World of Warcraft Leeroy Jenkins Phenomenon Expansion as an internet meme
September 3rd, 2007 by admin
Leeroy’s popularity has spread to other Internet venues as well. In the popular MMORPG Guild Wars, a dwarven character named Kilroy Stonekin relates the death of his family and calls the players to battle with a similar shout of his own name. Unlike Leeroy, Kilroy’s shout conveys benefit to his players rather than spelling their demise. He does, however, have a tendency to aggro groups of enemies, while continuing to run towards his family’s murderer. The players must then fight these enemies, but must also keep following Kilroy, since his death means the defeat of the entire party. This might very well be a reference to the desperate attempt that Leeroy’s teammates made to support him.
In NCSoft’s City of Villains, there is a recurring Arachnos soldier NPC by the name of “Jenkins” (who typically has to be rescued because he keeps getting himself captured.) City of Villains developer Positron recently announced to players that the character “…was definitely inspired by a certain Internet movie.”
Leeroy appears as a direct tribute in Artix Entertainment’s popular Web game Adventure Quest where he travels with the players to battle at “Vamprook Spyre”, where players, Leeroy, Grodd, and Amani are planning the raid of the dungeon filled with “Vampragons”, a telekinetic dragon/vampire bat hybrid. The dialogue is copied nearly word for word from the movie. In Artix Entertainment’s “DragonFable”, warriors can sometimes perform the Jenkins shout when the spell “Battle Cry” is utilized.
The website community YTMND has served to extensively promote and to expand the Leeroy Jenkins meme among the viewers of its various websites and has a number of sites dealing with him including one documenting his supposed suicide. In particular the community has extensively promoted his battle cry. They have also had substantial effect on the meme in the form of artwork that was originally used on its Leeroy tribute site. The artwork, which has subsequently been replaced with a still from the original video, is a digitally edited picture from the film Black Knight, featuring the hero standing on a bucket of KFC, instead of a rock. This image has been widely distributed and is in fact utilized by Uncyclopedia in their parody article regarding the meme.
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