About

Saxton Hale is a character from the online FPS game Team Fortress 2. Due to his muscular stature and overly-manly character, he has developed a following online.

Origin

The character first appeared in the comic for the Day 4 Update of the "Sniper Vs. Spy" update as a character printed onto a newspaper^[1] on May 25 2009^[2]. He would get his debut as a full character in the WAR! Update comic^[3].

Click to enlarge.

Online Relevancy

The character has multiple search results on Tumblr^[4] as well as some single-topic blogs related to him, such as "outofcharactersaxton"^[5] and "Saxton Hale Facts"^[6] (which posts "facts" about the character in a similar vein to Chuck Norris Facts), as well as having several search results for cosplay of the character on Google Images^[7]. He has several mentions on 4chan as well^[8]. He has over 1000 search results on DeviantArt^[9] and has several mentions on the Steam sub-forum for Team Fortress 2^[10]. Due to the popularity of the character, an unofficial gamemode called "VS Saxton Hale" was released as a mod in October 2010 for Team Fortress, which pits the players against the titular character^[11], and as of 22nd January 2016, there are over 70 000 search results for the gamemode on Youtube^[12] and over 90 000 results for the character himself on Youtube too^[13]. The character has multiple mentions on the Team Fortress 2 sub-reddit^[14].