World of Warcraft’s Pepe the bird goes from lark to phenomenon

When World of Warcraft texture and prop designer Jordan Powers drew a sketch of Pepe the bird as a doodle for a school art project years ago, he had no idea just how famous his little feathered friend would become.

He put it into his work on the Warlords of Draenor expansion pack for Warcraft, which launched this month, as a whim. Players can, with a little effort, entice the bird to sit on their heads and ride with them as they travel around the world in the massively multiplayer online role-playing game. And that’s when Pepe, ahem, took off.

The WoW audience fell in love with the adorable big-eyed bird, creating fan art, a pile of Tweets, and his own #pepe hashtag (which he shares with famous soccer player Képler Laveran Lima Ferreira). Most of the traffic is players posting photos and videos — hundreds of them across the Internet — of the fluffy bird atop their characters’ heads. They’ve demanded upgrades to Pepe, clothing for Pepe, a place (other than their heads) for Pepe to sit, and even dance moves for Pepe.

“What began as a sketch in my notebook has now evolved into something much, much more,” Powers wrote in a blog post this weekend. “Working on this expansion has been a great honor, and I am incredibly happy to have Pepe so well received by the community.”

He originally doodled the bird for a 3D project in an art class he was taking, he said.

“I started putting him in all of my work, gave him a name, and eventually a personality,” he said. “After Blizzard hired me later that year, I decided that I just had to put Pepe in Warlords of Draenor … I am in awe of the fan art I’ve seen on Tumblr and the rest of the ’net.”

If you want to know how to get Pepe for yourself (he’s inside your garrison town of any level in the World of Warcraft Warlords of Draenor expansion pack), fans have posted videos for Horde and Alliance players.