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by kar1181 930 days ago
I was heavily involved with the australian team fortress (quake 1 version) community in the late 90s and 'bro' (Robin Walker) and John Cook were gods to us, regularly involved in the RMIT/Melbourne Lan scene and online even when back then mostly it was 28.8/33.6k modems with a few LPBS on East coast uni isdns.

The struggle for them to move on from qwtf to 'tf2' was probably for the best as a lot of the lessons they learned in the wilderness there helped when they were taken on by value and worked on HL2.

Also find it somewhat amusing was that TF2 was originally going to be a much more 'realistic' modern miltary shooter before the scope creep killed it.

3 comments

I was in the same scene (Clan PlanetFortress FTW). Robin and those guys saved us from the annoying cheaters that were exploiting the old qw code. I was so excited for them when they got hired by Valve to make TFC and then HL2.
Clanpnp/ftb myself. Still remember some of the server IPs by muscle memory.
> Also find it somewhat amusing was that TF2 was originally going to be a much more 'realistic' modern miltary shooter before the scope creep killed it.

Instead we got Counterstrike. I'm not complaining as CS:Source is one of those games that I spent hours upon hours honing my skill.

I don't understand this comment. The original Counter-Strike mod came out around the same time as TF got ported to HL. Unlike TF, CS had pretty much consistent releases of some kind from CS up to 1.6 to Condition Zero and then Source and Go. I don't think there was any salvaging of TF stuff into CS.
To be clear, CS was developed independently of TF, and had a different genealogy as it were. Certainly some developer crossover later on, but probably more by people wanting to work on it instead of being told to.
I have seen some early draft designs for a WW2 themed shooter that might have been part of that early TF2 concept. Then Day of Defeat came along and fit the bill nicely.