Alot of you (by alot, I mean all 2 of you) readers may be unfamiliar with my relationship with Team Fortress.

I am a Mod-Man. I love buying games, not just for the game content, but for their potential to be molded into something far greater in the hands of pocket developers. I have installed and tweaked mods since the text adventure heydays. Back when they were usually referred to as hacks.

Most mods were pretty minor addons until the advent of the game Doom. With Doom we witnessed the birth and quick adolescence of the Total Conversion type of mod. There were TC mods that turned Doom into the Simpsons, some that turned it into an Evil Dead ripoff, and some that turned it into Star Wars. I could not get enough of these things, the possibilities seemed endless to me.

Quake was released and was almost completely 3D rendered. Now mod makers could go nuts. There was an explosion of mods for Quake, and mod superstars were born. The first mod I saw played almost as much as regular Quake multiplayer was 3wave CTF (Capture the Flag). This was a solid multiplayer game all on its own.

But then came Team Fortress. The multiplayer in Quake had been improved with prediction technology into something called Quakeworld. Team Fortress took full advantage of QW by adding all kinds of weapons and classes to use them. Classes were unheard of outside of RPG games at the time. It was an explosion, TF servers popped up like mad and still I would have to fight and wait for free spots to open up. I played all the classes, rocket jumping like crazy with the soldier, patient supreme twitchiness with the sniper, and all-out confusion and mayhem with the Heavy Weapons guy. I got so competitive that I joined several different groups and played in LAN and online competitions. This went on for a few years and stole many hours away from college homework. It almost made me ignore Quake 2 when it was released.

Time passed and the dawn of the MMORPG pulled me in and I slowed down on FPS playing. That is until Half-Life and Counterstrike (a mod that dwarfed even TF in popularity). But I always (and still) have a spot for Quakeworld on my hard drive so I can play a few rounds of TF from time to time.

Team Fortress 2 was planned before those two young developers were scooped up by Valve. Valve officially announced development on it after that, and released a small mod to their Half-Life engine to showcase some of the technology they would use in Team Fortress 2. This mod was called Team Fortress Classic. It sprouted its own cult following, but never was quite as popular as the original. I thought it was pretty looking, but the gameplay was a bit too wimpy for me.

After a year or so, some screenshots were released. They showed an ultra-realistic (at the time) combat system with modern weapons and soldiers fighting in squad combat. Sound familiar? Yeah it’s been done already, several times. If development didn’t take 7+ years on this thing, they would have beat everyone to the market with this by years, and BattleField 2 would have never existed.

Now, Valve has yet again made an announcement (that sounds all to familiar to Duke Nukem Forever fans) that Team Fortress 2 will be released with Half-Life 2: Episode 2. It will be squad based and very similar to TFC. It will also feature cel-shaded graphics. It looks very nice, actually, and should be a blast to play. Which I definitely will, if it comes out. I’m just not holding my breath anymore.