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When WETA Workshop first approached us with the idea of partnering some of their IP with ours, we couldn't believe our luck. These were the guys who made In The Name of the King, after all, and since that movie stars Burt Reynolds, there was a pretty good chance they'd introduce us to him. Eager to raise that chance to 100%, we sent them over a contract demanding they produce Burt Reynolds at any partnership meetings.
Their lawyers told us they'd actually made some different movies about kings: Return of the King and King Kong, neither of which feature Burt Reynolds in even a minor role. We got less excited, then briefly more excited again when we remembered that King Kong stars Tony Danza, then into a tailspin of depression when we realized we were thinking of Going Ape.
Luckily Greg Broadmore, WETA Workshop's mastermind behind Dr. Grordbort's Infallible Aether Oscillators, sent us over a bunch of concept art for cool-looking space guns, which cheered us up immediately. We asked if he could redraw the art so Burt Reynolds and Tony Danza were having a gunfight in space over who would be our best friend. He said sure. Then he never did.
But just because Greg Broadmore is a liar, that doesn't mean he didn't invent some nifty-looking guns. Find out more about them here, and read a comic we wrote about the items here. Or you can skip all that and go watch Smokey and the Bandit II here.
Coming up with a Meet the Team short is a lot like a game of Jenga. 99% of it involves making room for an idea and seeing what happens.
Most of the time what happens is the whole structure collapses. Then you have to figure out why it collapsed and rebuild it, this time making sure to add in some structural support for your idea so it doesn't bring the whole short down.
As you'll find out in this Behind the Scenes blog, though, sometimes you can spend so much time adding all that structural support that it’s not until you step back that you realize your short is now nothing but structural support.
You can spend a lot of time building around an idea, in other words, before it occurs to you that the simplest solution is to get a better one.
"Don't You Die on Me!"
Our first idea had Medic returning to the TF2 team after a long vacation. During his absence, of course, the mercs have been getting slaughtered but can't figure out why.
Showing the Medic returning from his time off via train gave us the opportunity to have some fun with the opening, as you can see from this animated storyboard:
For a long time, we'd wanted to play around with the cornball "Don't you die on me!" scene you tend to see in a lot of super-serious movies. This scene would have eventually had full string accompaniment, playing out as melodramatically as possible, until getting pantsed by the Medic's speeding locomotive in a not-so-super-serious nod to TF2's more tongue-in-cheek approach to death.
Why It Got Cut: The Medic's vacation, and the mercs' confusion with their subsequent poor performance, was taking a long time to set up in order to deliver a simple premise: The TF2 team needs the Medic to win. Since the big battle finale was shaping into a real keeper with successive iterations, and expressed pretty much the same message, the whole Medic vacation storyline was starting to feel redundant.
So we killed it. But that now meant there wasn't any connective tissue for the train in the opening. The scene, while funny, didn't have anything to do with everything that came after it.
"My Darkest Moment"
Eager to keep the opening, we decided to leave Medic on the train. But rather than eat up a lot of time having him catch up with the team post-vacation, we'd use the train sequence to interview our star talking directly to the camera about the finer points of his profession, as in previous Meet the Team shorts, with flashbacks to more action-oriented scenes.
This new flashback structure gave us a chance to tell more of an origin story—something we hadn't tried yet with a Meet the Team short—and the origin story we thought we wanted to tell was the birth of the Medic's magical device that heals people, the medigun.
We figured the best way to show the gun's genesis was to create a need. To this end, our flashback gave the viewer a Medic before the invention of his gun, dealing with the day-to-day chaos of healing people on a battlefield as busy as TF2's:
One unintended side effect of showing Medic's frustration in this scene was that some playtesters thought he was weak and ineffectual because he was having such a difficult time doing his job. You never hear the Engineer complaining, after all. We tried a few iterations with the Medic acting more competent and unflustered, but instead of fixing the issue it just seemed to confuse it: Did the Medic need a healing gun or not?
The solution came in the form of a sudden attack from the Spy. This let us keep the frantic, overwhelmed tone but gave Medic an early hero moment. It also let us include a beloved bit of business that we'd had lying around for ages and never had a place for: The Medic pumping the blood out of a body with his foot into another body.
This next animated storyboard shows one of the many incarnations of our attempt to explain the medigun:
There was a great deal of internal debate as to how much of this discovery should be chance and how much should be due to the Medic's intelligence. This led to a "creation" animatic that showed the Medic applying a little brainpower to his discovery. Note the appearance of the Medic's new aide-de-camp, the Spy's severed head (who makes a cameo appearance in the final short):
The medigun built, our hero dons his gear and joins the war outside for the first time, segueing into the big battle scene from the version of Meet the Medic we ultimately released.
Why It Got Cut: We'd made a fundamental error in judgment. Did we explain the birth of the medigun? Sort of. Did anyone want the medigun explained? Not necessarily.
Playtesting made us realize that we'd invested a huge amount of screen time on the nuts and bolts of the birth of an inanimate object, when we should have been focusing on our star. We scrapped the origin story of the medigun and went back to basics. When people think of the Medic, what do they think of? What's the iconic image?
The Medic, ubercharging a Heavy.
Once we realized what we'd been missing, the story came together in record time. Instead of the medigun we'd explain the origin of the ubercharge, giving us a chance to explore the Heavy and Medic's relationship a bit, not to mention a few gross-out surgery gags. Better yet, this new opening segued into our big finish far better than our old story ever had: The significance of the big ubercharge moment had some dramatic heft to it now. Even the doves were now explained, instead of just being a neat visual effect.
We hunkered down with our new idea, adding this and taking out that. This time around, the structure wasn't collapsing; instead it was getting stronger with each new iteration. Confident we were on the right track, we doubled our efforts. Six weeks later, Meet the Medic went live.
It's summertime and THINGS ARE ON SALE. If only all our writers weren’t at Writer’s Camp they could tell you HOW AWESOME THIS SALE IS. If they wrote something witty about the Scout's new TOWEL you would probably say "I really want to go out right now and buy a towel for MY scout." If they said something sad and revealing about the character of the Scout's new pair of FLIP-FLOPS you would probably say "I care deeply about Flip-Flops, if only I had a pair to show my deep feelings for Flip-Flops!"
Alas, we have no such writer available. We have no one who can write about how these items ARE ONLY AVAILABLE FOR A LIMITED TIME. We have no one who can reiterate in a slightly annoying, but still somewhat funny way THAT YOU HAVE TO BUY THE NEW ITEMS BEFORE THE SALE ENDS ON JULY 11. Indeed, we don't even have two short sentences that would convey that KEYS ARE NOW ON SALE TO OPEN SUMMER COOLERS! See? That was only one sentence and it wasn't particularly short.
Note: The Scout is shown equipped with TWO miscellaneous slot items. We realize this is currently IMPOSSIBLE. After firing the artist responsible, we are now working on making that artist's vision a reality.
Welcome to Stuff Friday! Without further adieu, here's some stuff!
The "Meet the Medic" Taunt
Capture a point. Shoot a guy. Walk ten feet. Think about walking ten feet and decide not to. Whatever the occasion, celebrate it with the Meet the Medic, a custom taunt that allows you to punctuate anything you do, no matter how trivial, with god rays, orchestral swells and an explosion of doves.
The "Schadenfreude" Taunt Pack
Science tells us that laughter is the best medicine. Put that theory to the test with the Shadenfreude taunt pack, now available in the Mann Co. store, which gives all nine classes the ability to laugh at a corpse and see if it gets any better. (You could hypothetically also laugh at non-corpse-related objects, we suppose. But what would be the point?)
Put Meet the Medic… On Your Wall!
Let's say you enjoyed Meet the Medic. Let's say you enjoyed it so much--and especially that one scene where the Medic walks out of his lab all cool with a bunch of doves flying around him--that you wanted to put it up on your wall. First you'd have to buy a big-screen TV. Then you'd have to buy a computer, connect it to the internet, and have the TV play Meet the Medic in an endless loop. Then you’d have to hire a butler to tell you every time that one scene comes up so you can go look at it. And don't forget laser eye surgery so you can see the image at museum quality. Total price: $140,000. Per year. What a bunch of crap, right? Now what if we were to tell you that Valve engineers came up with a better solution? Introducing the limited edition Meet the Medic lithograph, available now at the Valve Store. First come, first serve, folks!
Art
Man, is your wallpaper stupid. We're just guessing, because compared to the new hi-res, wallpaper-caliber Über Update art now available in the Artwork section, trust us, it's stupid.
