Team Fortress is a team and class based online multiplayer computer game based on id Software’s Quake. Team Fortress was originally designed and written by Robin Walker, John Cook, and Ian Caughley in 1996.

The original network code for Quake 1 was not optimized for internet play with dial-up – which was the primary form of connection in the late 1990s. This lack of optimization for dial-up connections caused severe lag, ping spikes and jerky movement while playing. The solution was “Quakeworld.”

QuakeWorld, was developed by John Carmack, John Cash and Christian Antkow, and was released in December 1996. Further development was later taken over by David Kirsch (a.k.a. “Zoid” from Threewave, of Capture the Flag fame) and Jack ‘morbid’ Mathews. It included a useful program called QuakeSpy, written by Mathews, which later evolved into GameSpy.

Even though the original Team Fortress was developed for Quake 1, it was played on Quakeworld. Thus the acronym – QWTF or Quakeworld Team Fortress.

From QWTF, Team fortress matured and was developed, revised and port to different games. Some examples of these are:
NeoTF
MegaTF
Team Fortress Classic
Q3F
Fortress Evolution for Quake III Arena
Weapons Factory
Quake 4 Fortress
Unreal Fortress
Unreal Fortress: Evolution
Fortress Forever
Quake 4 Fortress
Team Fortress 2

Some of the versions of Team Fortress listed above never made it past the development and beta testing phases. Those versions are only listed for information purposes only.

Visit the Team Fortress Forums to discuss these and other games.

Tags: Fortress Forever, Quakeworld Team Fortress, team fortress, tf2, tfc

2Fort! The very name brings back memories of snipers, medics, scouts, and sentry guns.  For those of you that do not feel like reading all of this – long story short, 2Fort went from a 32 – 64 player map to a 12 player map. If your still interested, keep reading.

Back in the days of Quakeworld, 2Fort went through several changes and there were several versions released. On any given server there were sometimes 2 versions of 2Fort – 2Fort and 2FortR. Back then, the maps were big, by todays standards they were huge.  The standard server usually had 16 player slots – 8 players per team.  Even though the standard server ran 16 slots, there were servers that had 24 and 32 players slots – 12 and 16 players per team.  At one time there was talk of 64 player servers.

One of the major reasons why these 64 player servers never became popular, was due to the system resources the server required.  Back in the mid to late 1990s, memory and processors were not cheap.  And just how expensive was the memory?  Around $3 a meg, and up.  Each player that connected to the server required around 1.5 megs of memory (if I remember right), then add the amount of memory required by the servers operating system.  For a 64 player server you would have to have at least 96 megs of memory just for the players, then add another 100+ megs for the operating system – lets just round that up to 1 stick of 256 megs to be on the safe side.   Just for the memory, the server owner would have to spend about $768.  Leasing a server at that time was not an option.  If you wanted a server, you had to know someone with access to a T1 or better.

Even though there were plans for 64 player servers, they never became popular mainly due to the technology limitations at the time.

2Fort was the map of the day.  There were other popular maps, but 2Fort was the one that just about every server owner had in the rotation.  Maybe one reason why it is so popular is because of how simple the map is.   Unlike a lot of maps at the time, 2Fort was simple – there is the enemy now go shoot them.  New players figured out the map pretty quick.  Maybe that is why 2Fort gained so much popularity?  The truth is, its a combination of a lot of features that makes this map so popular.

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Tags: 2fort, Fortress Forever, q2tf, quake 2 team fortress, quake world, Quakeworld Team Fortress, team fortress, Team Fortress 2, Team Fortress Classic, tfc

The Game That Started It All, QWTF

Up until when QWTF was released, the game of the day had been Quakeworld Free For All and Death Match.  There was only one class and that was behind a rocket launcher blasting anything that moved.  Sure, there was clan style death match.  But it was basically the same type of game play as free for all.  Instead of of shooting anything that moved, you just shot the other team.

There was Capture the Flag, but it was not much different from Death Match.  There were the same old two teams, but this time they were fighting over a couple of flags.

And then there was Quakeworld Team Fortresss.  This modification had different classes, it had different weapons, it had defensive and offensive teams, it had toys like sentry guns – what more could you want?

Quakeworld team fortress 2fort yard

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Tags: 2fort, quakeworld, quakeworld 2fort, quakeworld team fortress, Quakeworld Team Fortress, qwtf 2fort, team fortress