TOURNIE #1
Hey there. Welcome to my column where I chart my experiences with Penguin Doom Squad. This is mostly for fun.
Please check out my other episodes if you haven't.
Episode 1. Episode 2.
<Episode 3>
Do you guys remember the first community tournament?
Seriously good times.
It came about because I loved organized competition.
When I first got into this game, I’d watch my brother play in these organized matches. It’d looked fun--
A bunch of guys fragging together, shared victories, the ‘awws’ and ‘hums’ when a timely defeat came. It was like a team sport for nerds.
I’d wanted in so I'd asked around. Apparently you had to join a 'clan' for this type of stuff. I applied to be in pDs.
Once I got in, I'd signed up for a scrim the first chance I got. We were playing against this crazy clan, Hax. How could I forget? That night on 2Fort our team got rolled, no one did anything remotely team-like, and the mic channel was dead silent.
But it was fun. I was more than a drifter on the interwebs. I was part of a team.
Funny thing was: I didn’t know anybody save War and maybe Dragon in that first match. Back then, pDs clanners were rarely on. It was the regulars that kept the servers alive.
The names I saw night after night: Darren!, Ms.Frags, Oopsie, Plush, Valadian, Crawdad…these were people I wanted to play with! They could play on our servers, but they couldn't play in our scrims.
Hence—I came up with the idea of a community tournament. Regulars, clan members, even the much-loathed Hax clan…the tournie was open to everyone. Sign-ups went up in the forums. All you had to do was post your interest.
The response was overwhelming. At first we had a few names. But when people saw more and more responses, they wanted in! It snowballed. In the end, we had 30+ players, with a growing list of subs who’d found out too late but nevertheless wanted to play.
The format would be single elimination. Teams would meet once every few weeks to go head to head. We dueled through 2fort, Hydro, Well, Dustbowl—the entire TF2 landscape.
And people showed up week after week…because of some words on a webpage, and a mutual love for the game. I was proud and totally impressed.
On top of that--during those early days of TF2 mania, I had stumbled onto this intriguing site. Apparently two college guys had taken footage of a recent TF2 tournament (CEVO), edited it down into highlights and added a commentary track to it. In these videos, it showed them discussing strategy--what each team did, how they could have done it better, the mistakes, the successes.
So I thought, why not do this for our little tournament? It would probably be not as good, and maybe only a handful of people would watch it. But the idea brewed in the back of my head.
Our first match nearly didn’t happen. We had a lot of problems getting it off the ground. Players were leaving because matches took too long to begin. Some people didn’t show up at all. We had teams that were full of last-minute subs.
But you know what? All of that did not matter.
Looking back, the most fun I had during Tournament 1 was not the actual gaming. You see, what struck me were the players.
The anticipation before each match. The arguments of which team was going to win, which maps we hated, how the rules I made up sucked, how we could have done it better the next time.
That's the stuff I remember.
To put together my video, I spent nights literally just watching gameplay footage. It took a toll on me, but for each night that I spent working on it, I would find something that cracked me up.
For example I loved Giller’s potty mouth and his don’t-give-two-shits sense of leadership (‘Fuck it fuck it, let’s just go down’). I loved Hooli dedicating himself to doing nothing but sitting in the 2fort intel room for 30 minutes, because he had to
defend the intelligence. I loved the whole team cheering Facemelter on when he Spy-capped the point all by himself (‘I backstabbed his ass!’).
That's the stuff I love. Good times.
Untitled from
Leon Switch on
Vimeo.