 This video is sponsored by Manscaped. Good evening. Team Fortress 2 has 9 classes, we all know this. But despite that fact being pretty much common knowledge, chances are at some point you've seen or heard mention of a 10th class. Now, the TF2 community is crazy. I'd honestly say more crazy than most online communities. So if you've lived your life dismissing those whispers as nothing but the delusions of a child or man-child, I can't say that I really blame you for it. But while there's obviously never been a 10th playable mercenary you can select in TF2, that doesn't necessarily mean there was never going to be one. Over the years dedicated TF2 players have discovered not only comments and references to a 10th class in the game and in promotional material, but even strings of data in the code itself alluding to its existence. Thanks to the TF2 devs' cryptic and sometimes misleading behavior, as well as the internet's early days of chaos, rumors, myths, and jokes about TF2's 10th class have continued to circulate within the game's community pretty much since it first came out. And as a result, TF2's 10th class has become one of gaming's most renowned urban legends. Now, unfortunately, this video isn't going to be me blowing the lid open on an insider leak that valve is secretly planning to add the Obama class in the future TF2 update. I mean, they don't even add new weapons anymore, so you should know how silly it is to expect something like that, especially nowadays. But since there have been so many official hints and references to a 10th class, and there's been so much discussion about it in the community, I thought it would be interesting to take a deep dive into the topic. We're going to cover all the details and hints that have led players to think a new lovable merc might be on its way, and fully explore the mystery of TF2's 10th class. But first, fellas. Are you dealing with a jungle inferno down there? A true gentleman knows that taking down any nests that might stand in the way of a future play is very important, but it's not always clear what tool to equip to eliminate that nest. That's where today's sponsor comes in. The performance package 4.0 by Manscaped has everything you need to stay suave on the battlements. While Excess Bodyhair can leave you prone to buildup of sweat and bacteria, causing foul loaders and swamp crotch, Manscaped's lawnmower 4.0 will help you easily eliminate this problem, featuring skin-safe technology to help prevent cuts, waterproof capabilities allowing use in the shower, and even an LED light to help you navigate blind spots. This deal also includes the crop-preserver ball deodorant and crop-reviver ball toner spray, so you can apply soothing aloe vera to your sentry busters and keep them feeling fresh. These anti-chafing boxer briefs feature a microfiber blend designed to keep high-friction areas cool, thus avoiding the dreaded swamp crotch feeling, and on top of all that, this weedwacker 2.0 nose-into-ear hair trimmer will help you keep yourself well-groomed not just down there, but in all places like a true gentleman. So what are you waiting for? Use the link in the description to get 20% off plus free shipping and two gifts when you use my code RIKTOR at manscaped.com. That's 20% off plus free shipping and two gifts with promo code RIKTOR at manscaped.com. Alright, back to the show. Right after TF2 came out in 2007, people started noticing that in the files for the game, specifically in the Scripts and Player Classes folder, there's a .ctx file referring to a class called The Civilian. If we bust open our game files with a program called GCFscape, we can see that this file actually still exists this very day. On older versions of TF2, it was even possible to type the command Join Class Civilian in the console to play as him, though he simply appeared as an A-posing scout with 50 health and no weapons. This particular exploit was eventually patched out, though that doesn't seem to have ever stopped players from finding other exploits to let them glide around the map without a weapon. But who was The Civilian? Well, he was indeed a 10th class at one point in the game's development, but unfortunately he wasn't actually a mercenary. In fact, he was pretty much the opposite. The Civilian was a playable character that appeared in the previous Team Fortress games and served as the main objective of a game mode called VIP. In the VIP game mode, one team would have to escort the VIP to the end of a map while the other team tried to sabotage them and kill him. It turns out Valve worked on a version of this game mode for Team Fortress 2, but after concerns grew about how easy it was to troll your team by intentionally dying as the VIP, they decided to axe it. After TF2 came out, Valve ended up revisiting the game mode idea and transforming it into what we know today as Payload. However, this isn't quite the end of the Civilian story. For starters, he appears in the Meet the Sniper short in bobblehead form as a dash decoration on the inside of the Sniper's caravan, and in the TF2 community, the Civilian has a life of his own. Early on, that bobblehead design birthed some fan art and even an early custom model of the guy, and more recently, a popular TF2 fan mode called TF2 Classic incorporated its own VIP game mode, complete with the fully animated and voice acted rendition of him. The 2023 giga leak you might have heard of also shed some light onto the cancelled VIP game mode, showing some early prototype maps, which are pretty neat, but it seems they never actually got around to making a model for the Siv himself, just reusing this port from TFC. Luckily for us, however, there's much more to the 10th class legend than just the Civilian. In 2008, Valve followed up on the release of TF2 with the game Left 4 Dead, and within this game was a pretty peculiar Easter egg. If you look at the food items loaded throughout the map, you'll spot that some of them are TF2 brand, like the heavy gulp, some kind of pyro hamburger, and a cereal box that on the back reads, free inside, one six inch action figure, collect all 10. Now, I know nowadays this seems like an obvious joke, but the fact that this Easter egg alluded to a possible 10th class sent players into a frenzy back in the day, entire news articles ended up getting written about its discovery. So in an attempt to calm people down, TF2's lead developer Robin Walker sat down for an interview with The Escapist magazine on January 20th, 2009, and clarified some things. We've got several new class designs floating around, some of which we like a lot, but right now we're focusing on the broadening of our existing classes through the addition of the unlockables, he says. Though this comment was clearly meant to calm down the hyper-owned 10th class, by confirming that they weren't seriously working on one at this time, it ended up doing the opposite by confirming that Valve indeed had considered and even created concepts for the idea. And that is when the community really went wild. Imagine this, the year is 2009, and you log on to Steam after school to see a bunch of new messages from your friends. They're telling you there's some big TF2 news and all sending you the same website link. You obviously click it and you're immediately taken aback. This is a TF2 update page announcing an all new class completely unlike any other called the Guard Dog. It's complete with professional-looking renders of the class in action, detailed explanations of how it works and what weapons, taunts, hats, and abilities it has, a sprawling list of class-specific achievements for it, and finally, a couple of new maps to be included alongside it in this new upcoming update. How exciting is that? Well, very exciting for about five minutes before your friends reveal to you that you've just been trolled. Now, it doesn't seem like this page was necessarily created to be a hoax, but it certainly got mileage as one in the community. Much to many players' disappointment, this was not a real update page. But rather an elaborate fan art project created by a Brazilian guy by the name of Pianodon. And it is probably the most popular fan rendition of the 10th class of all time, thanks to how adorable it is. Now, if you're wondering why I'm including the fan-made Guard Dog in this video and not any of the other many 10th class fan art concepts, it's because of this. This is a blog post officially sent out on the TF2 website, showing an in-character letter written by Saxton Hale accepting the Guard Dog and thanking its creator. Depending on who you ask, this blog post may or may not make the Guard Dog actually candidate TF2 itself. And because of this post, rumors began circulating that since Valve liked the idea so much, they were going to make the Guard Dog update real, you guys. The creator ended up adding a long and peculiar message to the fake update page thanking Valve and the TF2 community. I have no dreams or hopes about the GD being implemented in the game like I presented since he needs some fixes. I think need some fixes is a nice way of saying overpowered as hell because the Guard Dog was basically a playable century nest that couldn't be sapped and made the medic obsolete and it obviously never got added at all despite the hope its creator seemed to be holding out. Regardless, the Guard Dog is still a pretty interesting and beloved part of the 10th class mythos. In fact, a remake of the Guard Dog model was created in 2019 for use in SFM movies and it's pretty cool to see him in action. But to take us back to the world of official Valve made content, on May 22nd, 2009, right after the Sniper versus Spy update, it was discovered that within the game existed more files pertaining to an unidentified character. In the materials, models, players, shared parts, head, female directory was this texture. Female underscore head underscore black dot VTF. No one was sure just how long it had been there but it was quickly and silently removed as soon as word got out about it, leaving a lot of fans excited and confused. A female character was Valve gearing up to add a female 10th class? Does the black in the title refer to the character's ethnicity or something else? Why does it look like she's wearing scuba gear? The 10th class is a scuba diver? To this day, there are pretty much no concrete answers about who or what this face was supposed to belong to. It's a shared female head, whatever that means, and to say anything more is just speculation. It doesn't even seem to have appeared in the recent repo leak at all, so your guess is as good as mine. It obviously probably isn't a female 10th class but the other explanations the community has come up with aren't exactly the most sensible either. Like, oh, maybe it's the pyro's secret face under the mask, but why would Valve randomly add a file to the game to tell us the pyro is a female scuba diver? I personally think this texture probably had something to do with Valve's scrap plans to create female versions of each class, which you might know about thanks to this concept art and this leaked female soldier model. But no matter how you slice it, this file's inclusion seems to have almost definitely been a mistake and something we weren't meant to see. I guess we don't technically know that it was not related to the 10th class but there's really nothing to suggest that it was either. Probably the last point in TF2's history that players entertained the idea of a 10th class was in 2014. With the expiration date short and the gunmetal update focusing so much on the character of Miss Pauling, some in the community, for some reason, thought Miss Pauling might at some point come to the game as a new playable character. But as we all know, that never happened because her real purpose was to be a marketable waifu and help TF2 keep up with the rest of the games industry. It seems that all the remains of a 10th class in TF2 today is a tongue-in-cheek grave marker in various Halloween maps reading here lies the 10th class and if there really ever were serious concepts for a 10th class at Valve, like Robin Walker claimed all those years ago, we probably won't ever see them. So, what is there to take away from the mystery of TF2's 10th class? Well, there's something to be said for sure about how the early days of the internet allowed for wacky gaming rumors to spread more easily. It seems like data mining has pretty much killed the video game urban legend and stripped a lot of childlike wonder from the medium. To me, it seems like the 10th class was mainly just an inside joke among TF2's developers. If it actually was ever worked on, it must not have been for very long. Working on this video has made me kinda sad remembering the era in which TF2 was a breathing, growing game. An era in which the thought of a new class wasn't so preposterous as Valve was adding new game modes and weapons every couple weeks. With the news of a new TF2 summer update on the horizon, players remain cautiously optimistic about the game's future. It's hard to say what's going to happen to TF2 in the coming years, but who knows, maybe soon you and I will experience a return to the game's golden era. That would be nice, wouldn't it? I hope you learned something about TF2 from this video. Subscribe to Richter Overtime for more sloppy goo goo. Thanks again to Manscaped for sponsoring this video. Go use that promo code and have a good day. Shoot you in the head like the black guy from the Matrix as a facelift with some gay chicks. Just face it, I'm a base kid, I'm awesome. Tyler McVicker playing dead like a boss. Shoot you while you eatin' all your Cheetos. I've been countin' green like a motherfucka C-Lo. Me a rat lover, we a stick to the G-Co. Me a plus a chopper, that's a motherfucka trio.