Electric Playground "Team Fortress 2 Beta" (lost episode of online video game news show; 2007)
The logo for the show
Status: Lost
The Electric Playground is a daily television news show created by Victor Lucas that covers upcoming video games, video game industry news, interviews with celebrities and people from the video game industry; it also takes looks at the latest toys, games, comics, and more. During 2007, an episode that was released on their website about a behind-the-scenes video of Team Fortress 2 before it was released
Background
On a now-defunct forum called “TotalTF2” - a forums about finding leaks of TF2 and dissecting what it would be about - a post was made by user “Crazy Man”. In the post, Crazy Man gives a link to the website for a web episode made by The Electric Playground that went over behind the scene leaks for Team Fortress 2.[1] The video was given interest to some people when the thread was posted at the time because of behind-the-scenes footage for the game. When clicking through the link now or any archive of it would say that Adobe Flash is no longer supported for the video, which the link was archived on December 24, 2007, seven months after the initial thread.[2] This would’ve meant that if Flash was still supported, it probably wouldn’t be the right episode.
From the replies of what people had seen, the first was about a map that was named “Bridge” then changed to “Gravel Pit” which was one of the maps for the release, and then mentioned how Gravel Pit would to capture two points from each side of the map, talking about the control points.[1] Crazy Man would speculate the maps that would be released for the game, getting them all right except for one:
- 2Fort
- Dustbowl
- Well
- Hydro
- Gravel Pit
- ???????? (Later turn out to be Granary)
This meant that the web episode would’ve leaked the 3PC game mode and the “Gravel Pit” map. Going down the forums, a user would talk about a map that they saw which included a crane. It later turned out to be an unfinished map where the crane would pick up the car and move it to the other track from the TF2 source code leak.[3]
Availability
As of December 2023, no photos, clips, or the entire episode has resurfaced, the only remnants being a now-defunct forum before the beta build was released. It is unknown if someone was lucky enough to archive the episode.
Gallery
See Also
- Team Fortress 2 (partially found original builds of PC multiplayer first-person shooter sequel; 1999-2006)
- Escape from Team Fortress (found cancelled web series; 2014-2015)