If there’s one difference between aabicus and I, it’s that we’ve had vastly different usernames. Aabicus has been aabicus for decades now. Meanwhile, I’ve jumped through a myriad of usernames. I started off being Phovos the Raptor, I shortened that name to Phovos, then, when I REALLY got into TF2, I started calling myself Medic. When I slowly stopped playing TF2 and after SPUF died, I moved away from that name and began to call myself Retvik, since my desired username, Arkay, wasn’t available. That was until I had a breakdown in December of 2023 and decided to start calling myself Arkay whenever I could anyway. After spending 200 platinum on a name change in Warframe, I decided to make the name Arkay permanent, even if I still call myself Medic here and Phovos on my own website.
These days though, some people still call me Medic. I hate it, it’s not my username most of the time. I haven’t been called Medic on Steam OR Discord (outside of the Daily SPUF server) for over 5 years. If you call me Medic on the Daily SPUF Discord server, that’s fine, but if my display name calls me “Arkay” or “Retvik”, then please use those names. It’s 5 or 6 letters, it’s not that hard.
But I didn’t always call myself Medic. There was a short period of time where I called myself Engineer. I wasn’t a Medic main, I hardly touched the class at first. No, I was an Engineer main. And I was a pretty alright Engineer main.
Like, I knew all the good spots. I could wrangler-jump. Playing on BLU wasn’t even a problem because I had good shotgun aim and would use my mini-sentry as bait while I shot people in the back. In fact, I loved playing as Gunslinger Engineer, making sure my team had forward teleporters and dispensers up front while I made annoying traps for people. Sticking my mini-sentry somewhere annoying was a ton of fun while I leveled up my teleporters. And if my mini-sentry died? Who cared? I’d just make a new one.
For a while, I had barely a few hours in Medic, but Engineer raced to the top of my most-used class list. My main class was Engineer, with a hint of Pyro and Soldier. Medic was nowhere to be seen at first.
Honestly, I don’t even remember what caused me to switch to Medic. I like to think it was when I met Bacxaber on a dark 2fort arena server, but I think, back then, I had gone back to awkwardly switching between Medic, Engineer, Soldier and Heavy, and also changing my name to whatever class I was playing as. And, funnily enough, Bacxaber was a Spy main back then, not the Heavy God he is today. But something made me switch to Medic and I stuck to it.
What I wonder though is what would have happened if I had stuck to the name Engineer? After all, I joined SPUF not that long after I chose to stay as a Medic main, but the name The Engineer was available when I created my SPUF account. In fact, the name The Engineer was available for so long that I claimed the account in 2016 for some reason. I probably wanted to use it for a Binding of Medic spin off or something.
I do think I wouldn’t have been as popular, nor would I have made the same friends I have today. After all, the reason aabicus and I became friends was because I leaned hard into the Medic persona and started collecting every type of Medic weapon possible. Aabicus had an uncraftable Amputator which I wanted, and we remained friends afterwards. Medic is just a much more meme-able and amusing character and I built a persona around it.
I mean, I probably still would have made friends and stuff, but I wonder if I’d even have started posting or running the Daily SPUF. I’m not sure.
At least I can take solace in the fact that there’s a parallel universe out there somewhere where I DID remain an Engineer main. Thanks, multiversal theory and multiple dimensions.