Press F to Pay Respects

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About

Press F (X) to Pay Respects is an action prompt featured in a quick time event from the 2014 first-person shooter Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. Upon the release of the game in November 2014, many players of the video game mocked the funeral cutscene for its forced element of interactivity that seemed out-of-place at a memorial service.

Origin

On November 4th, 2014, Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare was released. In the opening scene from the game's second mission, the protagonist Private Jack Mitchell attends the funeral of his best friend who died fighting in South Korea. The player is then asked to “Press F to Pay Respects” if they are playing the game on a PC, or to press the "X" button while playing on a console (shown below).

Background

According to the publication theScore esports^[3], the prompt was added in a late stage of the game's development and without the input of Jon MacInnes, the game's screenwriter. MacInnes explained in an interview that the game's scale made it difficult to be in control of every creative decision, and further says he wasn't aware that the prompt had become a meme until a journalist told him. He find it interesting that the simple phrase has evolved into something completely different as a meme.

Spread

On November 2nd, YouTuber doku uploaded a video of the Call of Duty sequence titled "Press X to pay respects," in which the player is promoted upon touching the casket (shown below, left). On November 3rd, Late Night show celebrity Conan O'Brien^[2] reviewed the video game 'Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare' on his clueless gamer episode and criticized most of the gameplay including the "Press X to Pay Respects" scene.
On November 4th, Redditor ZyreHD submitted a post asking why people were mocking the action cue to the /r/OutOfTheLoop^[1] subreddit. On November 10th, YouTuber NFKRZ uploaded a montage parody video titled "COD Advanced Weedfare: Intense Respect Paying" (shown below, right).

Derivatives

F in the Chat

With this meme's popularity, it brought a new meaning to the letter "F" itself, which came to be associated with sorrow and fails. On the livestreaming website Twitch, it began being spammed in the chat whenever such a thing happened, leading to streamers and others refer to this with the phrase F in the chat.