I Filed a Missing Persons Report For Someone From Modern Warfare 2

John Haley — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 22:50:25 +0000

Look. I am not a sentimental man. I run drills at my house. I have a spreadsheet for my socks. When my wife suggested we do a "gratitude journal" during the pandemic I said absolutely not and instead reorganized the garage by torque wrench size. This is who I am.

So I was not prepared for what happened to me on Tuesday, which is that I found a website called UserTags and spent forty-five minutes trying to remember the gamertag of a kid I used to play Search and Destroy with in 2010. I never learned his real name. I know he was in Michigan. I know he had a stutter. I know his mic quality was atrocious and he called every single sniper rifle "the long guy." I do not know his gamertag. I have been trying to remember for two days. It is eating me alive.

Anyway. Let me tell you about UserTags.

What it is

UserTags is, as far as I can tell, a small website run by someone who understands something important, which is that a huge percentage of the friendships people have formed in the last twenty years happened entirely through a microphone and a username, and there is currently no way to find any of those people ever again.

The pitch is "lost and found for gamers," which I think undersells it, but I also cannot think of a better one, so fine.

Here is how it works. You sign in with a real gaming account. Xbox, PSN, Steam, Discord. Take your pick. The site checks that you are a real person with real platform history, which is a thing bots and scammers cannot easily fake. Then you file a "tag" for someone you are trying to find. You type in their old handle, what platform they played on, and a short note.

The note is the whole game. More on that in a minute.

Then you close the tab and go on with your life. If, at some point in the future, the person you tagged idly searches their own old gamertag on this site, your tag appears. They see who filed it. They decide whether to reach out. UserTags does not message them. UserTags does not email them. UserTags does not slide into anyone's DMs on your behalf. The site's entire posture is that of a bulletin board in a laundromat. It sits there. It waits. That is the product.

I love this. I want to be extremely clear about how much I love this.

Why the passive thing matters

There is an obvious version of this idea that is a nightmare, and it is important to acknowledge that the obvious version is the version most startups would build. Somebody in a meeting somewhere would say "what if we notified the person when they got tagged," and somebody else would say "what if we had a leaderboard for most-tagged users," and pretty soon you have built a stalking app with a landing page in Söhne.

UserTags does not do any of that. If you tag somebody and they never look, nothing happens. Ever. The tag just sits there until the sun explodes. If they do look and see your tag and decide they do not want to talk to you, they close the tab, and you are none the wiser. You do not get a "seen" receipt. You do not get a nudge to "try again." There is no growth loop. There is no funnel. There is just the possibility that someday, somewhere, someone will be idly nostalgic about their old handle and there you will be, waiting.

This is the opposite of how modern products are designed and it is such a relief that I am considering sending the founder a fruit basket.

The note is the whole trick

Here is the part that I think shows the most cleverness, and I say this as someone who has designed a lot of dumb things and a small number of not-dumb things.

The site cannot verify that a tag is going to the right person. It literally cannot. Gamertags get recycled. Accounts get deleted. Memories are fuzzy and human beings are terrible at names. There is no database in the sky that says "yes, this handle in 2010 belonged to this human, who now lives in Toledo and works at an insurance company." That data does not exist.

So UserTags has to solve the verification problem some other way, and the way it solves it is by making the note itself do the work. The site quietly nudges you to be specific. Do not write "we played COD together." Write "you called every sniper rifle the long guy and your mic sounded like a food processor."

This is genius. It is a shared-secret proof dressed up as a memory. Anyone can claim to have played COD with anyone. Only one specific human on this planet reads "the long guy" and thinks "oh no, that is me." The recognition itself is the verification. There is no login flow that could do this. There is no ID check that could do this. You have to encode the proof into a memory that only the two of you share, and the site is trusting you to be honest about it because dishonesty here mostly hurts your own chances of a match.

I have been thinking about this design decision for two days and I still like it more every time I turn it over.

Things I am less sure about

Look, I am a fan, but I have been shipping software for a long time and I have to point at the load-bearing assumption, which is: this only works if the person you are looking for eventually searches their own old gamertag on this specific website. That is not a common behavior. Most people never do it. Most people cannot even remember their gamertag from ninth grade. I have been trying for forty-five minutes.

So the whole product lives or dies on whether "check UserTags for your old handle" becomes a thing people do the way "google yourself" is a thing people do. That is a cultural adoption question, not a technical one, and the answer is honestly not up to the engineers. It is up to whether the site gets enough word-of-mouth that people idly try it during a nostalgia moment. Somebody sees the Modern Warfare 2 remaster news, gets a warm feeling in their chest, wonders about the guys in their old lobby, and remembers there is a website for this. If that behavior emerges, UserTags becomes valuable. If it does not, UserTags becomes a graveyard of unrequited tags.

I do not know which one happens. Nobody does. But I think the design is right, and I think the founder is betting on a real emotion, and I would rather live in a world where this exists than a world where it does not.

The bigger thing

Here is what I keep coming back to. My kids will never have this problem. Their friendships are all on Discord, all linked to real identities, all discoverable. If my son wants to find someone he played Fortnite with in 2024, he can. The graph is legible to him.

But for those of us who logged into Xbox Live in 2007 with a handle we made up in the shower, and made real friends behind that handle, and never traded a single piece of durable contact information because it was not part of how any of it worked, the graph is gone. It was never written down. It lived only in the memory of two teenagers with headsets, and now those teenagers are thirty-five and have jobs and children and a vague sense that they used to know a guy named ShockTrooper42 who was really funny about killcams.

UserTags is trying to reconstruct a tiny piece of that. Not the whole graph. Just the part where, if two people both remember each other and both go looking, they can find each other again. That is a smaller ambition than "connect the world" and I think that is exactly why I trust it.