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Team Fortress 2.
It’s a video game. It’s a video game that Darnold has played hours of - days, in fact, if you wanted to count it. And that didn’t make it good.
It’s a bad game. It’s not a bad game, but it’s a bad game. Catch him on different days and ask him the same question and his answer will wildly differ. It’s a great game, it just has a bad community! Or, it’s a terrible game, and the crates are just a cash grab! Or, it’s the perfect game, and the art style and the mechanics merge to create a truly great experience - blah, blah.
He could talk for hours about it in any particular direction you wanted. Wanna talk shit? Sure. Wanna gush about it? He’s down.
It led to one awful, awful fact about him, though. He watched, over the course of that weekend, as the playtime counter on Steam slowly but surely ticked up, higher and higher - to 20,000 hours.
Eight hundred and thirty three days of the worst game on Earth, the game he’s been playing since the year it came out.
It’s not even a discouragement - he’s going for the ultimate prize, anyway. 69,420, a number no one has yet to reach. It was his goal, and even though he knew he wouldn’t get there before the idlers - or Scrap.TF, or the other market bots - he still wanted to try. He wanted to get there naturally.
Play the game. Be kinda good at the game. Two things he could do and be. He didn’t really like bragging, but, God - if you’re kicked from every other server for suspected aimbotting, you have to be doing something right.
It doesn’t help that he tends to flick his mouse up every time he lands a headshot, though. What’s funny to him really is not funny to whatever 15 year old he just killed, but he’s not responding to the slurs people throw at him in chat, not tonight. He’s going to stomp this stupid pub and then he’s going to go stomp another, because it’s been a hell of a month for him, and this is what he’s been doing to blow off steam.
God. It sure has been a month. It’s been a hell of a month, and he’s sitting in his stupid chair in his office at home, today, half eaten cup ramen forgotten beside him on his desk, and he’s playing this game instead of working like he’s meant to. Like he has to do from home, now that Black Mesa is a hole in the ground, because capitalism doesn’t sleep, and the wheels keep grinding them all to paste, and Black Mesa exists in some capacity on the East coast, where they’ve continued to demand his “potions.”
Fuck it. The potions can wait. He has to counter snipe on 2Fort, like God intended.
Well. He would be counter sniping on 2Fort, if this fucking medic stopped walking out of second spawn and right into his line of sight, asking to high five. In game, in chat. They weren’t even doing the taunt half the time - just asking for a high five. The poor guy ended up taking a bullet to the head for him, once or twice, just for them to stroll back out and right into the same position. Every single time.
So no battlements. Which is fine, it’s not his favorite place to set up shop anyway - right up the stairs from enemy sewers was his favorite place to pick people off. Walk off battlements and into pond, pray that there’s no nest at the bend in sewers, and up the steps. Easy.
Easy. Easy, but that meant the medic followed behind him too. Friendlies are… endearing, but they’re easily annoying if they latch onto you, and a medic using the overdose? And the vita-saw? And the vaccinator? They’re definitely fucking around. They’ve got, like, 2 points on the scoreboard. They’re fucking with everyone.
They’re definitely fucking with Darnold. They’re healing him, probably idly, and cycling through the resistances as fast as humanly possible while still moving in circles - so Darnold figures whoever this is, they’re using another key to reload, at least.
Well, that’s at least a sign that they aren’t new at using it. R for reload is fine for people who don’t use that medi-gun a lot. So they, at least, had less of an excuse for when they fucked it up.
The medic pops a bullet resistance the moment Darnold peeks his head out of the stairwell, and he’s greeted with a mini the second he walks further into the doorway.
He’s immensely glad for the minimal brain activity the medic is showing - it makes it easy to beat the absolute shit out of the thing before the engineer can come find out who’s fucking with his stuff. Which, in turn, means he’s got more time to set up in the back of that room with this brain-dead friendly medic and charge up for the inevitable heavy that rounds the corner seconds later. Which, of course, absolutely is what happens. At least he was prepared for it.
But the medic doesn’t sit in the room with him, they’re up and about, poking their head out the doorway, shooting at the walls, at the ceiling, at Darnold. Stopping in front of him and obscuring his vision, using the same high five taunt - Darnold suspects it’s the only one they have.
So he gives in. Just this once. Just this once, he responds, high fives the idiot. Just to shut them up. And, at the same time, he’s killed from the opposite side of the room by some other idiot.
The sound plays on the server. You know the one. The killfeed shows the story to everyone there: machina body shot collateral. Darnold leaves instantly out of sheer embarrassment.
The brain-dead medic, steam user balls.com, adds him not 10 minutes later, and Darnold checks their profile - empty, but not in a bot kind of way. Screenshots and screenshots of games Darnold’s never going to play, dozens and dozens of badges and comments containing in-jokes from a few friends, all a year old or more.
It’s sad to see, a little bit. So he accepts, and checks the hours played on some of his games.
He’s a little bit shocked to see TF2 is hovering at around 1,000. There’s a lot of shock, actually - how the hell could this person boot the game up after this long and still find enjoyment out of fucking with random people on a dead game from 2007?
That’s - well, it’s hypocritical. Darnold knows the enjoyment that comes from focusing down one particularly annoying asshole until they leave the server. He knows how funny it is to follow spies around to blow their cover. He knows how, at around this hour count, he was spamming annoying, terrible binds and painting everything he owned lime just to piss people off - he knows.
A message from the guy pops up a few moments later -
balls.com: lol didnt mean to get you killed
Well, at least he’s taking responsibility. Even if it's weird to friend a person just to message them an apology.
balls.com: was funny tho
balls.com: luv the machina luv the dumbass sound like
balls.com: ffffwwwwwPPAAHHHH WOO!!!!
balls.com: fun stuff
Darnold has to think for a second. Like, yeah, actually - as embarrassing as it was, it was funny, objectively. If he had watched that happen to someone else, he probably would have cried laughing over it. Clip it and put it in the folder. So that’s what he sends back.
darnold duck: yeah!! yeah it was funny i guess
balls.com: after u left the entire server went friendly rip
balls.com: wanted to fuck em up w/ u didnt mean to fuck THAT up
darnold duck: it’s good! it was just kinda embarrassing
darnold duck: didn’t know you had as many hours as you did
darnold duck: thought you were new or something
balls.com: nah i just played uhhhhhhhhhh big time ago
balls.com: long time
balls.com: been a while. all this new shit is wild huh. the fuck is an “organ”
balls.com: and how do i collect it as scientist man
Oh. Man, an old player. He should check this guy’s backpack the next time he’s awake. Which he’s about to not be, if his body and schedule have any say in it.
He types out a million responses, a whole lot of them questions, like - what made you start playing again, or do you have any questions about new items, or do you wanna play together sometime, or what’s your Discord tag so they didn’t have to use Steam - but he just sends “lol” and turns off his computer for the night.
Because he’s got stupid fucking potions to work on in the morning, and 1 AM is really pushing it.