"Copy That"

About

“Copy That” is a memorable quote said by an actor portraying a store clerk at the American computer and video game retailer EB Games in a video advertisement for the 2014 first-person shooter video game Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. Upon its online debut in mid-December 2014, both the screenshot of the store clerk and the phrase from the commercial went on to inspire a series of parody illustrations and photoshopped images on 4chan and Tumblr.

Origin

The 30-second spot commercial was first released online via the official YouTube channel for EB Games Canada on December 16th, 2014 (shown below). In the video, two fans of the Call of Duty franchise race to an EB Games store to purchase the eleventh installation in the series, Advanced Warfare, which was released for PC, Xbox and Playstation in November 2014. Upon arriving at the store, the customers immediately ask for copies of Advanced Warfare, to which a store employee with a visibly lanky neck and soft-spoken voice enthusiastically responds “copy that,” an affirmative expression typically used in military radio communications and frequently heard throughout the video game series.

Spread

On December 19th, a link to the EB Games commercial video on YouTube was submitted to Reddit’s /r/videos community^[15], where it soon reached the frontpage of the site after accumulating more than 3,800 upvotes and over 2,200 comments prior to its archival. On the following day, the video advertisement was highlighted by MemeCenter in a post titled “EB Games Makes The Absolute Worst Ad – Copy That!” In the next 48 hours, the video was re-submitted at least twice to Reddit, first to /r/xboxone on December 21st and then to /r/poetry on December 22nd. Throughout the month, the original advertisement, as well as various screenshots of the EB Games store clerk, were posted on several sub-boards of 4chan, including /v/ (video games), /tv/ (television) and /s4s/ (shit4chansays), not to mention its appearance on general video game discussion forums like GameFAQs. On December 27th, a Facebook page was launched to curate a series of photoshopped images based on the exploitable image, and on the next day, a single topic blog was created on Tumblr with a similar purpose.