If you're reading this, there's a good chance you already know something about Team Fortress. But, for the sake of thoroughness and to make sure everyone's on the same page, here's a rundown. It started about four years ago when two Australian guys named Robin Walker and John Cook discovered and obscure map for Doom known as fortress. The map had teams, and each team member could choose a certain specific weapon. Walker and Cook loved the concept, and a year or so later when Quake arrived they decided to use the concept of teams and classes to make a brand new mod, and lo, Team Fortress was born. It began with five different classes (four more would come later), each with strategic strengths and weaknesses designed to make teamplay essential. What followed could only be described as a phenomenon. Some 500,000 downloads later, Team Fortress became the single most popular mod in history (not including capture the flag), and still has a giant following and hundreds of servers even today, long after the glory days of quake have faded.

When Quake2 arrived, everyone expected that the creators of TF would update their little miracle for the new technology, but months passed and nothing was heard. Then came the announcement that Walker and Cook had formed their own little company, Team Fortress Software, that Team Fortress 2 would be forthcoming, and that it would be a commercially released mod for quake2. More time passed, and then we learned that id wasn't willing to be a part of the deal. So Team Fortress 2 for Quake2 died, and the future looked bleak. Then along came Valve. TFS liked the look of Half-Life, and Valve liked the concept of TF2, so Valve bought TFS, and so as of last Summer Team Fortress 2 finally had a home. But the game went through one final stage, a few months ago TFS announced that TF2 would not be an add-on for Half-Life, but a standalone game with the Half-Life engine. This understandably caused some uproar among the gaming community, but TFS gave two very good reasons behind this decision. One, the difficulty of marketing and selling an add-on, and two, the fact that by releasing it separately they could tweak and modify the engine, creating a better game.