Battlefield

2002video game franchiseclassic

Battlefield is EA and DICE's long-running first-person shooter series that fueled a whole subculture of stunt clips, machinima and web comedy after its 2002 debut5. The franchise's chaotic vehicle physics and glitchy sandbox turned player montages like the Battlefield 3 RendeZook into viral touchstones and inspired shows like Battlefield Friends and the live-action miniseries RUSH5.

gamingparticipatory video memesyoutube viralfail memesmachinima memes

Overview

Battlefield is a first-person shooter series published by Electronic Arts and developed by DICE, built around large-scale multiplayer where infantry fight alongside jets, helicopters, tanks and boats on sprawling maps1. Early entries ran on the in-house Refractor Engine before the franchise switched over to Frostbite, the tech that also powers EA's other big-budget shooters5.

What pushed Battlefield past normal shooter status was its sandbox. Wide open maps, destructible buildings and chunky physics let players script their own moments, and those moments got clipped, uploaded and passed around YouTube for years5. The visuals also mattered. When Forbes reviewed the Battlefield 5 reveal, the writer called it "one of the most gorgeous looking games I've ever seen" even while picking apart the trailer's tone3. The look plus the physics turned everyday matches into raw material for edits.

The series also gave the wider FPS crowd a shared vocabulary. Community slang like "shitbucket" for grinding sweats and "jeep stuff" for the C4-on-a-vehicle trick spread through forums and video comments, right alongside the C100, an in-game unlockable knife with a bipod welded to it as a joke reference to community memes5.

How It Spread

YouTube did most of the work. The clip commonly credited with codifying the Battlefield stunt-video format is "Battlefield 3 – RendeZook," posted on December 8, 2011 by user Stun_gravy, in which a pilot ejects mid-air, spins around, shoots down the pursuing jet with an RPG and lands back in his own plane5. It racked up over 11 million views and more than 35,000 comments, and copycat attempts kept the trick alive across sequels5.

Comedy content came next. The web animation Battlefield Friends, made by the YouTube channel HankandJed, riffed on class stereotypes, glitches and Easter eggs in the games, and its premiere episode alone pulled around 3 million views5. HankandJed spun that success into the follow-up Battleloggers and the secondary channel Neebs Gaming, which built its own audience around goofing off in Battlefield servers5. Live-action got a turn too. RUSH, produced by Corridor Digital and Studio71, premiered on go90 on September 20, 2016 and followed a scattered US Black Ops unit working with mercenaries in Cherna5.

The games' marketing also generated its own memes, mostly through backfires. In late October 2016, EA's Battlefield 1 Twitter account posted "#justWWIthings" jokes overlaying phrases like "weekend goals" on GIFs of soldiers burning in flamethrower attacks and zeppelins falling out of the sky, and Polygon reported that the tweets were deleted after mass ridicule2. In May 2018, the Battlefield 5 reveal set off another cycle. Forbes tracked how the trailer collected 121,000 dislikes against 158,000 likes on YouTube7, and The Verge covered the #NotMyBattlefield hashtag from players angry that the trailer put a female British soldier with a prosthetic arm front and center6. EA and DICE also broke with tradition by announcing that Battlefield 5 would ship without the premium pass model used for Battlefield 1, replacing paid map packs with a free live-service called Tides of War4. A Polygon preview added that the game would let players fully customize soldiers by gender, race and features inside a Company system tied to the four classic roles of assault, engineer, support and medic8.

The next mainline entry, Battlefield 2042, arrived on November 19, 2021, with Ultimate and EA Play Pro copies unlocking a week earlier on November 125. It leaned into a near-future setting with climate-collapse geopolitics, stateless "No-Pat" soldiers, and Battlefield Portal, a mode letting players build custom rulesets using maps and weapons remixed from Battlefield 3, 1942 and Bad Company 25. To set that up, DICE released Exodus, an animated short prologue posted to YouTube on August 12, 2021, that brought back Battlefield 4's Kimble "Irish" Graves and Clayton "Pac" Pakowski5.

How to Use This Meme

"Battlefield" as an internet reference usually shows up in three ways. First is straightforward gameplay slang, where "playing some Battlefield" is used interchangeably for any entry in the series, whether that's BF2, BF3 or 20429. Second is the montage format popularized by clips like RendeZook, where players cut together vehicle stunts, trick shots and physics glitches into a single hype video and post it to YouTube in the hope of pulling numbers similar to Stun_gravy's original5. Third is community shorthand borrowed from Battlefield Friends, where jokes about the sniper who never spots, the medic who never revives and "jeep stuff" C4 vehicle bombs get reused as reaction material well outside the game itself5.

Frequently Asked Questions

References (10)

  1. 1
    https://www.battlefield.com/battlefield3/1/awards
  2. 2
    https://www.polygon.com/2016/10/31/13478344/battlefield-1-ea-deleted-tweets-marketing
  3. 3
    https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2018/05/23/battlefield-5s-reveal-trailer-has-me-more-confused-than-hyped/
  4. 4
    https://www.polygon.com/2018/5/23/17384662/battlefield-5-premium-pass
  5. 5
    https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/subcultures/battlefield
  6. 6
    https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/24/17388414/battlefield-v-fans-game-women-world-war-2-history
  7. 7
    https://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2018/05/24/this-year-its-battlefield-5-fighting-youtube-trailer-dislikes-for-a-change/
  8. 8
    https://www.polygon.com/2018/5/23/17385250/battlefield-5-gameplay-preview-pc-ps4-xbox-one
  9. 9
    https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Battlefield
  10. 10
    https://www.joystiq.com/2012/08/13/battlefield-series-celebrates-7-year-anniversary-over-0-milli/

Battlefield

2002video game franchiseclassic

Battlefield is EA and DICE's long-running first-person shooter series that fueled a whole subculture of stunt clips, machinima and web comedy after its 2002 debut5. The franchise's chaotic vehicle physics and glitchy sandbox turned player montages like the Battlefield 3 RendeZook into viral touchstones and inspired shows like Battlefield Friends and the live-action miniseries RUSH5.

gaming participatory video memes youtube viral fail memes machinima memes

Overview

Battlefield is a first-person shooter series published by Electronic Arts and developed by DICE, built around large-scale multiplayer where infantry fight alongside jets, helicopters, tanks and boats on sprawling maps1. Early entries ran on the in-house Refractor Engine before the franchise switched over to Frostbite, the tech that also powers EA's other big-budget shooters5.

What pushed Battlefield past normal shooter status was its sandbox. Wide open maps, destructible buildings and chunky physics let players script their own moments, and those moments got clipped, uploaded and passed around YouTube for years5. The visuals also mattered. When Forbes reviewed the Battlefield 5 reveal, the writer called it "one of the most gorgeous looking games I've ever seen" even while picking apart the trailer's tone3. The look plus the physics turned everyday matches into raw material for edits.

The series also gave the wider FPS crowd a shared vocabulary. Community slang like "shitbucket" for grinding sweats and "jeep stuff" for the C4-on-a-vehicle trick spread through forums and video comments, right alongside the C100, an in-game unlockable knife with a bipod welded to it as a joke reference to community memes5.

How It Spread

YouTube did most of the work. The clip commonly credited with codifying the Battlefield stunt-video format is "Battlefield 3 – RendeZook," posted on December 8, 2011 by user Stun_gravy, in which a pilot ejects mid-air, spins around, shoots down the pursuing jet with an RPG and lands back in his own plane5. It racked up over 11 million views and more than 35,000 comments, and copycat attempts kept the trick alive across sequels5.

Comedy content came next. The web animation Battlefield Friends, made by the YouTube channel HankandJed, riffed on class stereotypes, glitches and Easter eggs in the games, and its premiere episode alone pulled around 3 million views5. HankandJed spun that success into the follow-up Battleloggers and the secondary channel Neebs Gaming, which built its own audience around goofing off in Battlefield servers5. Live-action got a turn too. RUSH, produced by Corridor Digital and Studio71, premiered on go90 on September 20, 2016 and followed a scattered US Black Ops unit working with mercenaries in Cherna5.

The games' marketing also generated its own memes, mostly through backfires. In late October 2016, EA's Battlefield 1 Twitter account posted "#justWWIthings" jokes overlaying phrases like "weekend goals" on GIFs of soldiers burning in flamethrower attacks and zeppelins falling out of the sky, and Polygon reported that the tweets were deleted after mass ridicule2. In May 2018, the Battlefield 5 reveal set off another cycle. Forbes tracked how the trailer collected 121,000 dislikes against 158,000 likes on YouTube7, and The Verge covered the #NotMyBattlefield hashtag from players angry that the trailer put a female British soldier with a prosthetic arm front and center6. EA and DICE also broke with tradition by announcing that Battlefield 5 would ship without the premium pass model used for Battlefield 1, replacing paid map packs with a free live-service called Tides of War4. A Polygon preview added that the game would let players fully customize soldiers by gender, race and features inside a Company system tied to the four classic roles of assault, engineer, support and medic8.

The next mainline entry, Battlefield 2042, arrived on November 19, 2021, with Ultimate and EA Play Pro copies unlocking a week earlier on November 125. It leaned into a near-future setting with climate-collapse geopolitics, stateless "No-Pat" soldiers, and Battlefield Portal, a mode letting players build custom rulesets using maps and weapons remixed from Battlefield 3, 1942 and Bad Company 25. To set that up, DICE released Exodus, an animated short prologue posted to YouTube on August 12, 2021, that brought back Battlefield 4's Kimble "Irish" Graves and Clayton "Pac" Pakowski5.

How to Use This Meme

"Battlefield" as an internet reference usually shows up in three ways. First is straightforward gameplay slang, where "playing some Battlefield" is used interchangeably for any entry in the series, whether that's BF2, BF3 or 20429. Second is the montage format popularized by clips like RendeZook, where players cut together vehicle stunts, trick shots and physics glitches into a single hype video and post it to YouTube in the hope of pulling numbers similar to Stun_gravy's original5. Third is community shorthand borrowed from Battlefield Friends, where jokes about the sniper who never spots, the medic who never revives and "jeep stuff" C4 vehicle bombs get reused as reaction material well outside the game itself5.

Frequently Asked Questions