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2007 — Team Fortress 2!

Fortress Forever Fortress Forever Fortress Forever
Fortress Forever
Released September 13, 2007
Fortress Forever billed itself as a Team Fortress spiritual sequel for the new Source Engine, leveraging Source's improved physics and designing a game that old-school clan monkeys and post-Half-Life 2 newcomers alike could enjoy.

Undaunted by the announcement of Team Fortress 2 during their development, and so excited for TF2 that they could hardly complain, the FF team redoubled their efforts and beat Valve to the buzzer a month sooner in September '07. Fortress Forever made its way to Steam eight years later (Valve is famously clear and consistent about this process), where it yet remains a Source mod community darling, getting updates rarely but as-needed.
Team Fortress 2 Team Fortress 2 Team Fortress 2
Team Fortress 2
Released October 10, 2007
Free space. By mid-2006, Team Fortress 2 had clawed out of the military-tactics mire, and reintroduced itself to the public as a pulpy spy-movie goofball shooter that embraced the absurdity of its own concept: teams of identical men, fighting to the death over useless nonsense buildings in the middle of nowhere for no reason. It shipped bundled in The Orange Box, and Half-Life took Team Fortress's spot in Valve's abandoned forever-closet.

Between the TF team's long-term update timeline, and the simultaneous rise of YouTube and modern social media, Team Fortress 2 was basically unavoidable on the internet for the next decade. Ask us how we know.

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

The Team Fortress 30th update releases on August 24, 2026. Check here for more tomorrow!

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