How I became a Jenkins
The one World of Warcraft title I earned by recreating gaming's most famous disaster on purpose: fifty dragon whelps, fifteen seconds, and a man named Leeroy.
If you played any video games in the mid-2000s, you have heard a man yell his own name.
Back in 2005, a clip went around of a World of Warcraft group standing in a doorway, carefully planning their approach to a room packed with dragon whelps. Lots of math, lots of “okay, on my count.” And while they planned, one of their guys, who had stepped away from his keyboard, came back, took one look, and just charged straight in, bellowing “LEEEEEEEEEEEROY JENKINS” as he ran. The whole group followed in a panic and everybody died. Depending on how you count, it is one of the very first gaming memes to escape into the regular world. People who have never touched the game know Leeroy Jenkins.
A few years later, Blizzard did the thing I love them for: they made it official. They added an achievement for charging into that exact room and killing fifty whelps in fifteen seconds, which is to say, for doing the dumb thing Leeroy did, on purpose, well enough to pull it off. Clear it, and the game gives you a new last name to wear under your character: Jenkins.
So that is a title I have. On October 18, 2008, per the screenshot up top, I went and earned it. Trihedron Jenkins. I cannot tell you it was hard. It is a joke achievement and it is meant to be. But there is something perfect about a game being self-aware enough to canonize its own most famous screwup, and about me being exactly the kind of player who went and got it. I read every quest. I knew all the lore. I took the world seriously. And I also stopped, one night, to go cosplay as the guy who ruined everyone’s raid. Both things are true. Both things are me.