About

Enemy Spotted is a popular line uttered by characters in multiplayer first person shooter Counter-Strike when they spot a member of the opposite faction. While being a staple soundbyte in the game series, it became associated with a short clip of a young man wearing a black balaclava and attire doing an amateur recreation of the game's terrorist faction.

Origin

On April 10th, 2006, YouTube user cukrius uploaded a short homemade movie titled "Counterstrike in REAL" which features a group of young men dressed as terrorists and counter-terrorists from the famous game Counter-Strike (shown below, left). As of July 31st, 2017, the video has gathered more than 17 million views. Nine years later, on April 6th, 2015, user youdonowme uploaded a 3-second-cut clip of the boy wearing a black balaclava jumping down a flight of stairs before saying the line "Enemy Spotted" (shown below, right). This peculiar instance, in which suspenseful audio was added prior to the line's delivery, accumulated to over 580,000 views in the next two years.

Spread

On November 11th, 2015, a notable parody was made by YouTuber jimmy2296, using a short clip from Disney's classic movie Finding Nemo in which Nemo is trying to pronounce the word "anemone" but ends up stuttering (shown below, left). As of August 2017, it has gained over 670,000 views. This was the first of many parodies that began appearing on YouTube, with a substantial amount either parodying the Finding Nemo video or doing different jokes focused on the phrase (example of the latter shown below, right).

On June 15th, 2016, an entry on Urban Dictionary was made for the phrase, referencing the initial video.^[1] There have also been image macros and jokes in various other meme templates made in tribute to the original video and the line.

Various Examples

Search Interest

As shown by the graph, a sudden spike in the line's popularity occurred towards the last half of 2015, noting an influx of parodies being made.

External References