When I was a younger child, I remember my little brother being obsessed with a videogame called Team Fortress 2. A game where you play on different teams, different classes of players and then you compete in various game modes eg. Capture the flag, control point, payload. At the time I was about 14 and wouldn’t have thought it had much attention, and while his obsession with the game died as quick as it began, it was quickly forgotten after.
It was not until around 2016 that I remembered Team Fortress 2 again, and that was when my brother was then showing me a new game called Overwatch, which if you did not know, it is a game where players compete in different teams, in different character classes and various game modes… does this sound familiar to you? Well it did to me at the time and here I was thinking it was a 3rd Team Fortress game. Yet it wasn’t. It was a completely different game but with a very similar game style.
I reflect a further 5 years on and I am scrolling through a list of ‘forgotten’ games to look what I can write blog post about for my BCM215 weekly blogs, and near the top lays the game Team Fortress 2. It was a complete flashback to many year before and it was legitimately my own forgotten game. But when planning to explore this game I found a connected game that is just as much forgotten.
“Team Fortress” was originally created in 1996 for PC and it wasn’t its own game to begin with. Created as a game modification for the 1996 videogame Quake, it was a team/classed based multiplayer online first person shooter. From here, Valve took an interest in the Team Fortress software. From here it lead to another game called Team Fortress Classic, and there it lead to the Team Fortress 2 I know well. Eurogamer’s writer, Emma Kent, described Team Fortress 2 itself as “Valve’s Forgotten Game”, so if the 2nd official game is described as forgotten, then what about the very original?
The creation of Team Fortress inspired a large amount of gamers to create their own game modifications on the Quake game engine. Much like its later version, Team Fortress inspired a game formula for many other games due to its popularity (such as Quake III, Enemy Territory Fortress). Whilst players have definitely reduced playing the original game due to its age, a large population of players still play on the most recent version of the game.
Looking at the game from the perspective of performing an analytical framework, I would look at analysing the influence that the original Team Fortress had on the video game community for the future. This would mean to analyse the history of the game and its developments, and then analysing games with a basically accurate game formula. Analysing the game and player interaction would be important as well, so downloading the original game may be beneficial. Compared to its later successor however, there are fairly limited articles describing the influence of the game, and many people look to its successor as being the influence for the video game community. To dodge this issue of limited research, if the individual was researching Team Fortress, they may find it more informative to conduct their own research, gathering an audience through platforms such as Steam discussion boards or even Reddit boards.
Overall, those looking into conducting an analytical framework on the Team Fortress original game might find various results or even find they may wish to scope on its successor, but at the end of the day, Team Fortress was a game that heavily influenced and inspired some of the mass multiplayer online first person shooters that we see today.
Till next time,
Alex 🙂
Header Credit – Reddit, r/tf2, u/SwaggerSpice 2014 https://www.reddit.com/r/tf2/comments/2uc7dq/where_it_all_started_2fort_in_original_team/
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