TF2C - Team Fortress 30th

2014 — The Big Guys

Team Fortress 2 Classified

Formerly Team Fortress 2 Classic
Released December 31, 2014

Once, a team of brave zillennial cyber-criminals mounted old Team Fortress 2 code to the Source SDK, enabling modders to make direct changes to TF2's content for more or less the first time ever. Even as early as 2014, people felt like Valve had left a lot of TF2's potential unrealized, or had spun it off in the wrong direction. And so, the TF2 Classic team (as it was called then) embarked on the inelegant goal of adding and removing stuff, pretty much arbitrarily, based on whatever they thought was fun.

"They" eventually became "we", but this goal has not meaningfully changed. Six years of wavering momentum brought us to the Death & Taxes Update and TF2C's full release in 2020, whereupon we sat in anxious legal limbo, until the official SDK came out and we could go legit.

Team Deathmatch Classic and Open Fortress both spun off of TF2C, though all three games may as well be equally different from it now, and have significant team-member overlap. A Source mod contributor who only works on one mod is very rare.

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!