![]() ![]() When considering Team Fortress 2’s legacy, it’s hard to ignore how it tread new ground in the realm of virtual economies with the in-game hat market, and Valve’s development of the Steam Marketplace. A masterclass in growing goodwill in your player base. Valve’s ultimate flourish was in giving players the tools (Source Filmmaker) for free, to make their own versions of Meet the Team and countless custom community memes in tow. As a concept it’s nearly trite, and many attempts lack the sincerity of Valve’s approach in the late noughties, when they carved names like Heavy and Pyro into the annals of video game history. Nowadays, having an introductory featurette for a new hero is an expectation. The game is memorable for plenty of reasons - in particular, I remember the noise the menus would make when servers started to chug - but the ‘Meet the Team’ series of animated shorts was groundbreaking in how it humanized virtual characters in a strictly multiplayer game. It’s hard to think of a game that has entwined itself so successfully with the internet and meme culture than Team Fortress 2. Half-Life 2: Episode Two stands alone (no pun intended) as one of the greatest story-driven first-person shooters, a tradition that has since gone out of style, for the most part. Like many, the ending left my head spinning. “Then the overall tone really came into focus when (Episode One and Two, Portal series writer Erik Wolpaw) and the team nailed the ending – it wasn’t just a harder version of what you played, but it was the end of the story.” ![]() We called a meeting and Gabe asked what we were discussing – he was so incredulous that someone would suggest it that he didn’t believe it was a real question - he simply said - ‘why would we do that in an incredulous way?’ That answered that, and we spent the rest of the meeting talking about how awesome it was shaping up,” Faliszek continued. “That felt alien to many of us, heck all of us, but they were adamant about it so we asked Gabe (Newell, Valve President) to weigh in. “This will sound strange from the outside, but at one point an artist loosely tied to Portal made the pitch that the world should have dead bodies in it,” he continued. “I still remember the late-night conversation around it and then, as always – let’s put it in and test it.” “We had all just gone to see Children of Men, and that ending - where it ends a beat before your brain expects - stuck with us, and we brought it to Episode Two,” he said. Faliszek recalls working on the tantalizing climax of Episode Two, which saw Alyx and Gordon’s plans derailed by a pair of deadly Combine Advisors. ![]()
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