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1996 1999 2000 2005 2007 2008 2014 2026

2000 — Team Fortress 2 Coming Soon?

Quake 3 Fortress Quake 3 Fortress Quake 3 Fortress
Quake 3 Fortress
Released April 1, 2000
The multiplayer-only throwback Quake III Arena was meant to replicate Quake's movement and game-feel, which made it a handy destination to port Quake mods like Team Fortress without too many gameplay compromises. A full-conversion mod with an exclusive suite of assets and maps, Q3F tactically merged a Quake-style movement-first arena experience with new Team Fortress Classic innovations, like Command Points and code support for VIP (with its own Civilian, no less!). Much of Q3F's web presence didn't survive the decline of self-hosting and forums, but it was the most dedicated and high-effort mod of its ilk at the time, and attracted a massive fan base to match.

Many of Q3F's developers, plus big names from the Quake mod scene, later organized into a dev studio called Splash Damage. They distinguished themselves making map packs and multiplayer modules for other games like Return to Castle Wolfenstein, and most notably created TF2-inspired class shooters Brink and Dirty Bomb, before the studio was lost in the shuffle of private equity.
Unreal Fortress Unreal Fortress Unreal Fortress
Unreal Fortress
Released November 20, 2000
The early '00s was a period of rapid improvement in gaming tech, especially on the PC and especially-especially in PC shooters. Games aged fast. Stragglers from Quake II's somewhat anemic mod scene brought Team Fortress along to whichever new arena shooter caught their fancy, and plenty of them washed up in Unreal Tournament 1999.

Unreal Fortress set itself apart with innovative inter-class support mechanics, like other classes being able to apply unique buffs to friendly Armourers' (Engineers') sentry guns, but it never really escaped its own orbit. While its last major update was a map pack released in 2002, Unreal Fortress strung along until the 2004 closure of BarrysWorld, the gaming network that had hosted UnF's game setup files and official servers. Another dream crushed by the long tail of the dot-com bubble.

A History of Violence

Once, there was nothing. The desktop computer was a cold and uninviting appliance, fit only to receive suspicious emails from deposed African royalty and occasionally print out pornography. Would-be PC gaming enthusiasts stared morosely into their Solitaire windows, fingers twitching, bloodlust unsatiatied, wishing they could play a pulse-pounding sicko game where you jump over death pits and steal flags and kill people.

Then id Software released Quake, and the nascent online shooter community swarmed around it — and with it, the nascent online shooter modding community. Three Australian programmers, big men in their savage remote island's shooter scene, licensed out the QuakeC development suite on day one, and set to work on their long-planned team deathmatch mod of Quake, where players would choose their weapons from a few themed loadout presets. (Classes, as they came to be called.) This was Team Fortress, and it was scrimmaged at length by the Melbourne LAN scene before finally going up for download on a tepid winter day[1] in 1996.

As of today, we've been jumping over death pits and stealing flags and killing people for thirty years. In recognition of our forebears, and out of longing for the days when developing a video game mod could get you a real job, slip on the nostalgia goggles with us and get to '96ing.

^ 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Hemisphere Update

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