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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/Ataraxidermist on 2025-01-28 17:51:26+00:00.
Original Title: [Videogame community and modders – Team Fortress 2] How to foster and nurture a beautiful mess of a community with lots of creative (if utterly bonkers) minds, only to slowly strangle it to death yet fail to kill it.
Hello wonderful people, fancy seeing you here. Don't stay out, it's cold and snowy. Get in and don't worry if you don't know a thing about video games, I will walk you through the important aspects and terms, because the current Zeitgeist is inclusion and I make sure to include the noobs, the limited net-worths and the clinically insane. Incidentally, this game happens to be played a lot by these three populaces.
Don't mind the weirdos dancing. It's better that way. They usually are a lot more lively, you would have had to dodge a number of rockets to get here.
It's windy, I know, we keep all of our doors unlocked and open at all times here in Doublecross. Come to think of it, I wonder why. Our documents may be safer behind locked door, I'm pretty sure the other team has no lockpick at hand. Come, let's walk, it will keep you warm.
Ignore the pyro. He... she? They do whatever it is they do.
That briefcase over there? It's nothing, merely our top-secret documents, allegedly. Don't tell the other team, but we write random stuff on papers and stuff them in there. I'm not even sure there are real secrets in the briefcase, but no matter. Mark my words, one of these days, we'll get the other team's briefcase, and then they will be sad because we won.
I too write random things to stuff inside the briefcase. Look at this, I wrote about the history of MannCo's mother company Valve and some of the struggles it went through with this game of ours. Want to have a look?
Turning valves and gathering steam
Our senseless and thus essential story starts with a context, and the context starts with a man: Gabe Newell. Or Gaben, for those who must reduce two words into one for better focus on playing a videogame and get wrecked by twelve years old hyperactive children who, if their words are to be believed, have done unspeakable things to my mother.
Gabe Newell makes a step into the world and decides he would work on videogames and for that, he would create a firm with nothing but his two hands, courage, and millions in a truck full of cash he got from working at Microsoft for 13 years. During this time, he was producer of the first three versions of Windows, and perhaps more importantly for us, spearheaded a team to port a game on windows to prove it was a game-worthy platform. That game was Doom, released in 1993 and who would leave an eternal mark on culture at large.
Gabe was impressed how a small team of Nerds managed to create a software that sold more copies than Microsoft had with windows, and Microsoft was already employing hundreds at the time versus the dozen or so who worked on Doom.
Sensing opportunity, Gabe followed the 90's vibe to throw everything away and sink your savings into start-ups. Convinced games were the future of entertaining, Gabe and another former Microsoft employee, Mike Harrington, decided they were wealthy and connected enough to create Valve in 1996. And thus the legend, the myth, is born.
Aware start-ups had a tendency to fail fast, Gabe didn't expect much success. He and Mike were not game designers, they did ports and worked on windows but had little experience on how to actually create a game from scratch. One mediocre game and the studio would be done, that's what they expected.
FPS, an acronym which stands for first-person shooter, is per Wikipedia a genre centered on gun fighting and other weapon-based combat seen from a first-person perspective, with the player experiencing the action directly through the eyes of the main character. When doom came out some years back, everyone wanted a piece of FPS, and the genre was evolving fast alongside videogame in general, a young media in full swing. Compare Doom, which came out in 1993, and Quake 2 in 1997. The technological gap is huge, but the design gap? Tiny. It's fast, brutal, and often boils down to corridors and bad things to shoot at without much in terms of story.
And in 1998, Valve gave us Half-life.
Take a look at the first few minutes. No shooting, no... nothing in fact. Just a loooooooooooooong train ride, then a short tour of the facility, until you can finally don the suit and the action start. The action ended up frantic and brutal, as was fit for a FPS at the time. But for a change, the game went out of its way to tell a story, it took time to immerse you into the underground complex of Black Mesa. Instead of short cutscenes that took you out of character, the entire game was spent without leaving Gordon Freeman's point of view. The designers used tricks like unbreakable windows to have you witness events (like this - warning, pixelated 1998 violence) to allow for a form of cutscenes without breaking immersion. The game would bring in about $75,714,289.92.
I could go on, but my focus is another game. If you wish for more information about Half-Life (and Drama surrounding its creation), Valve released a video for the 25th anniversary of the game to give an insight. This article also goes into detail about production and why the design decisions made the game legendary.
Eh... where's that bloody other paper... Hey! I'm talking here, don't get distracted by the others!
The expected "mediocre game" made Valve a household name, and they wouldn't stop there. Half-Life 2 in 2004 would use the improving computer capabilities to bring us the gravity gun, which allowed to make proper use of physics. Portal in 2007 was a puzzle game played in first person, the main feature was the aptly named portal gun allowing you to shoot one entry and one exit portal on flat surfaces, which allowed for creative solutions and outside the box thinking, assorted with the usual hitting your head against the table until you finally found the trick and thought to yourself that was easy, why didn't I notice it right away?
Valve would also go on to create Steam in 2003. Originally meant to facilitate updates for their multiplayer game Counter-Strike, yet another resounding success, Steam would go on to become a platform to sell games, Valve or non-Valve. They were virtually alone as a dematerialised seller for a loooooooooooong time, while physical shelves in shops were slowly losing ground to the internet and always faster download speeds. This fatally gave Steam a monopoly. Monopoly that is often decried, and gave way to anti-trust questions and lawsuits.
That's Valve. High quality games, lots of thoughts in them, also an insane time working on them to the point the term "Valve time" has been coined. It defines the huge discrepancy between a game announcement and the final release, or the total absence of communication and public wonder if they are even doing something over there at Valve. Which meshes well with a huge number of fans awaiting the next video game grail. Just ask "Half-Life 3, when?" aloud and you can start counting the number of tears (18.230 on average), strokes (23 on average), Molotov cocktails thrown and crises of faith (both impossible to count). Here's a chart showing off in greater detail the Valve times as they happened, we will encounter a few as we go on.
Now follow me through the corridor, don't mind the turrets. I thought it would be a hilar...
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