Team Fortress 2 community loses it, decides to 'meme a character into existence through the power of mass gaslighting' while Valve focuses on Counter-Strike

pcgamer.com:

We need to do some kind of wellness check on the Team Fortress 2 community. Sure, the game might have gotten a big summer update and smashed its all-time concurrent player record in the last year, but it's hardly the apple of Valve's eye in 2023. Players of the venerable shooter were left to gaze forlornly over at Counter-Strike 2 when that game was announced back in March, wondering if TF2 might get similar treatment «in another decade».

I think that loneliness might have driven the poor souls to breaking point. In a fit of nostalgia, players across the TF2 community are reminiscing about better times, the golden old days when the game was a brand new and potential-filled part of The Orange Box. Specifically, they're all singing tributes to the game's missing tenth class: The Madcap. Gone but not forgotten.

Thing is, though, the Madcap never existed. TF2 has never had more than nine official classes—three offence, three defence, and three support—and yet for the past week or so the game's subreddit has been a sea of memes, retrospectives, and fond recollections of the time players spent with the character before Valve supposedly removed him early on in TF2's lifespan. The community has, apparently spontaneously, decided to try to collectively delude itself into believing this class actually existed and everyone has just forgotten it. Why? Boredom, mostly. 

It's a bit wonderful. A kind of wilful shared hallucination that the community has embarked on out of love for the game and a lack of much else to talk about, and for a while there they genuinely had me wondering if I had somehow completely forgotten about a tenth TF2 class that Valve yanked out early on. Alas, no. The real Madcap, the one that kicked this whole