'South Park' Gamer Guy / Fat Computer Nerd

About

South Park Gamer Guy, also known as South Park WoW Guy or Fat Computer Nerd, refers to an image of a character from South Park who is seen slouching in front of a computer screen with his hands on a mouse and keyboard. The image comes from the 2010 episode of South Park “Make Love, Not Warcraft” and spread online in the early 2010s and onwards as an image macro and reaction image meme.

Origin

On October 4th, 2006, season 10, episode 8 of South Park aired, entitled “Make Love, Not Warcraft.” In the episode, a gamer puts thousands of hours into World of Warcraft until his character is powerful enough to hack the game itself. This hacker is revealed to be an unnamed obese man who is seen at various points throughout the episode, rapidly clicking his computer mouse while staring at the screen and occasionally eating potato chips (YouTube^[1] reupload of the character’s introduction seen below).

Streamer PirateSoftware shared that his father allegedly was the inspiration for the character, since he knew the South Park staff. He shared an image of his father beside the "prototype" character in a Twitch stream. A June 13th, 2022 YouTube^[7] reupload of the clip can be seen below, earning 27,000 views in under two years.

The image circulated online starting about two years later. According to a reverse image search on Tineye^[1] (then link to the results page in the footnote), the earliest known instance of the image being posted was on the site on Madshrimps.com on February 4th, 2008, but early examples of the meme have been lost. The earliest recovered meme using the character was uploaded to Know Your Meme^[2] by RandomMan on March 1st, 2013, where it received 1,580 views in 11 years (seen below).

Spread

Prior to trending as a meme, the South Park Gamer Guy was referenced as a joke within the South Park fandom, and images of the character circulated online. For instance, in a post on Reddit's^[3] /r/funny from November 8, 2013, a man was seen cosplaying as the character. The post (seen below) received 3,100 likes and 393 comments in 10 years (now archived). The cosplayer, named Jarod Nandin, received online praise and notoriety after photos of his cosplay were spread by various media outlets.

Around 2017, the character began to see more mainstream spread as a meme, with several similar images of the character at his computer being used as formats, particularly after it was added to the Imgflip database as an adaptable template. One early example was a meme posted to Imgflip^[5] by user mladenik in 2017, which uses the template to joke about trolling. It earned over 28,000 views in eight years (below, left). Another Imgflip^[4] meme from 2017, posted by bigmacdaddy in 2018, earned over 1,600 views in seven years (below, right).

One of the most notable posts about the character and meme format is a January 3rd, 2021, post by @Slasher on X^[6] / Twitter. The post announces the death of South Park Gamer Guy cosplayer Jarod Nandin due to complications of COVID-19. It received over 46,000 likes and 6,300 reposts in two years (seen below).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References