The Memes Of Firefall

This is a little leasurly guide to describe some of the rich interactions we've had during the 3 years of beta for Firefall. And it's a testament to the community if it gives rise to it's own memes.

As you're getting involved in the community of this game you'll sometimes hear "crazy" things.I'd like to explain some of em. Some are art pieces that started to get their own meaning and have a life on their own. Those pieces were presented during Firefall Live's Do You Even Art Bro. Other memes just spontaneously grew out of the many community events and even from the Chosen themself! (they have memes too!)

Jawbones

In early (close beta 2012) days, when the open world would be explorable for the first time, all chosen would constantly taunt the player. One of those taunts was: “I will collect the jawbones of your loved ones”, this kinda stuck with the community till this day. Even though the chosen mainly silent now, the perceived threat of them collecting jawbones is still very real with players!

FauFau

FauFau is a cute way of saying Firefall. It was mainly inspired by Sara Roberts (Zh1vas) who - in her role of the new co host for Firefall Live - screamed "Firefall" in a cute way during one of the streams. As it was transcribed in twitch chat as FauFau, it lived on with some members and afterwards became an ingame (hardcore) army you can apply for.

Brody

Brody used to be an Accord contact during the closed beta for a while. He briefly replaced Oilspil as a thumper operator to respond to players when they would call down or launch a thumper.

However there was a bug in the game that caused Brody to always comment on players not having gathered enough materials even when the thumper was 100% full. This became a "grumpy Brody is never satisfied" meme.

Brody was removed for Open Beta, you could only hear him during the new player experience from that time on.

El Terromoto

El Terromoto is a character in Sunken Harbor who retired from holmgang championships and now pimps players to do LGV races.

The following sentence made him "a meme".

I've heard about you, some new idiota thinking he can COMPETE with the rest of us

Players must have heard this more than a million times each time they arrived at Sunken Harbor where he usually dwells.

Since the launch of Firefall, he somewhat dissapeared, watercooler stories tell he's hiding because he's so afraid that players want to take all their frustration out on him.

VP of Jazz Hands

The meme was initiated on the firefall forums by CptFancyPants who started a thread called “New dev diary : James MacCauley I’m sorry[forums.firefallthegame.com],

The main post alluded to the joke of Jazz Hands when James MacCauley made exaggerated hand gestures in some of the very first development report videos that the studio made to explain what firefall was. Back at the time he was still VP of game development, as he is now the CEO of Red 5 Studios.

It’s rumored that he now even has a “VP of Jazzhands” ingame title.

MacCauly himself (when asked in Firefall Live), thinks it's very humorous and we should all have a good laugh.

Rudocracy/Rudified

Scott Rudi is the lead designer on Firefall and he's the man with the plan, whenever he appears as guest in Firefall Live he has lots of things to say, lots of design to talk about and on the forum he's the guy (RudiKazootie) with the lengthy posts about upcoming changes and the design philosophy behind it.

He does this with composure and can rival Jazzhands in terms of "taking game" intensity. In essence: whenever Scott explains or fixes something in the game it becoems it's own model of society, christened: Rudoracy, and in it: problems don't get fixed but Rudified!

Phebez

Phebez/Phebes is Phobos' (the game's producer and former community coordinator) evil silent twin brother.... or is he actually a she and a princess ? We'll never know.

MoeFall

Bietol, a member of Red 5 studiops created a thread[forums.firefallthegame.com] on the firefall forums with the subject of "Mo' creatures antropromorphizations of the inhabitants of firefall". That resulted in an instantly happy community in dire times of beta testing :)

Six Sided Rhombus

This “meme” was “invented” by our former community MC ThaCheez (Tony Reyes) during the very first edition of Firefall Fest which was held in Ocrober 2012, More specificly: in a prize giveaway segment in the second block on monday with Felicia Day and Will Wheaton, he stated that the table was looking like a “six sided rhombus”. Which was received with much laugher because a Rhombus is not a geometric shape nore is it a hexagon (the true shape of that table)

(Team) Sweatrag

Again this was something invented by Tony Reyes (ThaCheez), our former Community MC. It seemed to be very hot always during Firefall Fest and with all the lights shining on him, he constantly had to wipe off his face and eventually made something “tough” out of it. This meme took form as he did the same thing over and over across all daily blocks, and by the time the first Firefall Fest ended, everyone was talking about his sweat rag. Jokes were passed that you could also win them etc, twitter took off with #teamsweatrag hashtags...

Tony's hole

During the Night of the Melding (Halloween) Special event stream, Tony and Frank were doing an Ares mission in the the bunker near stonewall whos only entrance is a small shute.

When they completed, participating players on the stream would choke the entrance with LGV's and this became a memorable moment as Red 5 members were pressed to do some "inappropriate" remarks out of frustration :)

You can witness this moment if you look from 1:11 on this twitch stream:
http://www.twitch.tv/r5studios/b/475278772

#blamepez20xx

This 'meme twitter tag' doesn't really have an "origin", but advances every year. It started to gain popularity because of several root causes. Mainly if something goes wrong in the world of Firefall, on the forums or on livestreams such as Firefall Live, FadedPez (Frank Lettieri) has to do the explaining as of why stuff has gone wrong. So after time he had to do lots of explaining for things such as Delays of patches, Late starts of Firefall live episodes, forum or other community related events. So people jokingly started to say "blame Pez", and that naturally rolled into a hashtag meme.

It was even being used as keyword for prize givaways in Firefall Live.

Moist

Moist was the byproduct of Tony's Sweatrag. Tony's sweat wasn't just sweat, it's "Moist". It touched everything concerning Firefall!

Later on Tony began to resent "Moist" a bit, he couldn't stand that it was everywhere where his sweatrag went, and people reminded him of that fact even a year after it became a "thing".

Red Huge

This reffers to a holographic representation of Admiral Graves who was converted into a Chosen warlord and can be seen (and heard) in Black Water Anomaly;

His daughter Pilgrim played the main role in the Firefall Manga.

When User Kazar saw that, he made a rather ominous thread[forums.firefallthegame.com] about it on the firefall forums that people liked.

Red Huge: JBWill

Forum user Killbista mistakenly took the images of The Dude (from The Big Lebowski), to be JBWill's actual avatar. He noticed images of The Dude on the internet and thought JBWill was famous :)

A couple forum members took it upon themself to create this great (mashup) image:

Got Gas / Doomsday event meme

Somebody made a thread about strange sightings of Chosen near Copa and in Blackwater. The user reported that these Chosen were able to jetpack, an ability that the AI Chosen don't have.

The meme started when speculation arose that chosen were using the swamp gas from Blackwater swamp to prepare for something.

It turned out to be the Doomsday Event (June 13th 2014) that was held 2 days before the Early Access launch of Firefall.

In this event, Red 5 studios' developers took control of custom made chosen earthsieger units and played "PvD" against the players on the live servers. They took over watchtowers and SIN towers just as normal Chosen would do but with more brute force, special weapons and "scourged earth plans"

Aero memes: Gribbit/boss-boss

In the beta version of Blackwater Anomaly,players were simply looking for an anomalous device to bring back to Transhub for analysis.

This device used to be found on the location where you now fight Necronus, As the player picked it up Aero (with her heavy spanish accent) would say "gribbit and let's get out of here".

Aero is known to start several other memes on the firefall forums such as the way she sometimes used to greet the player when he logged in by saying "boss-boss". When trying to psychologically analyze her, she must have the urge to come up with a new brazilian dish called "radio bacons".

Among her long stretched Leht's do this or leht's do that sentences, Further vocabulary of Aero contains: "This guy gives me the cribs"

#blamepez

#blamepez is a "meme" that started to catch on an own life during 2014 and found its origines on twitch chat during Firefall Live Streams.

Firefall Live is a weekly show hosted by the Firefall creators on friday 10 am PST, in which viewers can get up to date on numerous things like, studio updates, expected game updates, fan art submissions etc. It also often hosts a discussion segment where players will call in on teamspeak to ask game related questions to the developer.

Since early 2014, Frank Letierri AKA FadedPez is the host of that show. Quite often, the stream suffers from delayed starts and some technical difficulties inbetween segments. We've recorded delayed starts for up to 20 minutes and when the stream would start, audio signals weren't always very loud or wrong trailers were started or situations. People would always "Blame FadedPez" for the mistakes that happend in the stream. He would sometimes announce a video that didn't match what was shown, and gradually that meme grew past the initial meaning and he was also being "blamed" for game server outages, especially if they happened right before or after Firefall Live. It carried on to twitter as well, when people would report bugs and Pez would respond, people got the urge to place the #blamepez as easy answer :)

Just like FauFau, #blamepez has it's own army in the game now with the tag [BLMPEZ]

[Civic42]

so I managed to get into the forums by accident

[CosmicD]

at least we have the memes :)

[Civic42]

Welp, Firefall finally shut down.

[DARKB1KE]

RIP Memes.

[SomeUnregPunk]

The turtles in the amazon move extremely slowly across the Amazon.
You can't hurt them and they don't react to you.
The Melding affected a lot of creatures on this planet... but somehow it only made the turtles even slower than ever.

[DARKB1KE]

What was the thing about the turtles? Just that they're mysterious?

[MasterGeneralB]

Don't forget Amazon's mystical turtles...

[Itsuko]

yes

[SomeUnregPunk]

this is cool. Thanks for making this.

[alkoholisoitunut lisko]

yo momas so fah when she walks ppl thing shes a thumper <eXTREMELY bad joke