All right, chums. Let’s do this!
World of Warcraft’s famous Leeroy Jenkins video, in which a careless player gets his whole party (comically) killed, is 10 years old today. It was originally submitted to the site Warcraft Movies on May 5, 2005. Even if the video was staged, Leeroy’s warcry, which was just him screaming his own name, helped him become a mainstream phenomenon. Leeroy Jenkins was even part of a Jeopardy answer.
That makes the video just about 6 months older than World of Warcraft itself, which launched in November 2004. Ten years and five expansions later, Warcraft is still the massively multiplayer online role-playing game king, even if it is losing some subscribers.
Leeroy Jenkins has become one of the few player characters to enter Warcraft’s canon. A nonplayer character version of Leeroy can become a follower in your garrison (a feature added in the latest expansion, Warlords of Draenor), and he’s even a Legendary card in Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft, Blizzard’s free-to-play digital game.
So, let’s celebrate this momentous anniversary by watching the hilarious video (likely for the hundredth time):