South Park does World of Warcraft
South Park. You either get it and find it hilarious, or you don’t get it and think it’s a great steaming pile of offensive crap. But when South Park decided to do an episode centring around World of Warcraft, the cartoon entered TV history and WoW got a publicity boost that no amount of advertising money could have bought.Tiled “Make Love, Not Warcraft”, episode 147 saw Cartman gather Kyle, Stand and Kenny together to take on Jenkins (possibly a reference to the now-famous Leeroy Jenkins), a WoW character that has become more powerful that Blizzard ever anticipated because the owner has played WoW nearly every hour of everyday for the last 18 months. The episode makes fun of MMOPRG players in the usual South Park way by showing the boys becoming more and more obese as they train their avatars for the upcoming battle with Jenkins.
But the most surprising thing about Make Love, Not Warcraft is that the South Park team received full cooperation from Blizzard in making the episode. Blizzard provided their own character models for each of the players as well as access to the then alpha server for WoW: burning Crusade. In addition to this, Blizzard made several animations, such as lip-synching, more gore and other animations that aren’t in the actual game itself.
The Sword of a Thousand Truths, which in the South Park episode is needed to defeat Jenkins, did make it to a beta test of WoW: Burning Crusade but has since been renamed to the Gladiator’s Slicer. Make Love, Not Warcraft is also notable as being the most widespread and widely watched example of machinima (using a computer game as an animations tool) to date.