About

Golden Frying Pan refers to a weapon in the popular online FPS Team Fortress 2, which has developed a memetic status in the game's community due to its extreme rarity.

Origin

The weapon was introduced in an update to the game called "The Two Cities Update"^[1], which added "Australium"^[2] reskins of weapons to the the drop system of the Mann Vs. Machine game mode, which would reskin the weapons model in a golden finish. The only way to attain the weapons are participating in a pay-to-play mode called "Operation Two Cities". Finishing the operation grants the player a chance to win a rare "Australium" weapon, with an even rarer chance of winning a Golden Frying Pan.

Spread

The rarity of the item (as well as being related to the Frying Pan) lead to the item being highly priced within the community's economic system^[3]. On the Steam forums for the game, the term "Golden Frying Pan" has been mentioned frequently^[4]. On November 26th, 2013, two videoes, uploaded by the Youtubers known as Strife and TheUnknown Venom, reported that the first Golden Frying Pan to have dropped had been sold for $5500, which lead to multiple videos discussing the price of the pan's selling price.

[This video has been removed]

First videos uploaded discussing the weapon's selling price

On January 11th, 2015, the first Golden Frying Pan was deleted by its owner Auricom5, apparently due to all the attention they had received via owning it^[9], which lead to multiple discussions and videos being made about its deletion^[5]^[6]^[7]^[8].

[This video has been removed]

Original video of the deletion was taken down