Team Fortress 2 Builds Permanent Memorial To Soldier Voice Actor Rick May

In April, veteran video game voice actor Rick May passed away after contracting COVID-19. While May amassed quite a few credits over his career, he might be best-known as the growling voice of Team Fortress 2's Soldier class, forever baying for blood on maps like 2Fort and Dustbowl. Though Valve added an in-depth tribute to the actor for the month of May--complete with talking bronze statues--it's now built out a more permanent memorial in a quiet corner of one of the game's most iconic maps.

As spotted by Rock Paper Shotgun, one of the gutted silos in the Granary map now holds one of the statues of the Soldier as a permanent tribute. Though it's difficult to see from the map itself, there's also a line of decapitated heads standing on a fence in front of the statue. As TF2 fans well-know, this is a reference to the iconic Meet the Soldier video, where Rick May says that Sun Tzu invented the concept of war, among other questionable claims.

Online games often build memorials to community members who pass away unexpectedly. For example, Star Trek Online built a tribute to Leonard Nimoy when the beloved Spock actor died in 2015, and Overwatch honored a fan who tragically died one day before the game's release when he chased down a thief who stole a classmate's motorcycle.