A long, long time ago, there was a game called Team Fortress 2. A hugely influential multiplayer team-based shooter, Team Fortress 2 was released about four months after the release of the initial iPhone, which also arguably had an effect on society.
In fact, it was so long ago that TF2 was widely understood to mean Team Fortress 2 even amongst the whipper-snappers of the day. Today, the young think TF2 means Titanfall 2, and the elderly (myself included) write countless threads on Reddit and X begging for Team Fortress 2 to be formally acknowledged as the one-true TF2.
At its heyday, Team Fortress 2 was one of the most played and celebrated games of its era. Yet, the fight to maintain Team Fortress 2’s cultural relevance was gradually degraded by a protracted content famine, which saw, at best, small updates and Halloween events from 2017-2020, and only three significant content drops since.
Deprived of content, forced to play in servers full of cheaters and bots, it has been a painful era to be a Team Fortress 2 fan.
Well, that might all be about to change as Valve has appealed to the community for new maps and missions for Team Fortress 2, with the new content dropping on August 27th, and a second update promised before Halloween (October 31st).
In a humorous blog post entitled “Mann vs. Machine Maps Needed!”, Valve alluded to the horrors of AI before appealing to its community for non-Halloween-themed missions and maps. The statement reads:
“Thirteen years ago, we launched Mann vs. Machine, a chilling cautionary tale where an artificial consciousness tried to take all our jobs. You didn’t know it back then, but that was actually a literary device called “speculative” fiction, where writers (us) accurately predict the future (the present), but then hide it so as not to cause widespread panic.
In an effort to keep panic levels low, and apropos of nothing, we’d like to tell you a story: Once upon a time, a Mann vs. Machine mode in a video game was getting a much-needed update. And so a brave blog post writer (us again) asked the community to submit Mann vs. Machine maps and missions in time for that update. (For the sake of this panic-reducing speculative fantasy, let’s put the fictional deadline at Wednesday, August 27th).
If that was the entire story, you’d already be at a low panic level but vaguely concerned about a looming dystopian future (mission accomplished). But as is traditional in the genre of speculative blog fiction, there’s more! The king of the fictional land where this all happened (ancient Greece), decreed on stone tablets that even though the update was dropping right around the ancient Greek candy-harvest festival of Halloween, the maps did not need to all be Halloween-themed (first tablet) and in fact shouldn’t be (second tablet).
“Though some of them COULD be,” the king carved into a third tablet, held in the stone hands of a statue… of PRIMATE GEORGE WASHINGTON? No! It’s just regular George Washington in a dystopian future past where our sculptors are NOT AS GOOD AS IN ANCIENT GREECE! What an ending! (The end.)
Is this tale a simple flight of gripping, well-written fancy? (No.) Or a chilling glimpse into a future that could arrive as soon as, again, Wednesday, August 27th with a second part arriving right before Halloween? (Yes, see paragraph one.)”
Team Fortress 2’s enduring legacy
The majority of Team Fortress 2’s player base has naturally migrated to other games over the years, especially its spiritual successor, Overwatch. Yet many holdouts still preferred Team Fortress 2’s core gameplay. The simplicity of hero abilities, the identity and personality of its cast of characters, and the gunplay meant that nothing quite filled the gap left by TF2.
With nothing but scraps to feed on, the game’s appeal has endured. Team Fortress 2 featured in several Insomnia LANs, garnering high viewership and in-person enthusiasm from raucous crowds. TF2 will also feature at EPIC.LAN 45, due to community request, albeit in a for-fun capacity.
With new content on the horizon, will we see a mini-revival of the classic game? Will TF2 finally mean Team Fortress 2 again? This old man hopes so.
Darragh Harbinson is an esports writer specialising in Counter-Strike. He has written for Esports News UK, Esports Insider, UKCSGO, Dexerto, and Rush B Media.
