Team Fortress 2 smashes all-time player record while fans hail plump seal as 'the best thing they've ever added to the game'

pcgamer.com:

Don't call it a comeback: Team Fortress 2 has smashed through its all-time record for concurrent players, and at the time of writing has hit a peak of 253,997 and rising. This enormous uptick has been prompted by the release of a huge summer update, which was assembled by Valve but consists almost entirely of community content, and in particular love at first sight between the TF2 community and a rather plump seal.

The seal appears on a map called Selbyen, created by longtime TF2 mapmakers Rhamkin, Zythe, and was modelled by FGD5 and animated by Nanoco1000. The excellent Fisherman's voice is provided by MegaPieManPHD. The seal begins the map in a van, before «release the seals» is declared and it begins waddling in a line towards the sea: players can speed it up by collecting mackerel on the map and feeding it.

Nanoco was already buddies with the mapmakers, and «was delighted to have the opportunity to work on animating a map prop!» As for the subsequent reaction, «seeing the community all immediately fall in love with it it's fantastic! It's genuinely like free serotonin every time someone tags me in a post about the seal lmao. I think my favourite thing I’ve seen of the seal so far is this meme.»

The seal didn't have an official name during the map's creation, so Nonoco started calling it Selby, before Rhamkin started calling it Silvia and that one stuck. The TF2 community does seem to have some alternatives in mind such as the extremely tasteful name Clubsy (even though there's already a seal called Clubsy in the game who rides in the Engineer's pocket). But we're sticking with Silvia.

Either way the TF2 community is absolutely cock-a-hoop about this seal, and it is pretty adorably chunky. «Give a man a seal,»