According to Zimmer (2014) and McCool (2015) the term “spoiler” started out in the 1970s. McCool reports that in 1971 Doug Kenney, one of the founders of the National Lampoon, had a feature called “Spoilers” in which he revealed the ending of such films as The Godfather, Citizen Kane and Psycho. McCool also reports the use of “spoiler warning” in a column in the sci-fi magazine Destinies. As for the actual term “spoiler alert,” both sources agree that it first occurred in 1982, in a Usenet post (on Usenet, see Chapter 1), apparently in the context of a discussion of The Wrath of Kahn (a Star Trek movie).

A “spoiler alert” is essentially a courtesy warning to the reader/viewer/hearer that one is about to reveal something about a show, book, game, etc., that is a significant plot point (for example, who wins the game). Thus if one wants to avoid having the plot spoiled, one should stop reading/watching, etc. The interest in spoiler alerts comes from the fact this is very much a contemporary phenomenon and that jokes and memes have been using the term. If one searches for “spoiler alert” on the internet, one will find that numerous articles have the phrase “spoiler alert” in the title as a clever way of conveying the point of the article. For example, the title of Viega and Thompson (2012) is “Ten Years On, How Are We Doing? (Spoiler Alert: We Have No Clue)”. I will provide an extended example by analyzing a short 2015 comedy video by Key and Peele titled “Spoiler alert” which makes fun of the topic.

As we can see from the Google n-gram, in Figure 9.1, the earliest mention of the term begins in the 1990s, but the term does not really “take off” until the 2000s. So we can safely say that the spoiler alert is a practice (I hesitate to call it a genre) that is truly exclusive to the digital world. Now it is obvious that “spoilers” have always existed, at least potentially. It is easy to image someone saying, “Dante makes it out of hell and into heaven” to a reader in AD 1321 or a reader saying, “Aeneas makes it to Rome” to a would-be reader of the Aeneid in 18BC.