Leeroy Jenkins

~ the obituary ~

In 2005 the world i was logged into was a turkish ultima online private server, which is where a lot of us ended up when a monthly subscription in dollars was not a realistic thing to sign. World of Warcraft was a year old and i knew what it was without knowing anybody in it. So Leeroy reached me the way most of that culture reached turkey, secondhand and late, as a sound file people quoted before they had seen the video.

The clip is forty five seconds long. A guild called PALS FOR LIFE is standing outside the Rookery in Upper Blackrock Spire, working out how to handle a room full of dragon whelps before pulling a boss called Solakar Flamewreath. One of them is running probability numbers out loud. Somebody notes that Leeroy is away from his keyboard. Leeroy comes back, hears none of it and runs in shouting his own name. Everybody dies. Asked what he was thinking, he says at least he has chicken.

It went up on WarcraftMovies.com on 11 may 2005 under the title Leeroy!!, and inside a day it was the most downloaded file the site had ever hosted. Ben Schulz played Leeroy. Ben Vinson, who went by Anfrony, was recording. What they had built was a recruitment video for their guild, a joke aimed at the maybe two thousand people who would get it.

~ the case file ~

~ how it became a word ~

The clip escaped the game faster than anything from that world had before. Within two years Leeroy Jenkins was a name you could use in a sentence to people who had never installed an MMO, meaning the person who ignores the plan and starts the fight. Blizzard leaned into it rather than fighting it: a trading card in october 2006 with art by Mike Krahulik, then in 2008 an achievement called Leeeeeeeeeeeeeroy for killing fifty rookery whelps in fifteen seconds, which is a company officially rewarding you for the mistake.

Then it kept going. There was a Hearthstone legendary and a Toyota commercial. Jon Stewart used it on the Daily Show in 2012 and a congressman reached for it on the floor of the house in 2023. Very few pieces of internet comedy survive the platform they were born on. This one outlived the file format it shipped in.

~ the argument ~

Almost immediately people started saying it was fake. The audio was too clean and the probability speech was written far too well for a guy improvising into a headset. PALS FOR LIFE said early on that it was staged and then also said it was a faithful re-enactment of something that genuinely kept happening to them, which satisfied nobody and kept the question open for over a decade.

That ambiguity was doing real work. The video is funnier if you believe it happened, and a lot of people needed to believe it happened. Vinson said later that they never expected anyone to take it straight, that they thought the satire was obvious. It was not obvious. It was the most convincing thing either of them ever made.

~ the day it died ~

In december 2017 Vinson released the first cut, the dry run they had recorded before the take everyone knows. Schulz posted about it on the battle.net forums and framed it as a net neutrality thing, which was what was in the news that month. Vinson said he had been sitting on the footage for years without knowing what to do with it.

Calling that the death is my choice and i will say so out loud, because the meme did not stop being referenced and Blizzard put the voice lines into Overwatch as recently as 2024. But a piece of folklore is not the same object as a video file. The folklore needed the possibility that a guy actually walked away from his computer, came back, ruined everybody's night and said something perfect about chicken. In december 2017 the people who made it put the evidence on the table and took that possibility away. What is left is a very good comedy sketch, which is a smaller thing than what it was for twelve years.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »