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The Legend of Leeroy Jenkins

Continued from page 2

Published on March 08, 2007

I bother them anyway. I find a druid standing in the town square and tell him I'm writing a story about Leeroy Jenkins. "$#^^%& Leeroy," he shoots back. "Leave dude." I try approaching others about Leeroy and get the same reaction. Many ignore me or run away. One inundates my chat window with rude comments: "Rurneji shoots you the finger! Rurneji shoots you the finger! Rurneji shoots you the..."

  • Fred Harper
  • Anthony Camera
    Ben Schulz lost the beard but kept Leeroy Jenkins (left), his alter ego.
    Ben Schulz lost the beard but kept Leeroy Jenkins (left), his alter ego.

Details:

Version 1 of the original movie

Ver sion 2 of the original movie

The Jeopardy question

Leeroy in the elevator

Subject(s):

Leeroy Jenkins, World of Warcraft
I get the picture.

I finally find someone willing to talk: Netti, a female gnome dressed like a 1970s pimp who's riding a flaming-hoofed steed. I ask why everyone is down on Leeroy. "Well, all these random people get on this server to talk to Leeroy, so people who actually play here have to wait like hours because the server is full," she explains.

Since having eight million people concurrently play the same version of World of Warcraft would completely overcrowd the game, Blizzard has created many different servers, with several thousand gamers inhabiting each one. I'm exploring Leeroy's home server, Laughing Skull, to get the locals' take on their homegrown celebrity. It sounds like they're sick of him.

"Personally I think the video is lame," continues Netti. "I really don't care about Leeroy. He's just a loser who made a video -- wow, big whoop. If you log onto MySpace at all and search videos, there are tons of World of Warcraft videos there."

Netti's right. Gamers have created endless World of Warcraft movies: orcs dancing to MC Hammer, taurens lip-syncing to Broadway musicals, trolls and humans enjoying the love that cannot be named. The quality of many far surpasses that of "A Rough Go." So what is it about this one clip -- and Leeroy Jenkins?



Ben is as astounded as anyone else by the cult of Leeroy Jenkins. "I think it's absolutely ludicrous," he says. "I chuckled a good amount when we first released it, but I don't think it's the epitome of comedy by any means."

Ben hails from a dramatic family: His mother is a theatrical director and his father, a retired chemical technician, designs theater sets. Ben himself has considered voiceover acting; he has a great, deep voice and has taken classes to improve it. But no one in the family has ever achieved the sort of global fame that Leeroy has, thanks to a handful of words mumbled into a computer microphone one night.

"You could take the most famous theatrical production and I don't think you would get the broad awareness of it that you get with this thing," says James Schulz, Ben's dad. "I'm sure Shakespeare or any great playwright would just be dumbfounded at the possibility of it."

To even begin to understand "A Rough Go," Shakespeare would first have to wrap his mind around the concept of "machinima," the emerging form of filmmaking in which movies are created entirely inside video games. The term was coined in the late 1990s, when players began using game-play recording systems in titles such as Quake and The Sims 2 to make increasingly creative films. Machinima productions have now been seen on MTV, the Independent Film Channel and in Volvo commercials, and a few enterprising gamers have turned their cinematic hobby into commercial success.

Rooster Teeth Productions has created a business around its comedic video series Red vs. Blue, which it produces in the games Halo and Halo 2. "Most people have powerful computers sitting at home, and that's pretty much all you need to make these videos," says Gustavo Sorola, staff member and voice actor at Rooster Teeth. "Without too much investment, people can make their own videos. It's the equivalent of everyone having a camera."

But it only took one camera to capture Leeroy Jenkins and turn him into the most popular figure in World of Warcraft. Part of Leeroy's attraction, suggests Carl Goodman, deputy director and director of digital media at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York, may be the fact he is such a loser -- his straightforward foolhardiness is immediately identifiable and seditiously refreshing for players who spend way too much time planning strategies with their teammates and obsessing over virtual accomplishments. "In World of Warcraft, there is might and magic," he says. "You have an instant action movie available to you" -- an action-movie set that Ben and his friends had the audacity to use for a slapstick comedy. "It makes fun of gamers' overly analytical approaches to action," Goodman adds. "It's saying, come on, you geeks, just get in there and do it."

That Leeroy is the game's biggest failure rather than its highest achiever may explain why he's transcended the self-referential sphere of World of Warcraft and moved into the realm of pop culture. Everyone everywhere has pulled a Leeroy. "There's something more universal about this guy who screws things up for everybody than someone who is the best at something," says Henry Lowood, curator for film and media collections at Stanford University. "If you're not a player in the game, you are not going to be that interested in how spectacularly good a player is. But you can relate to someone who messes up."

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