Outtake 1 of 4.

Our first idea had Medic returning to the TF2 team after a long vacation. During his absence, of course, the mercs have been getting slaughtered but can't figure out why.

Showing the Medic returning from his time off via train gave us the opportunity to have some fun with the opening, as you can see from this animated storyboard.

For a long time, we'd wanted to play around with the cornball "Don't you die on me!" scene you tend to see in a lot of super-serious movies. This scene would have eventually had full string accompaniment, playing out as melodramatically as possible, until getting pantsed by the Medic's speeding locomotive in a not-so-super-serious nod to TF2's more tongue-in-cheek approach to death.

Why It Got Cut: The Medic's vacation, and the mercs' confusion with their subsequent poor performance, was taking a long time to set up in order to deliver a simple premise: The TF2 team needs the Medic to win. Since the big battle finale was shaping into a real keeper with successive iterations, and expressed pretty much the same message, the whole Medic vacation storyline was starting to feel redundant.

So we killed it. But that now meant there wasn't any connective tissue for the train in the opening. The scene, while funny, didn't have anything to do with everything that came after it.

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