This game is a beautiful piece of living internet history. We still play competitively, the emergent gameplay continues to evolve. Most of the community have been playing for over 20 years, and a huge percentage of the players are contributing to code, art etc.
I worked for Rogue Wave Software years ago, and we used to play this on the corporate LAN at lunch time. IT guys were in on it too, and would quietly upgrade all the players to be on the "good LAN" for better connectivity.<p>Once the head of Tech Support from Boulder showed up during lunch hour and saw me playing, and says "You guys play too?!" - so then we each shifted lunch hour by half an hour and had cross site fun.<p>I will say that it was by far the best and most effective social engagement thing that existed cross organization on each site, and between sites. Well that and the free bagels and espresso machine.
Oh wow, QWTF was my absolute first contact with online gaming and it is so dear to my heart. They were such innocent times. People asking strangers on servers to join their clan and I remember cherishing my clan tag so much. I was on dialup and didn't start using the mouse for a least a couple of months, but like I did, innocent times and no one was whining or rude.
There's also Fortress Forever, for anyone who misses TFC: <a href="https://store.steampowered.com/app/253530/Fortress_Forever/" rel="nofollow">https://store.steampowered.com/app/253530/Fortress_Forever/</a>
I played TFC a little bit back in the day (missed its heyday, unfortunately, but the TFC Gold servers continued to be active on Steam long after TF2 was released).<p>It's easy to think that TF2 "streamlined" the experience by removing bunny hopping and grenades, but honestly, whenever I try to go back to it, grenades are just annoying. They render much of the well-tuned class distinctions obsolete when even the medic can blow you up
I had nothing but good times playing TF in 1997/1998. I joined clans and made friends online in a way that seems almost impossible to do nowadays.<p>Action Quake 2 and CS through 1.6 offered similar opportunities to make good friends, but TF was the advent of that for me.
The best and most fun Quakeworld mod was 'Capture the head' (or maybe it was called 'Headhunters' I'm not sure).<p>Every time you gibbed someone you could pick up their head, and run around with it attached to to you until you 'dropped' on a specific spawn point to score. You could run around with up to 6 heads attached to you in a 'chain' - if someone gibbed you, they could then pick up all your heads.<p>Very tactical, and lots of fun!
I remember playing team fortress on my IBM Aptiva with the awful modem/soundcard combo which meant I could either play online or with sound but not both. Given the abundance in time inside all of a sudden I think I'll give this a try. Thanks for sharing!
Speaking of older games, are there any (other) active communities these days that still play competitive capture-the-flag style games? CTF seemingly died years and years ago and most games these days are sort of regressing to various spins on deathmatch style modes.<p>Miss TFC/Unreal Tournament style CTF communities, but I'm not sure there's anything left aside from obscure discord communities that occasionally throw together a few matches.
This brings back so many memories. What got me into servers and programming in the first place was setting up quakeworld servers and modding them.<p>What I miss the most are rocketjumping maps. I spent so many hours on those servers but it seems most of the maps are gone from the historical record.
An outstanding mod with a lot of work going in to improve game play still till this day. Tournaments are being ran and the game is actually starting re-growth from all the hard work the development team is putting in. I think this game should definitely be on valve's steam 'free to play' option. I think the majority of gamers would enjoy getting into a game like this, especially the older lads.
Long ago when the number of games was much lower, you could count on people to know or hear about all the major games. There was a sense of community, of shared culture. Just like the first years after communism officially ended in Poland - there were 3 TV stations and there were cartoons at 19:00 every single day, with especially good ones on sunday. You could walk up to a random kid in class and start a conversation about his favorite bedtime cartoon. Or there was very limited choice in common household appliances and furniture, so countless people had the same models.<p>Yes, it's nostalgia too, but it was fun to have a sense of shared culture. Fragmentation has its downsides. I'm not sure how to have the cookie and eat it.
One of the first mods I ever got into was the original TF. Too bad I pinged like 200 m/s from the majority of the servers so at best I could log in and spam grenades before I died. lol.
I saw a frag video posted (Team Fortress Done Extreme 2).<p>I never got into team fortress from quake days, but I did get into team fortress classic.<p>One of the best frag videos for tfc is Last Dinosaur 2:<p>Apart from the final rendered quality (not exactly a 4k video) I think it still holds up, really good frag video.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPZsL6R0uq0" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPZsL6R0uq0</a>
The user experience is from the past millennium.<p>1. I downloaded the game and unpacked it. It would not start. Debugging reveals a dependency upon libpcre.so.3. This is not packaged (obsoleted by libpcre2). I hacked around the problem by making a link to libpcre.so.1. Imagine someone who is not a programmer, would he be able to figure that out?<p>2. I ran the game and go into the options menu. The text is so small it is almost unreadable and there is no way to make it bigger. We Quake players are all old farts now who more often than not have deteriorated vision.<p>3. I got the server list and attempted to join an empty server with low ping in the neighbouring country so I could experiment a bit. The game proceeds to download lots of files at 7 kB/s with no indication of overall progress. After four minutes of waiting I cancel out.<p>4. I find the menu to host a local server. Running it errors out in the console: something something DM4 not found.<p>5. I decide to write up what happened to HN. I quit the game. Gamma settings for the desktop environment are messed up.
For anyone who wants to know how impressive this sort of development time/commitment is, keep in mind that Duke Nukem Forever started development a year after this mod did.<p>Of course, people didn't have to wait from 1996 to 2020 to actually play it.