Tf2 lans are magical. I’ve been desperately trying to find a better word. Magical feels too corny and idealistic and removed from the real world that very much is not magical. It delegitimises the very real and true experience so many of us has each time we all scrap together enough money to fly to Birmingham, of all places, just to hang out, play TF2 and get drunk off overpriced drinks at spoons or some cheap shit brave souls manage to sneak into the venue, past the 5 old security guards at the entrance.

My first ever tf2 lan was insomnia 61. I was 17 and had never travelled anywhere without my parents. I had never booked my own flights, my own hotel room or budgeted out my own meals before. Because I was still under 18, I wasn’t allowed to go on my own and I was forced to finally meet Tobs, who I knew lived in Silkeborg, just like me, but had never met. I’d known that another soldier main lived really close to me for a long time, spent days in school as a 15-year-old fantasising about which of the names of the old students hanging on the left wall of et’eren was him. A running joke I had had with my old roamer was that one day we would hit “the Marmite and Tobs”, a reference to an old clip from Kaneco’s tf2 highlights channel.

I still remember the genuine relief in my mum’s voice when she told me how nice it was to at least see the young man who had already signed a legal document taking responsibility for me while we were away.

When I finally arrived in Birmingham it was late at night, and I had absolutely no idea where I was. Two guys I’ve known online for over a year showed up and take us to our hotel, introducing themselves by their aliases, Calle and Mason. Neither of them looked even remotely like I thought they would. The lan hall is an assault of monitors and pcs and guys that look like they have terrible b/o (and some do). There is a website that lets you order food directly to your desk and we have to pause one of our games when Calle’s pizza arrives halfway through so we can wait for him to eat it. Voices that used to come through my headset, from names lighting up in a mumble channel, suddenly come from the people sitting around me. When I finally meet my idol AMS for the first time he pinches my cheeks and lifts me off the ground. Guys I’ve watched and revered for years like Mike and B4nny are deities given flesh as they walk around the venue, leaving me even more starstruck than when I later see one of my childhood heroes, Lewis Brindley from the Yogscast, on his way to Nandos.

I remember coming home and feeling like I didn’t ever need to come back. It was too far away, and I was too young and too shy and anxious to ever actually go up and talk to most of the people I wanted to. The only picture taken of me at the event is of me sitting next to Mentelex, both of us wearing cardboard Mario hats from the exhibition hall and watching Kuroko no Basket. Every night I went to bed at midnight, the eternal enemy of tf2 lan enjoyment.

Menty at lan

Copenhagen Games 2019 was more fun. I was older and had somewhat conquered my fear of alcohol. It helped me loosen up and pick my way out of my thick teenage shell. A lot of the now prem players playing at the tournament were people I knew personally. I sat behind Papi and the rest of svift while they tried to overcome their demons and beat ascent for second place. A random Canadian guy with a long and cringy name called Grape Juice the Third, who played soldier in advanced, had spent over 20 hours travelling to the event just to play the open groups. To this day, he is one of the closest friends I have made in tf2. We stayed up late and talked shit and I laughed, a lot. With a lot of people. A confused couple in their thirties came by the stage as the final was about to start and ended up getting a 20-minute dissertation on the state of the 6s meta. Aoshi spent the entire lan sneaking stickers onto my back and together with a blackout drunk Irppa, I got to meet Quad in the flesh. He tried to sell me on a wrist brace for gamers that supposedly helped with tracking or something.

Photo by Ness “Uberchain” Delacroix

By the end of 2019, I was in the worst mental state I have ever been in. I had started university as a physics major but after 3 weeks I had lost the energy to leave my room. I spent 4 months lying to my parents and pretending like I was still going. It wasn’t until after new year’s, an impulse bought trip to Geneva, and my supposed exam season about to start that I stutteringly managed to tell them that I wasn’t going back. During this time, I had picked up casting, on what seemed like a whim, when AMS jokingly remarked that I’d be good at it after watching a clip of deli getting a 5k with a kritz, mistaking my reaction in mumble for being in the cast. Counou told me it would be the only way I’d ever get an etf2l award. That was a fucking lie.

2020 and 2021 panned out the way they did, and we didn’t get a lan. When we finally got to 2022 and i69, after 4 cancelled lans in a row, I had climbed the casting ranks enough to be on the shortlist of casters being considered for the event. I was visiting a friend in Germany and had brought my laptop just so I could be there for the meeting where they would tell me if I was casting the event. To be officially asked to join the production team as a caster was a relief.

What shocks me the most about TF2 production is the sheer improbability of how dedicated the people behind the scenes have been, are, and will continue to be. There is very little to no glory to be earned by spending your lan weekend sat in a jungle of wires and lights and screens and audio mixers and microphones and more, seemingly endless amounts of cables. The production space is a frenzy of stressed, over worked and highly caffeinated people, juggling 20 plates at once while also trying to sweep away the shards of the plates they have already dropped. These guys show up earlier than anyone else and go home just as late as those who spend the night drinking and catching up with long lost friends. Their reward is usually getting blamed for poor audio, tournament delays and poor choice of break music. Best case is usually that they don’t get noticed at all. They must manage the technical and logistical nightmare of a 10-hour broadcast alongside aloof broadcast talent who for better and very much for worst are an eccentric odd bunch, who somehow have the nerve to sit in front of an audience of however many people and talk for as long as they have to. It’s off the backs of people like Archrhythm and Soda and Jon who do the thankless job of organising literally everything that we have events in the first place.

A view from the caster desk at i69

Tournament admins spend their entire weekend being the villains of the event. Trying as hard as they can to maybe, just maybe so help me God, have things run on time. Of course, they never do. Between rampant tech issues and players being late due to silly and impractical things, like needing to eat or go to the bathroom, matches going into overtime and taking longer than they should, admins need to become the asshole just in order to get some fucking games going now please. Behind all your favourite three game, multiple golden cap series is at least one incredibly stressed and nervous admin hoping and praying for a swift 2–0 so the tournament can keep running on schedule.

Despite being the front facing part of the broadcast, it’s often us casters who put in the least amount of effort. Sure, there’s some prep that goes into figuring out who the teams are and what they want, figuring out the storylines to tell on broadcast, but in comparison to the production it feels like a minuscule and inconsequential effort. We show up, put on headsets and talk for about an hour at a time and then leave again. If we feel fancy we might do some voice exercises. A part of being a caster is being used to dealing with delays. While the rest of the production area ignites in a firestorm of various audio and other tech issues, you must sit resolutely in front of the camera and try to appease the public. For what it’s worth, you at least get a reward. After years spent casting online matches of varying degrees of importance with people of various levels of competence, getting to cast the most important games of the year with the best of the best is nothing short of relief. When I got to cast the upper bracket finals of i69, it was almost an out of body experience. Casting gives you moments where your body does things you don’t know it could, raising your voice or hitting pitches and cadences that you didn’t think possible. The ultimate privilege is getting to direct the crowd. Feeling it react when you do, because of the things you say and how you say them is better than any drug (not that I have had many) I have ever had. When I finished casting Witness vs Froyo I was shaking. I wanted to do it again and again. It’s a culmination of 3 years of work spent casting shit div 1 games and online North American games at 2 am, just for the privilege of the chance to give yourself to something that matters. I left the event never wanting to do online casts again. I haven’t done many since.

Casting with Beater. Photo taken from i69 outro video by EssentialsTF

I don’t think a single person attended RCADIA without permanently marking it as their favourite lan of all time. Looking back on it now, it was a fever dream. I got to cast with the best caster in tf2. I casted pretty damn well myself. Theres a 2tb folder of me and Bumfreeze screaming and jumping when BIGBLOKELAN took down The League of Shadows. I sat behind Papi for the entire finals and screamed so loudly when he won that you can hear it in Gazy’s mic on the other side of the hallway. I brought a bottle of Gammel Dansk and poured it into the glass in my hotel room, giving it to unsuspecting tf2 players I had lured up to my room, three to four at a time, introducing it simply as “My grandpa’s favourite drink, Rest in Peace”. He would’ve found their reactions priceless. I gave Bum half a shot and he instantly went to puke. Silentes accidentally got 3 and drank it all like a champion. When the bar closed at 2 am 30 shitfaced tf2 players stormed the nearby gas station and scared the poor university student working his night shift so much the police showed up. I know everyone who went to it loved karaoke, but I somehow drunkenly didn’t even notice it happened.

The iSeries outro videos always follow the same format. Clips of production and players smiling, having fun. Some clips of players hitting big airshots or headshots and screaming after the fact. Some copyright-free sappy white guy with a guitar music plays in the background. The credits roll and the names of everyone on production scrolls across the main stage. To be honest, I don’t like them too much. I’m pretty sure the clips of the admins smiling are the only time they’ve done so the entire tournament. As a caster it’s always nice to have your calls immortalised in video form but to be completely honest I would much rather have it be in the actual frag video. Usually, my favourite bits of lan content are the drunk videos and photos that surface days after the event. The drunken 2 am arm wrestling or the random clips of 30 shitfaced players storming a nearby gas station after the bar has closed. Clips of Mike screaming his head off when Epsilon finally take down mixup at 1 am. Knutsson eating a burger with a spoon. The random 2 second clip on my phone of Domo on the floor of the bar, crying with laughter.

wg_leaked_strats

Recently, I saw an interview Ma3la (now Wyatt River in the Valorant scene) had done with Sideshow. In it, they reminisce about their old days at iSeries lans desperately doing everything they can to get tf2 off the ground. Pouring in countless hours trying to make something out of nothing. Tf2 is an e-sport where profits are so comically slim, they simply don’t exist. You could win the entire tournament and still end up in the red. Both production and players are talented enough to go elsewhere and make a living for themselves. Plenty have done so in the past. But for whatever reason, I find myself sticking to Team Fortress 2 anyway. I can’t let it go, no matter how hard I try. It sticks sometimes like a tumor and sometimes like a good friend. I willingly travel to the hellscape that is the NEC in Birmingham and spend my entire monthly budget on food and drinks just to broadcast to a small crowd of no more than a thousand people and to hang out with the people that play it. There is a bond we all share that must be felt firsthand to be believed. I hope we keep doing it until we’re older and a younger more passionate and fiery generation takes over, just like we did from those previous. I miss my friends already.

cu@, wherever that might be

Roskilde,
September 11th 2023