Red Shirt Guy
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About
Red Shirt Guy is the star of a viral video that asks an obscure question regarding World of Warcraft lore during Blizzard Entertainment's 2010 BlizzCon. The video has been the subject of a variety of parodies and remixes.
Origin
On October 23rd, 2010, a video was uploaded to YouTube showing footage from a Q&A session from that week's BlizzCon. During the session a red-shirted teenage boy managed to stump Blizzard designer Alex Afrasiabi and loremaster Chris Metzen with a rather obscure question concerning a seemingly minor character in the WoW universe.
Red Shirt Guy: Hello. I have… I just finished reading The Shattering yesterday and I noticed something. It said that Falstad Wildhammer was going to be on the Council of Three Hammers but in the beta it's Kurdran Wildhammer and Falstad is not in the game at all. What happened to him?
Chris Metzen: Isn't Falstad dead? From Day of the Dragon? No?
Red Shirt Guy: No, he survived and in fact he was the leader of Aerie Peak in vanilla WoW through Wrath of the Lich King.
Chris Metzen: Of course… Yeah, Alex what's up with that?
Alex Afrasiabi: Thanks, Thanks for pointing that out. We're going to get that fixed.
Red Shirt Guy: Thank you.
Spread
On October 27th, 2010, the video was submitted to the r/gaming subreddit[1] and reached the the front page accumulating a total of 6,068 up votes. The same day it was posted to the viral content site BuzzFeed.[2] On November 1st TechCrunch[5] reported that Blizzard responded to the incident by fixing the addressed issue and added a non-player character named "Wildhammer Fact Checker" dressed in a red tunic:
Several Facebook[6] fan pages and a "Red Shirt Guy" Wowpedia[4] page have since been created.
Red Shirt Guy Responds
Red Shirt Guy posted a video on his YouTube account, InsaneGuyofDOOM[3] responding to his Internet fame on October 29th, 2010. He claims that his voice may seem strange in the video because he was nervous at the time, and confirms that he has been diagnosed with a mild case of Asperger's syndrome. The video was subsequently posted to Reddit[7] the same day, and reached the front page accumulating 4,394 up votes.
Derivatives
Images
Videos
Search
Search queries peaked shortly after the video was uploaded to YouTube in late October of 2010.
External References
[1] Reddit – Red Shirt Guy stumps World of Warcraft game designers at Blizzcon with a tremendously geeky question
[2] BuzzFeed – Red Shirt Guy Asks the Nerdiest Question Ever
[3] YouTube – InsaneGuyofDOOM
[4] Wowpedia – Red Shirt Guy
[5] Tech Crunch – Blizzard Puts Red Shirt Guy In World Of Warcraft
[6] Facebook – Red Shirt Guy
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