Kotaku recently interviewed a few of the staff at Valve. The main topic of discussion centered around the origin of the "Meet the..." line of videos and the desire of the staff to create a full-length Team Fortress 2 video.
A Team Fortress 2 comic is still in the works. The team behind the videos will be working on the comics. As for the Medic and Pyro videos, the team said to "stay tuned" for news on when we can expect those.
"We're not ready to announce anything along those lines, but I don't think there's a person in this company that wouldn't love to see a full-length TF movie or even a 10-minute movie," Valve writer and TF2 video contributor Erik Wolpaw said. He was on the call with Kotaku from the Valve's office in Bellevue, Washington. "I'm not just being cagey. I'm a little bit removed from these kinds of things. But they keep giving us a little bit more rope with which to hang ourselves, so who knows."
Feature films might be a flight of fancy for now, but to even joke about such things shows how far Valve has come in the two years since the studio released Meet the Heavy, the first of what have been seven increasingly elaborate shorts. The movies are so popular that even fake fan-made ones like an amateur take on the eventual Meet the Medic short has garnered 800,000 views on YouTube. The shorts have added character and flair to a multi-player shooter that could well have had far less background and texture.
The clips have their origins as audition scripts for the voice actors who played the likes of the Heavy, the Sniper and the rest of the characters in the game. The first video in the series, May 2007's Meet The Heavy, is almost word-for-word what Valve used to cast its actor. That Heavy video was made on the heels of a Portal video used to promote the personality of that game. Walker remembered that his team's headiness with that the Heavy video, thinking it "was the greatest thing we had ever seen."
Another interesting fact is that both the Sandvich and Jarate were made into real objects as a result of the "Meet the..." videos.Feature films might be a flight of fancy for now, but to even joke about such things shows how far Valve has come in the two years since the studio released Meet the Heavy, the first of what have been seven increasingly elaborate shorts. The movies are so popular that even fake fan-made ones like an amateur take on the eventual Meet the Medic short has garnered 800,000 views on YouTube. The shorts have added character and flair to a multi-player shooter that could well have had far less background and texture.
The clips have their origins as audition scripts for the voice actors who played the likes of the Heavy, the Sniper and the rest of the characters in the game. The first video in the series, May 2007's Meet The Heavy, is almost word-for-word what Valve used to cast its actor. That Heavy video was made on the heels of a Portal video used to promote the personality of that game. Walker remembered that his team's headiness with that the Heavy video, thinking it "was the greatest thing we had ever seen."
A Team Fortress 2 comic is still in the works. The team behind the videos will be working on the comics. As for the Medic and Pyro videos, the team said to "stay tuned" for news on when we can expect those.