Valve was the only team that seemed to have a plan. The matches we played beforehand were sort of like a really good public match. People were taking it seriously, playing well, communicating, and going for objectives, but there was still a lot of “doing your own thing” and not a lot of team strategy. I think most of the studios, including ours, were just in it for the fun and didnt really practice very much beforehand.

I believe we were on gravelpit when we played valve (might have been dustbowl or one of the other western looking maps, this was back in 07 so it’s been a while). The spawn gates were sort of down in a dip in the ground, and on the defenders side where we couldnt see yet, they setup a row of turrets with a row of dispensers behind them. Like a lot of them, probably half the team or more was engineer. When the gates opened, anyone that went down into that little dip was immediately wrecked. Their engineers were running between the rows constantly spamming repairs, and they had pyros spamming flames to catch spies. We almost broke out a couple of times, but in the end never made it out of the spawn area.