Team Fortress 2: Meet the Medic Outtakes

These are original deleted scenes made by Valve for ’Meet the Medic’ before they decided to go with another idea. They also show how the Medic got a Spy head. Name of the outtakes in order of appearance: ’Don’t You Die on Me!’, ’My Darkest Moment’, ’Kill Me’, ’Making Gods’. 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.