PROTIP — Three-panel Penny Arcade comic of Team Fortress 2's Heavy telling a player to shoot the Medic first.

PROTIP

2004catchphraseclassic

Published September 23, 2026

PROTIP is an internet slang term used sarcastically to preface advice that is either genuinely helpful or absurdly obvious2. The joke traces to a March 2004 Doom parody image by Andrew Stine featuring the Cyberdemon and the caption 'To defeat the Cyberdemon, shoot at it until it dies'3. That image passed as a real GamePro scan for over a decade before Stine outed it as a photoshop, and the gag ended up referenced in Doom's 2016 reboot as a hidden achievement.

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Overview

The PROTIP format wraps a piece of advice in an all-caps 'PROTIP:' label and then delivers something either useless, self-evident, or flatly wrong. The humor sits in the gap between the confident insider-tip framing and the triviality of the actual tip, with the Doom original ('shoot at it until it dies') setting the template3.

Outside gaming forums, protip drifted into a general-purpose ironic advice tag used across Something Awful, Reddit and blog comment sections in the mid-2000s3. Urban Dictionary's user-written definitions split the word two ways, treating it as both 'obvious advice sarcastically presented as sage wisdom' and 'a tip intended to convert a novice to an expert'2. The double meaning is load-bearing: readers cannot always tell whether a protip is earnest, joking, or both.

Origin & Background

Platform
GamePro magazine (source term) / Doomworld forum (viral spread)
Creator
Andrew Stine
Date
2004

The word 'protip' first appeared in mainstream print as the name of a recurring GamePro magazine sidebar in the mid-to-late 1990s, where staff writers slotted short strategy tips into their reviews3. On March 7, 2004, Andrew Stine, co-founder and former webmaster of the Doom fan site Doomworld, uploaded a fake GamePro screenshot to the Doomworld forum showing the Cyberdemon from Doom's E2M8: Tower of Babel level under the caption 'PROTIP: To defeat the Cyberdemon, shoot at it until it dies'3.

Stine built the image as satire of the redundant, obvious advice gaming journalists routinely included in walkthroughs. Doomworld regulars and other fans quickly circulated it as if it were a real magazine scan. Stine only confirmed the image was a photoshop on June 27, 2016, updating an old Doomworld thread to admit he had faked it himself3.

How It Spread

On October 12, 2004, Urban Dictionary user Shifty Eyed Goat submitted the earliest known entry for 'Protip,' with the example line 'don't call the cops reporting your weed stolen'2. By the mid-2000s the term had jumped into advice columns and standalone sites like protips.co, protipoftheday.com and ptotd.com, all since offline. The protipoftheday.com operator credited the whole enterprise to 'a particularly clumsily-worded spot in a magazine' that became an internet meme4.

Comics and games kept the format visible. Penny Arcade published a strip titled 'The Protip' on September 21, 20071. Urban Dictionary named protip its Urban Word of the Day on December 28, 20082, and Google shipped a tutorial widget called Protips.apk with Android in June 20103. Uber Entertainment's Monday Night Combat surfaced protip lines on its loading screens that same year3.

The cleanest callback came from id Software itself. Doom's 2016 reboot added an achievement called 'Shoot It Until It Dies,' unlockable by killing the Cyberdemon, a direct nod to Stine's Doomworld post3. Days later Stine updated the old forum thread to confirm the original image had been a photoshop all along3.

Timeline

1990

GamePro magazine begins using 'ProTip' as the label for strategy sidebars inside video game reviews.

2007-09-21

Penny Arcade publishes a strip titled 'The Protip.'

2008-12-28

Urban Dictionary features 'Protip' as its Urban Word of the Day.

Frequently Asked Questions