With the release of Warcraft last month, not only is the circa 2004 game getting a boost, but so is the story of World of Warcraft's most famous player, Leeroy Jenkins, who rushed into battle in a move immortalized in the 2005 video "A Rough Go." Two years later, Joel Warner tracked down Ben Schulz, Leeroy's alter ego, at his parents' home in Lafayette, where he was playing the game on his mother's Dell computer, for the 2007 Westword cover "The Legend of Leroy Jenkins."
With the movie now out, Warner recently revisited the subject for International Business Times. Turns out that Shulz, a building engineer who works for a Denver-based federal agency and is getting ready to marry his attorney fiancee, hasn't played World of Warcraft in years — though he still considers himself a gamer.
But he hasn't forgotten Leeroy. In fact, he walked the red carpet at the movie's premiere — even though Leeroy doesn't make an appearance in the film.
Leeroy has popped up in other unusual places, however. A 2009 Armed Forces Journal article on the reckless way American forces were charging into supervisory roles in Iraq was titled “Let’s Do This! Leeroy Jenkins and the American Way of Advising,” Warner notes. And a National Geographic series on an Afghanistan Air Force rescue team showed that its mission alert signal was the audio of Schulz yelling, “LEEROOOOOOY JEEENKINS!"
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