Game:

Team Fortress 2 (2007)

Duration: 0:29

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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?

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