Celebrating the 10th anniversary of World of Warcraft’s famous Leeroy Jenkins wipe

At least I have chicken

Have you ever wondered what Leeroy Jenkins means in the gaming world and where it originated? The tale begins ten years ago, a year after World of Warcraft was introduced to the world. Before the final raid, Molten Core, was even introduced to the game and before epic gear entered the game, there were still trolls in the game.

In the case of Leeroy Jenkins, a very coordinated set of raiders (from the guild Pals for Life) sat around the Rookery in the Upper Blackrock Spire figuring out the best course of action to take on the boss (and whether or not they even needed to do it).

The Rookery in the Upper Blackrock Spire was a room filled with dragon whelp eggs. If one of the eggs is stepped on it opens up and produces a dragon whelp. At the time of this raid, stepping on over 4 eggs could have led to failure, stepping on them all definitely meant death.

One of the raid members, our Leeroy Jenkins, was sitting — presumably AFK — during the pre-raid consultation. At one point, the Paladin launches himself foward yelling:

"Alright let's do this… LEEEEEEROY JEEENKINNNS!"

He then proceeds to run into the room, grab tons of whelps and wipe the entire raid (dammit Leeroy). This course of action lead to an in-game title and achievement to be added to World of Warcraft (your character's name followed by "Jenkins").

The video of Leeroy went down in history on May 11th, 2005.

Watch it in full 480p glory:

The original video can be seen here (with messed up audio).

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