A year or two ago, a Discord group I used to frequent chose this as their game of the month that they got together every Monday to play. Chasing nostalgia, I joined in. My expectations were low as every other time I had tried chasing nostalgia with TF2, it had been a sad shadow of what once was. But this time, despite all expectations, I had great fun, and for a few evenings that year I remembered why I used to love this game and had basically gifted my life to it.

It’s still pretty much dead though. But that’s fine. The main reason it worked back then so well was first of all that it was new and secondly because I had communities. For a while I was even in a clan made up of people who were in it not because they wanted to become good at professional gaming, but because they wanted to enjoy being in this one specific clan, made up of friends and acquaintances from one local server. My best buddy was our medic, I was our roamer soldier, the rest were people from the server, 3 of them friends in real life, and one who played with us often with his brother (who I hanged with a few times in real life). It was the kind of clan that you tell stories about later on and that you probably won’t repeat once it’s done.

After the clan inevitably died in a mixture of real-life barging in and unsuitable replacements, I tried a few other clans, but that part of the game was done for me. There was still so much fun before and after, back when the game was the coolest thing around, when people at Valve were as excited about working on it as we were seeing what crazy new stuff they came up with, back when the hat economy was a funny thing and not the building block of one of the worst things to ever happen to videogames, back when all my friends played it and I with them.

That’s all gone now, but such is life. As one person once told another, we’ll always have Paris.