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One month into his junior year internship and Danny still couldn’t believe he was getting paid to think about games. Last summer had been cubicles and dress codes. Here, half the office argued about RTS balance over lunch.
He’d been thinking about reinstalling Age of Empires II. Just to mess around, maybe see if the old forums were still alive. He found one and scrolled.
Then he saw the thread title.
What Happened to Wheelord69?
He stared at the screen.
No.
No way.
Posted by: CastleAgeKnight89 – 2 months ago
Alright, so this has been bugging me for a while, and I need to know if anyone else here remembers Wheelord69.
Dude was an absolute menace. I used to see him all the time in ranked team games. NEVER typed a single word, not once, not even a “glhf” or a “gg.” But his playstyle? Completely unhinged. Not in the usual “this guy has no idea what he’s doing” way, but in the “he’s either a genius or a lunatic and I can’t tell which” way.
Never meta, never predictable, and somehow ALWAYS effective. He’d pull out the most absurd strategies that had no business working, and yet, they did.
His Teutons? A fortress nightmare. This guy would wall off half the map by Feudal, then just sit there like some medieval horror movie villain, letting you THINK you had map control, only to unleash absolute hell at the perfect moment.
And don’t even get me started on his monks. The man LOVED monks. Not in the “I’m gonna make 10 and be annoying” way. Wheelord69 would mass them like some unholy cult leader, waiting for you to overcommit before suddenly flipping your entire army against you.
I swear to god, I once saw him win a post-Imperial war with nothing but conversions and rams. No idea how. It shouldn’t have been possible. But it happened.
And then, one day? Gone. No more Wheelord69 in the lobby. No sign of him in ranked. No one ever saw him again.
I’ve been wondering for months now. Who the hell was this guy? A smurf for a top player? A retired pro just messing around? Some strategy savant who decided to disappear at the peak of his reign?
Did anyone else play with him? Does anyone KNOW?
Danny read it twice to make sure he wasn’t hallucinating.
Because these people were talking about Matt. His cousin. The guy who told him this morning that “gel point is a science, not a feeling”.
He scrolled to the comments.
→ SheepMicro: Holy crap I remember Wheelord69. I was on his team once. Dude said NOTHING the entire match. We were getting destroyed, and I thought we were done for. Next thing I know, he’s built a fortress city in the corner of the map, walled himself in, and started booming.
Thirty minutes later, my dude marches out like he’s Rome reincarnated, and we won a 3v4 post-Imperial war because he had so many paladins and monks I think my GPU almost crashed.
I asked him after the match how the hell he pulled that off. No response. Man was a ghost.
→ BoarLureMaster: I played against him once. Thought he was trolling because he made nothing but infantry and monks. I was Meso civs, went full eagles. Biggest mistake of my life. The moment I engaged? Suddenly half my army was his. I panicked and typed “Dude WTF” in chat. No answer. Meanwhile, his teammate DannyTheMan types “CONVERT AND REPENT.”
I just alt-f4’d.
Danny had to put the laptop down. He was making sounds that weren’t words.
They remembered him, too. DannyTheMan. One year later and he was still the hype man for a silent lunatic who played monks like a war crime.
He wiped his eyes and kept going.
→ HouseWallKing: I saw DannyTheMan in a lobby a while back and asked him what happened to Wheelord69.
Dude just typed “He has ascended.”
Then he left.
→ CastleAgeKnight89 (OP): That settles it. Wheelord69 wasn’t just a player. He was an event. And we will never see his like again.
Danny grabbed the laptop and took the stairs two at a time.
Matt was at the counter, stirring another batch of jam. The kitchen smelled like berries. It had smelled like berries for weeks.
“Matt.”
He checked the thermometer. “Hm.”
Danny set the laptop on the only clear surface and turned it to face him.
“Read this.”
He looked at the screen for about two seconds, then went back to the pot.
“No.”
“NO?! Matt, these people think you were a smurf.”
“I don’t even like blue.”
“That’s not what—there are people out there who are still recovering from what you did to them!”
“They adapted.”
“They didn’t. That’s the whole point of the thread!”
Matt said nothing. Danny scrolled down to the HouseWallKing comment and jabbed his finger at the screen.
“Read that one.”
He read it. His hand stopped on the spoon.
“…That was you?”
“That was me.”
Matt almost smiled.
“So. You wanna come out of retirement? Reclaim your title?”
He went back to stirring. “No.”
“Just one game. You, me, the faith-based economy—”
“No.”
“This is a crime against gaming, Matt.”
“I ascended.”
Danny threw a dish towel at him.
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