This video covers the evolution of the sentry gun in Team Fortress.

Quake Team Fortress – While filming the footage for the video, I could not find a Quakeworld Team Fortress server that was running the original skin, so this one had to do. The original QWTF sentry gun had a brown looking skin and did not look anything like that black one. Out of all of the team fortress versions, the QWTF sentry gun was probably the most lethal.

Team Fortress Classic – Was easy to build and upgrade, but did not seem to be ask lethal as the QWTF version. The TFC sentry gun can be rotated right and left, but not up or down.

Fortress Forever – Is maybe the most fun version and maybe has the best design. This thing is small, can be built just about anywhere, and can be aimed exactly where the engineer wants it.  When a cloaked spy gets close to this sentry gun, it starts beeping.  That way a cloaked spy is not going to sneak up on the engineer and his gun.

Team Fortress 2 – Due to the cloaking ability of the spy and the sapper, this sentry gun is on the weak side. Its a good gun, but doe to the over balancing of the classes, its almost useless against a good spy.

Post your comments in this thread of the Team Fortress Forum.

It makes my heart happy to see Quake Team Fortress (also known as Quakeworld Team Fortress) alive and well. Seeing these videos brings back memories of the good ole days.

At one time Quakeworld and Quakeworld Team Fortress was the game of the day. The difference between netquake and QW was the networking code. For people on dial up, QW ran smoother then netquake. But there were the die hards that refused to play QW.

Quakeworld and QWTF was popular for several reasons.  1, the gameplay was fast and intense.  2, it was the only first person shooter multiplayer game around.  Being the first has some advantages – such as setting a standard that everyone else has to follow.

Thanks to Tickenest for posting this video on youtube.

We here at Elite Gamers believe in supporting the classics.  And because of this, a Quakeworld Team Fortress section has been added to our files section. Some of the files include classic maps such as 2Fort5, 2Fort32, Hunted and several others.

Quakeworld Team Fortress (QWTF) was the first team fortress game, and the one that started it all.  Without QWTF, its doubtful we would have Team Fortress Classic, Fortress Forever and Team Fortress 2.  It was Quake and was a free addon.  When QWTF was released, it took the Quake community by storm.  At that time there were just a couple of multiplayer games on the market and Quake was the only real first person shooter multiplayer game.

Games like QWTF must never be forgotten.  If they are, part of our gaming history is forgotten.  Its not enough to say that Fortress Forever is one of the best Team Fortress games on the market today.  We should be able to look back and be able see what to took to make Fortress Forever a great game.

To make sure that our gaming history is not forgotten, new files will be added on a regular basis.  So check back often for updates.

Now then, go visit the Team Fortress Forum.

Team Fortress is a team and class based online multiplayer computer game based on id Software’s Quake. Team Fortress was originally designed and written by Robin Walker, John Cook, and Ian Caughley in 1996.

The original network code for Quake 1 was not optimized for internet play with dial-up – which was the primary form of connection in the late 1990s. This lack of optimization for dial-up connections caused severe lag, ping spikes and jerky movement while playing. The solution was “Quakeworld.”

QuakeWorld, was developed by John Carmack, John Cash and Christian Antkow, and was released in December 1996. Further development was later taken over by David Kirsch (a.k.a. “Zoid” from Threewave, of Capture the Flag fame) and Jack ‘morbid’ Mathews. It included a useful program called QuakeSpy, written by Mathews, which later evolved into GameSpy.

Even though the original Team Fortress was developed for Quake 1, it was played on Quakeworld. Thus the acronym – QWTF or Quakeworld Team Fortress.

From QWTF, Team fortress matured and was developed, revised and port to different games. Some examples of these are:
NeoTF
MegaTF
Team Fortress Classic
Q3F
Fortress Evolution for Quake III Arena
Weapons Factory
Quake 4 Fortress
Unreal Fortress
Unreal Fortress: Evolution
Fortress Forever
Quake 4 Fortress
Team Fortress 2

Some of the versions of Team Fortress listed above never made it past the development and beta testing phases. Those versions are only listed for information purposes only.

Visit the Team Fortress Forums to discuss these and other games.

The people that play Team Fortress are a pretty loyal bunch.  Most of them have been playing since the days of Quakeworld, or at least Team Fortress Classic (TFC).  So what is it about the game that makes it so good?  And what is it that makes the game so addicting?

With a lot of online games there is usually a couple of character classes to play.  Such as Counter-Strike – there are two teams, but the players on each team do not have special skills, or special weapons.

Left 4 Dead is another good example.  There are 4 human characters, but all of them can use the same weapon, they all do the same thing and none of them have any special skills.  Now the zombie side of the team, that is a little different.  Each zombie has its own skills and abilities.  That might be why people like playing the zombie class so much.

Kinda like the human controlled zombies of Left 4 Dead, that is what its like to play Team Fortress.  Each player has their own skill, grenades (except TF2), and weapons.

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Part of the problem started when an untold number of noobs bought the orange box and started playing TF2.  Most of the new players had never heard of anything else besides TF2.  To this group of new players, Quakeworld Team Fortress, Team Fortress Classic and Fortress Forever never existed.

While in a game of TF2, a player overheard two other players talking about TFC.  The noob said – “There are other Team Fortress games?”  This is the kind of player that has been thrust into the community.

There are two types of people playing Team Fortress:

Old school – the people that played either QWTF, TFC,  FF and TF2.

Noobs – the people that have only played TF2.

I am pretty sure that a lot of TF2 players consider their selves “old school” after only playing one version of Team Fortress for less then 2 years.  Sorry guys and gals, that is not how it works.

The “real” old school team fortress players are the ones that were playing Quakeworld Team Fortress over 10 years ago.  From QWTF they went to TFC and then to either FF or TF2.

If you were to go back in time, 4, 5 or even 8 years ago – there was a mutual respect between the QWTF and the TFC players.  Mainly because a lot of the people had played both games.   But these days, there seems to be a lack of respect from the TF2 players towards those other games.

Click here to read the rest of the team fortress community has been divided article.

This is a video comparison of 2Fort in QuakeWorld Team Fortress and Team Fortress Classic.

One of the major differences between QWTF and TFC 2Fort is that a lot of the shadows were eliminated. Quake 1, by the way the game was designed had a lot of dark colors and shadows. These color textures were brought over the the original QWTF. When TFC was released, it used the Half-Life 1 textures instead of the ones that came with Quake.

The overall size of the maps were reduced between QWTF and TFC. Not just the outside area, but the ramp room, the basement and the flag room were all reduced. This is especially noticeable in the flag room. the flag room in TFC is maybe half the size of the flag room in QWTF 2Fort.

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2Fort! The very name brings back memories of snipers, medics, scouts, and sentry guns.  For those of you that do not feel like reading all of this – long story short, 2Fort went from a 32 – 64 player map to a 12 player map. If your still interested, keep reading.

Back in the days of Quakeworld, 2Fort went through several changes and there were several versions released. On any given server there were sometimes 2 versions of 2Fort – 2Fort and 2FortR. Back then, the maps were big, by todays standards they were huge.  The standard server usually had 16 player slots – 8 players per team.  Even though the standard server ran 16 slots, there were servers that had 24 and 32 players slots – 12 and 16 players per team.  At one time there was talk of 64 player servers.

One of the major reasons why these 64 player servers never became popular, was due to the system resources the server required.  Back in the mid to late 1990s, memory and processors were not cheap.  And just how expensive was the memory?  Around $3 a meg, and up.  Each player that connected to the server required around 1.5 megs of memory (if I remember right), then add the amount of memory required by the servers operating system.  For a 64 player server you would have to have at least 96 megs of memory just for the players, then add another 100+ megs for the operating system – lets just round that up to 1 stick of 256 megs to be on the safe side.   Just for the memory, the server owner would have to spend about $768.  Leasing a server at that time was not an option.  If you wanted a server, you had to know someone with access to a T1 or better.

Even though there were plans for 64 player servers, they never became popular mainly due to the technology limitations at the time.

2Fort was the map of the day.  There were other popular maps, but 2Fort was the one that just about every server owner had in the rotation.  Maybe one reason why it is so popular is because of how simple the map is.   Unlike a lot of maps at the time, 2Fort was simple – there is the enemy now go shoot them.  New players figured out the map pretty quick.  Maybe that is why 2Fort gained so much popularity?  The truth is, its a combination of a lot of features that makes this map so popular.

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The Game That Started It All, QWTF

Up until when QWTF was released, the game of the day had been Quakeworld Free For All and Death Match.  There was only one class and that was behind a rocket launcher blasting anything that moved.  Sure, there was clan style death match.  But it was basically the same type of game play as free for all.  Instead of of shooting anything that moved, you just shot the other team.

There was Capture the Flag, but it was not much different from Death Match.  There were the same old two teams, but this time they were fighting over a couple of flags.

And then there was Quakeworld Team Fortresss.  This modification had different classes, it had different weapons, it had defensive and offensive teams, it had toys like sentry guns – what more could you want?

Quakeworld team fortress 2fort yard

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