In any video game with fairly realistic human characters, fans can often get a sense for the character's height, even if the developers don't state it explicitly. For less realistic games like Minecraft though, a character's height is harder to gauge. The Minecraft mascot and default player character Steve's height could once only be guessed at, since players know each block in Minecraft is a meter across. That gave the sense that Steve is fairly tall, but then Xbox released a tweet saying Minecraft's Steve stands at an impressive six feet and two inches tall.

A lot of fans were surprised by the news that Steve is well above the average height for a human male. It's certainly weird to imagine the Minecraft protagonist standing tall over real-life fans, but it's not just the comparison to a real human's height that's potentially shocking. It's particularly odd to think about how Steve sizes up compared to other well-known video game characters. There's a lot of tall characters out there, but it turns out that Minecraft's Steve is taller than a lot of them.

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How Minecraft Steve Sizes Up

Minecraft Steve close up

Xbox's tweet about the Minecraft mascot makes him taller than some remarkable characters right off the bat. For instance, Metal Gear's Solid Snake is generally just short of six feet tall, which means Steve has a couple inches of height on him. Steve is also taller than every single one of Persona 5's Phantom Thieves. Joker stands at 5'9", which is above average for Japanese men, while Yusuke Kitagawa is the tallest at 5'11".

Steve's height means that he has some pretty unexpected peers, too. For instance, Metroid's bounty-hunting hero Samus Aran is famously tall outside of her suit, with a Super Metroid guide describing Samus' height at 6'3". That easily makes Samus taller than most people, but it means she's almost exactly the same height as Steve. Sephiroth, the antagonist of Final Fantasy 7, is also pretty close to Steve in height. Although comparing him to other characters makes his height a little unclear, Sephiroth is officially 6'1", which means he's about on par with Steve.

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Other characters are still significantly taller than Steve, in spite of his surprising size. For instance, Halo's Master Chief still towers over Steve and most other human characters, standing at 6'10" without his Spartan armor. That means Steve would be only eight inches smaller than Master Chief, which is a significant difference but a lot less than most characters. Steve isn't particularly close in height to other famous video game giants like Lady Dimitrescu and Ganondorf, but it's still a major surprise that Steve is closer to these characters' heights than many of his peers.

Minecraft Steve is a Relative Giant

mojang live event update october 2020

Anybody who has followed franchises like Super Mario for long enough knows fans will eagerly debate the heights of characters if developers don't provide exact numbers. That makes Steve's precise height all the more hilarious. If other franchises with cartoonish, stylized characters start providing canonical heights for those characters, then Steve's height will be a perfect benchmark for surprising measurements. Mojang may have just tried to generate publicity with news on 2022's Wild Update for Minecraft, but it turns out revealing Steve's height might be an even better way to get fans talking about the game.

Minecraft is available now for Mobile, PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.

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