A Look Back at TF2 SPUF’s Non-TF2 Gatherings

Traditionally, TF2 SPUF events have always taken place in the game to which the forum is dedicated. But that’s not always the case. Especially when the meeting is more casual or introduced by a relative unknown, we can get some esoteric spur-of-the-moment parties with some pretty impressive turnouts. This is just a fun recollection of some good times (and one pretty bad time) from SPUF’s history!

1) 100% Orange Juice. This one is less a single event than a recurring mini-community, but a lot of the old itsurblog crowd regularly play 100% Orange Juice together after hugthebed2 first commented on his surprise that another itsurblogger (me) owned it. XYTWO bought like 12 copies for different people and organized most of the original games, and the fact that they’re still ongoing is a testament of how much he meant to us. It’s also further proof of the good things itsurblog gave us, as I’d never learned there were other SPUFers who owned this game without having had the opportunity to talk to them about non-TF2 topics.

2) SPUF Becomes a Catocracy. Try as I might, I can’t find the old thread dedicated to this event, I’ve only got an old screenshot I found on my computer:

UPDATE: Thanks Jay Dorris! Thread is here!

I think this was back in like 2013, somebody (update: hugthebed2 again) found a chat room where you could chat while running around a virtual backyard as a cat. Naturally, SPUF took to it like a tabby takes to a laser pointer.

I managed to find the old site, you can go meow it up here.

3) SPUF breaks out the carriage returns. This one was started by our own Jay Dorris, and sadly I can only show you his thread because I didn’t take any screenshots and the typewriter website is down. Basically imagine Twitch Plays Pokemon only with SPUFers and a single typewriter.

Things began innocuously enough, until /g/ (and later 9gag and reddit) discovered it for unrelated reasons, and things got a bit back-and-forth. SPUF proved to be more dedicated to writing in the industrial era, however, and simply carried the conversation until the next day. By the end of it even the typist got involved!

This event inspired a similar one started by Rainbow Warrior where SPUF got to discuss using fridge magnets. I missed this one myself, but from what I can gather from the many, many screenshots in the dedicated thread it was pretty difficult to say anything meaningful thanks to everyone controlling every letter at every time. Though TWKUK got some great things happening in Room 3:

4) The other SPUF vs. SPUD. Remember when this face replaced SPUF the first week of this month? Very occasionally the forum goes down for maintenance or updates, and normally the wait is brief but back in December 2012 the wait was over a week. With their favorite TF2 forum cruelly wrenched from them, SPUFers that didn’t drop into withdrawal comas invaded the Steam Discussions forum, and the meeting went about as well as Mentos invading Pepsi.

After traumatizing the relatively new forum for a week, we got our old one back and the status quo reasserted itself. But I still felt motivated to write an apology letter to them for putting up with us. But at least they didn’t get it as badly as:

5) SPUF Raids the TF2 Wiki. Not the Official Team Fortress Wiki. The other one. The one I won’t link to, because it’s poorly managed, people have gotten viruses from it, and the entire thing has fallen into disrepair as the officially adopted one steals all the Google hits. It’s always needed to disappear, but one time it got some helpful pushes from a group of ardent SPUFers.

This was back in July 2012. A minor SPUFer made a thread complaining about how crap this Wiki was compared to the official one. After most commenters agreed, he upgraded it to a “Let’s just burn it to the ground General Sherman-style” campaign and a bunch of people (myself not-included) joined in. Almost every page of the Wiki was flooded with vandalism, my favorite page was the Jag. Would have ended there, but then one SPUFer contacted his friend who had admin privilege, and that guy thought  “what the hell”, unprotected the Main Page, deleted all the templates and did a bunch of other stuff I bet was a real pain to revert. End result: The SPUF mods didn’t just delete the thread and ban the ringleader, they unpersoned him (only time I can think of that happening) and the wiki still doesn’t allow people to make new accounts for editing.

I’m positive there were more, so if you remember one I’ve missed please let me know about it in the comments! Or just go the extra mile and set a new one up yourself. While we’ve had a lot of events that cover the “discussion” aspect of SPUF, I’ve always wished we had more of the “playing other games” events. I know two games I’ve always wanted to try with other SPUFers are Fortress Forever and Gang Garrison 2, games close enough to TF2 but different enough that we can all be clueless together.