Team Fortress 2 Fans Inconsolable After PC Gaming Show Snub
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Loading... - Aidan Moran
- 16 Jun 2022
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Some poor Team Fortress 2 players—beleaguered by bots, stomachs growling from the game’s lack of major updates—wrongly believed they would finally get a dose of good news after spotting the Engineer character in a promotional image for PC Gamer’s PC Gaming Show on June 12. They did not.
To be fair to PC Gamer’s graphic designer, the promotional image also featured characters like Manny Calavera from the adventure game Grim Fandango, which was released in 1998, The Red Prince from role-playing game Divinity: Original Sin II, and Lara Croft from the Angelina Jolie movie. We can assume that gamers in 2022 aren’t frothing at the mouth for a Grim Fandango re-remaster just in time for its 24th birthday, but Team Fortress 2 players would gladly accept the most microscopic crumb of news to keep them fed.
They’ve had a hard few years. Video game company Valve has put the 15-year-old game mostly on the backburner aside from lifeless Halloween-themed updates. Team Fortress 2 players once kept track of their neglect on the website Creators.TF with a graphic indicating days since the game’s last major update. To fill the empty days, they also maintained a repository of fan-made updates to keep the “authentic Team Fortress 2 spirit” alive and to rise to the occasion when Valve wouldn’t. That website is down now.
Spotting the Engineer out in the wild was thrilling for these sad puppies. Seeing him proved that other people could see him too, and that they remembered Team Fortress 2’s existence. A normal promotional image turned into a single, hopeful firefly in the game’s starless update catacombs. But once players’ hope grew too big, PC Gamer stamped out that firefly real quick.
“Just to check everyone’s collective expectations—this is a promotional image celebrating some iconic characters in PC gaming,” the website tweeted on June 12. “Team Fortress 2 isn’t featured in this year’s show, as much as we’d like it to be.” Ah. Can you hear that? It’s the sound of 30,000 hearts getting bazooka gunned.
It was funny how Team Fortress 2 fans collectively deflated, even though context clues might have saved them from disappointment. They also knew their intense reaction was funny, and posted a lot of memes that involved crying and laughing and laughing about how much they’re crying. Read More...
