Team Fortress 2

• 1. Introduction

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  Team Fortress 2 drew 253,997 players at the same moment after a 2023 update, the highest count in its history. That figure is remarkable for a Valve multiplayer shooter that had already been on sale for a long time. The road to that peak was strange. The game was announced so early that it became a fixture on an annual list of vaporware. When it finally shipped, it looked like a painted magazine cover instead of a war. Years later, its own fans had to rally to rescue it from swarms of cheating bots. In between, players began trading virtual hats for sums that rival real-world prices. How did a shooter survive such a long wait? Why do its mercenaries look like cartoon characters from a 1960s spy film? And how did cosmetic items grow into an economy?

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• 2. Nine Years To Ship

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  Robin Walker and John Cook began as TF Software, an Australian team that made the original Team Fortress as a free mod for the 1996 game Quake. In 1998 Valve hired both of them, having just released its first game, Half-Life. Valve planned the sequel as an expansion pack for Half-Life, running on the GoldSrc engine, and gave a release date at the end of that year. In 1999 it released Team Fortress Classic instead, a port of the original made as a free Half-Life mod. Valve built it with the public Half-Life development kit to show the community and the industry how flexible that kit was.

  The sequel was announced under the title Team Fortress 2: Brotherhood of Arms and aimed for a modern war look. Plans included parachute drops over enemy territory and networked voice communication. They also included a Commander class, played much like a real-time strategy game from a bird's-eye view. The Commander issued orders to human players and to computer-controlled soldiers. Valve abandoned the idea because players simply disobeyed.

  At E3 1999, Valve showed Brotherhood of Arms with parametric animation, which blended animations for smoother and more lifelike movement. It also demonstrated Intel's multi-resolution mesh technology, which cut the detail of distant objects to improve performance. The game collected several awards, including Best Online Game and Best Action Game.

  In mid-2000, Valve announced a second delay and blamed the switch to its new in-house engine, Source. Then came six years of silence. Walker became project lead on Half-Life 2: Episode One, while Cook worked on Steam, Valve's distribution platform. Team Fortress 2 turned into a textbook case of vaporware, appearing regularly on Wired News's annual list and often mentioned beside the much-delayed Duke Nukem Forever. Walker later said Valve built three or four different versions before settling on the final design. Shortly before Half-Life 2 appeared in 2004, marketing director Doug Lombardi confirmed that the game was still in development.

  The public saw it again at the EA Summer Showcase in July 2006, where Valve revealed it would ship as the multiplayer part of The Orange Box. Gabe Newell said the goal was to create "the best-looking and best-playing class-based multiplayer game". Customers who pre-purchased the Orange Box could join a beta on the 17th of September 2007. The game launched on the 10th of October 2007, packaged with Half-Life 2, Episode One, Episode Two and Portal. A PlayStation 3 port followed that December.

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• 3. Painted Mercenaries

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  J. C. Leyendecker, Dean Cornwell and Norman Rockwell are the illustrators whose work shaped the look of Team Fortress 2, along with other twentieth-century commercial art. Valve achieved the effect with a technique called Gooch shading. It was a sharp break from the realism of Valve's other games. The earlier militaristic direction collapsed because it could not be reconciled with the gameplay, in which opposing armies built elaborate bases directly next to each other.

  Readability drove many choices. Every character, team and weapon was designed to look distinct even at long range. The coloring draws the eye to the chest, where the equipped weapon sits. Maps carry little visual clutter and use stylized, almost impressionistic modeling so enemies are easy to spot. Textures start as photographs, which are filtered and edited by hand to give them a tactile quality.

  The two sides are RED, short for Reliable Excavation and Demolition, and BLU, short for Builders League United. RED bases use warm colors, natural materials and angular shapes. BLU bases use cool colors, industrial materials and orthogonal shapes, so a player can tell where they are at a glance. The bases are spy fortresses disguised as warehouses and farms, hiding laser cannons, nuclear warheads and missile launch facilities that serve as objectives. Writer Chet Faliszek said the voices came from imagining what people in the 1960s would expect each class to sound like.

  Nine classes fill the roster, split evenly into Offense, Defense and Support. Each has a primary weapon, a secondary weapon and a melee weapon. The Scout, voiced by Nathan Vetterlein, is a baseball fan from Boston who trained by outrunning his seven siblings. He can double jump and counts twice when capturing points. The Soldier, voiced by Rick May, is a loud patriot who talks like a veteran despite never having served. He can fire his rocket launcher at the ground to launch himself across the map. The Pyro, voiced by Dennis Bateman, wears a gas mask and a fire-retardant suit and believes they live in a utopia called Pyroland.

  On defense, the Demoman is a one-eyed demolitions expert from Ullapool, Scotland, voiced by Gary Schwartz, who also plays the Heavy. His sticky bombs stay put until the player chooses to detonate them. The Heavy is a huge Russian from the Dzhugdzhur Mountains who calls his minigun "Sasha". He is the slowest class in the game. The Engineer, voiced by Grant Goodeve, comes from Bee Cave, Texas, and builds sentry guns, dispensers and teleporters, using a wrench to repair them.

  The Medic is a German doctor from Stuttgart with little respect for the Hippocratic Oath, voiced by Robin Atkin Downes. The Sniper is an assassin born in New Zealand and raised in the Australian outback, voiced by John Patrick Lowrie. The Spy, also voiced by Bateman, is a French operative with a watch that turns him invisible and a cigarette case that lets him disguise himself as any player. A knife in the back kills instantly. The Medic's Medi Gun fills a meter as it heals, and a full ÜberCharge makes the Medic and a chosen patient briefly invulnerable, which is why no class works well alone.

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• 4. Ways To Win

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  King of the Hill ends when one team holds a single central control point for a total of 180 seconds, and the time need not be continuous. It is one of five core game modes. In Attack/Defend, only BLU can capture RED's control points, usually in sequence, and each capture adds several minutes to the clock. In Capture the Flag, the flag is an intelligence briefcase, and a dropped briefcase returns home after 1 minute. The first team to capture the enemy briefcase three times wins. Control Points maps use three or five points, and only the middle one is open at the start.

  Payload is the fifth core mode. BLU pushes an explosive cart along a track while RED tries to stop it, and each checkpoint reached earns extra time. If BLU stops pushing, the cart rolls back to the last checkpoint. The more teammates stand near the cart, the faster it moves.

  Side modes are stranger. In Medieval Mode, players are limited mostly to melee weapons, and the text chat swaps ordinary phrases for archaic ones, so "hello" becomes "well meteth". PASS Time borrows from rugby, with a ball called the JACK that players carry or throw through goals, and it was built by Valve with Bad Robert Interactive and Escalation Studios. Mannpower gives players a grappling hook and power-ups, and it descends from a Quake mod called Threewave CTF by former Valve employee David Kirsch. Versus Saxton Hale began as a mod for Arena mode by a creator called LizardOfOz. It sets one melee-only player as the boss Saxton Hale against up to 31 opponents.

  Mann vs Machine turns the game cooperative. Players defend their base against waves of robots modeled on all nine classes, plus bomb-carrying tanks. Fallen enemies drop Credits, which players spend on upgrades. A paid version called Mann Up uses Tour of Duty Tickets bought with real money. Halloween brings more than 60 themed maps, and an item called Eternaween, added in 2013, lets a server use Halloween cosmetics for 2 hours.

  Competitive play has its own shape. Valve announced a ranked mode in April 2015 and released it in the Meet Your Match update on the 7th of July 2016. Ranked matches are six-vs-six, with players placed in thirteen ranks. Community leagues use the same Sixes format and often cap classes such as the Medic. Others play Highlander, a 9v9 format with exactly one of each class. A North American league, ESEA, offered $42,000 in prizes in 2017, then announced it would close its Team Fortress 2 leagues on the 17th of April 2019.

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• 5. The Gravel War

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  Zepheniah Mann left his company, Mann Co., to his aide Barnabus Hale, and his worthless New Mexico land to his sons Redmond and Blutarch. A comic called "Loose Canon" dates this will to 1890. The twins had talked their father into buying the land, and they could not share it. They founded RED and BLU, and both used immortality machines to outlast each other. Their stalemate, the Gravel War, ran for more than a hundred years. It ended only when their long-lost brother Gray Mann killed them both.

  The game itself has no active storyline, but this feud explains the maps. The nine mercenaries were hired by the brothers. When Gray's robot army threatened Mann Co., the company's Australian chief executive Saxton Hale rehired the mercenaries, which is the premise of Mann vs Machine. Hale is famous for a hypermasculine personality and for chest hair shaped like Australia. An unseen Administrator, voiced by Ellen McLain, announces objectives over loudspeakers, and her assistant Miss Pauling is voiced by Ashly Burch. Halloween adds villains such as the Horseless Headless Horsemann, Monoculus and Merasmus.

  Valve told this story mostly through short films. Beginning in May 2007, it released ten "Meet the Team" videos made with Source Filmmaker. In "Meet the Heavy", the character is interviewed. In "Meet the Soldier", he lectures a row of severed BLU heads on Sun Tzu, claiming Sun Tzu "invented" fighting and then muddling this with the story of Noah and his Ark. The video for the Spy leaked onto YouTube several days early. Early videos grew from voice actors' audition scripts, and "Meet the Heavy" is nearly word-for-word the Heavy's script.

  The videos fed back into the game. They helped Valve improve facial animation, and they produced the Heavy's "Sandvich" and the Sniper's "Jarate". Gabe Newell said the series let Valve explore making feature films. The last installment, "Meet the Pyro", arrived on the 27th of June 2012, and a fifteen-minute short called "Expiration Date" followed on the 17th of June 2014.

  In August 2009, Valve hired comic writer Michael Avon Oeming to teach its team how to develop characters in comics. Dark Horse Comics collected the results in a volume published in November 2011. A seven-story series simply titled Team Fortress ran sporadically from 2013 through 2024. Between 2010 and 2012, clues scattered through updates formed an alternate reality game that led to the August 2012 reveal of Mann vs Machine.

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• 6. Updates Without End

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  The 10th of June 2010 brought Team Fortress 2 to macOS, announced with an image in the style of early iPod ads. It showed the Heavy's black silhouette on a bright green background, his Sandvich held high. Mac players received virtual earbuds as a gift. Linux followed, with a restricted beta on the 6th of November 2012, open access on the 20th of December, and a full release on the 14th of February 2013. Linux players received a free Tux penguin until the 1st of March. In March 2013, the game became the first to officially support the Oculus Rift headset.

  Class-by-class patches gave each of the nine mercenaries new weapons and a "Meet the Team" video. A yearly Halloween event named Scream Fortress added items available only for a short window. Players gained crafting, trading and replay features. Consoles fared worse. Valve tried to keep Xbox 360 updates free, but Microsoft refused, so Valve bundled several updates together to justify the price. No patches have reached the Xbox 360 version since 2009, and the PlayStation 3 servers went offline for good on the 29th of March 2023.

  In April 2020, source code for the game and for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive leaked online. The code dated from 2018, and several fan projects paused while the damage was assessed. Weeks later, after the death of Soldier voice actor Rick May, Valve added a menu theme based on Taps and saluting Soldier statues with commemorative plaques on most official maps. The statue on cp_granary, setting of "Meet the Soldier", was made permanent on the 21st of August.

  On the 9th of February 2023, a blog post promised an "update-sized" release, the first major one since October 2017, and asked Workshop creators to submit material by the 1st of May. Valve later changed the wording to "holiday-sized". The update shipped with 14 community-created maps. In April 2024, a 64-bit version raised the frame rate by an average of 22 percent, though some anti-virus software wrongly flagged it as malware. On the 17th of June 2024, Valve dropped macOS support, since Apple's Metal graphics drivers are not officially compatible with the Vulkan API.

  On the 25th of October 2024, a patch fixed the BLU Scout's pants, which had been brown like the RED Scout's instead of blue. People mocked the idea of fixing such a bug 17 years in. Valve reverted the fix a day later because it clashed with existing cosmetic items built on the mistake. In February 2025, Valve added the client and server source code to the public Source SDK, letting creators modify the game as long as they release their changes for free.

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• 7. Hats And Money

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  On the 23rd of June 2011, Valve announced that Team Fortress 2 would become free-to-play. Walker explained that Valve had learned that the more players the game had, the more valuable it became to each of them. Revenue rose by a factor of twelve within nine months. Money now came from microtransactions, mainly for cosmetic items, and Valve continued to release new features free.

  The groundwork came earlier. The Gold Rush Update in April 2008 added earnable weapons for each class, and the Sniper vs. Spy Update in April 2009 added the first cosmetic items. In 2010, the Mann-Conomy Update let players trade items with each other and buy items in an in-game store. Before the official Steam Community Market arrived in 2013, much of this trading ran through informal gray markets that exposed players to fraud. Walker said hats let players show status or loyalty to another game series just by their looks.

  Items carry qualities that set their worth. "Unique" items are the common base. "Strange" items count kills while equipped. "Unusual" items add particle effects and are obtainable only through crates or trades. "Collector's" items come from combining 200 Unique copies of one item. Keys that open crates act as a currency, with a fixed Steam price of US$2.18 each and a market value around $1.80 in 2025.

  In 2011, the economy was reported to be worth over US$50 million. On Valentine's Day 2012, Valve added a $100 wedding ring that announces the sender, the recipient and the engraved name to everyone in the game. Players soon used it to joke or protest. The "Hat of Undeniable Wealth and Respect" exists in only around 750 copies. In 2025, a trade for a "Crone's Dome" witch hat was appraised at upwards of $43,200.

  The market has also been shaken by accidents. On the 25th of July 2019, a bug made certain older crates always produce Unusual items instead of the nominal 1 percent chance. Prices of Unusual items collapsed, and players called it "the Crate Depression". Valve fixed the bug the next day. On the 6th of July 2018, it had already blocked crate opening in Belgium and the Netherlands, where local laws made loot boxes illegal.

  Community creators earn from the system too. A May 2013 update was built entirely by more than fifty players. By June 2013, Valve said it had paid over $10 million to over 400 contributors, including $250,000 for that single patch. The "Tough Break" update of December 2015 let players spend a small amount for items on community-made maps, and the money went back to the mapmakers.

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• 8. The Fans Fight Back

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  The Saxxy Awards ran annually from 2011 to 2018 and showcased films made with the game's characters. Most fan works found their home on YouTube, made in Source Filmmaker, Garry's Mod and Blender. The animator The Winglet earned praise for the crossover TF2 vs Overwatch and a series called The Fedora Chronicles. In 2023, the fan film Emesis Blue won acclaim as a feature-length psychological horror. Fans of Team Fortress Classic also built a total conversion mod, Team Fortress 2 Classified, mixing ideas from both games with scrapped designs.

  That community mattered when bots arrived. In early 2020, bot accounts flooded Valve's casual matchmaking servers. They crashed servers, spammed obscenities, copied other players' names to avoid being kicked and used aimbot cheating software. On the 16th of June 2020, Valve restricted voice and text chat for accounts that had never paid for items or bought the game before it went free. Eight days later, it blocked name changes on matchmaking servers. The YouTuber Toofty interviewed people behind the bots, whose reasons ranged from grievances against Valve to simple enjoyment of the chaos.

  By May 2022, the problem remained. IGN's Rebekah Valentine described the game as "literally unplayable" on official servers after receiving over a hundred news tips. Medic voice actor Robin Atkin Downes contacted his Valve connections and urged fans to speak up in a "peaceful, passionate manner". On the 26th of May 2022, players protested on Twitter with the hashtag #savetf2. Valve replied, "TF2 community, we hear you! We love this game and know you do, too. We see how large this issue has become and are working to improve things." Patches followed in June and July, and in August 2022 Valve took servers down for five minutes and issued bans.

  The bots slowly returned. In January 2024, #savetf2 resurfaced, and on the 3rd of June 2024, fans launched a new protest under #FixTF2 with a petition that gathered over 300,000 signatures. The next day, a wave of negative reviews hit the game's Steam page. On the 28th of June, outlets reported another round of bans on bot accounts and their hosts. The following day, Valve updated its support page to state that the game bans would not be reverted.

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