the skin used by the player's character.

Even though many perceive Steve as a male character, Notch himself stated that gender does not exist in the sandbox game.

Since this was the very first character in the game, it is safe to say that they were added to the title back in 2009 when Minecraft was born. Even today, Steve is the default character in this game and is used by millions of players. Over the years, their appearance has been modified countless times in different ways.

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Alex

Alex was the second character introduced for the game (Image via Mojang Studios)

Alex is the second character that was added to Minecraft and has also become synonymous with the title. Compared to Steve, however, Alex does not have an extensive history.

This character has slim arms, ginger hair, a ponytail, a green top, brown pants, and tall grey boots. Alex was added to the game on August 22, 2014, after the game was acquired by Microsoft. This skin was added to console and mobile versions later down the line.

One of the reasons why Alex was added to the game was to help players represent themselves in terms of gender, as mentioned by Microsoft's studio head, Helen Chiang.

While Notch initially stated that this character does not have any gender, Helen Chiang wanted the block game to have different genders to help the player base represent themselves. Since Notch left the game company, a lot changed for the famous sandbox title. That said, no gender for Steve or Alex has ever been confirmed.

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Ari, Efe, Kai, Makena, Noor, Sunny and Zuri

Four out of seven new characters were added to the game after 10 years (Image via Mojang Studios)

For a decade, Steve and Alex were the only two default playable characters in the game. This changed when Mojang Studios finally added seven new skins to the game.

In October 2022, the developers announced Noor, Sunny, Ari, Zuri, Makena, Kai, and Efe as new characters. All of them had different appearances and skin tones. This was a way for Mojang Studios to help this title's diverse community represent themselves in the game. All these characters were added with the Java Edition 1.19.3 update.