 Good evening, Team Fortress 2. We all know it and most of us love it. It's a game with an immeasurable cultural impact. Even a good chunk of people who know absolutely nothing about FPS games recognize the heavy from weird Five Nights at Freddy's SFM animations or what have you. It is truly remarkable how far TF2's reach remains given that it's over a decade and a half off release and isn't even getting content updates anymore. But that name, Team Fortress 2. This game is a sequel. But to what? It's only one other official Team Fortress game by Valve software on Steam and it's called Team Fortress Classic. So this must be the game Team Fortress 2 is a sequel to, right? Uh, no. See, talking about the TF franchise outside of TF2 is kind of like exploring a wild jungle. There are technically six different games that predate Team Fortress 2, most unreleased, and none of them look anything like what we have today. If we're talking about what product Valve is following up on when they release TF2, then yeah, I guess you can make a case that it's a sequel to Team Fortress Classic. That's not how the project began and it's also not really that true either. To properly unravel Team Fortress 2's complex origins, we're going to have to go very far into the past. In 1996, three Australian college students banded together to create a unique class-based shooter using the Quake software development kit. This game was called Team Fortress and it was quietly released for free on file sharing sites as little more than an experiment. But to the teenage team's surprise, Team Fortress grew up following very quickly and the pressure was on for them to continue development. As suggestions began piling in, the team started releasing new versions of the game with new balance changes, maps, and classes. Yes, new classes. On launch, Team Fortress only had five classes to pick from. The Scout, the Demoman, the Medic, the Sniper, and the Soldier. It was later updates that added the Heavy, then the Pyro, then finally the Spy and the Engineer. In fact, the developers made plans and promises for two new classes named the Technician and the Observer that never properly materialized. More on them later. Eventually, Team Fortress became the most popular multiplayer Quake mod and kind of a big deal. So, the developers, who were all either in their late teens or very early 20s, each made the huge decision to drop out of college and formally found a company called TF Software. They then rented out a house to serve as both their office and living quarters with the sole goal of developing a great sequel to Team Fortress. 1997 technically marks the beginning of the Team Fortress 2 development timeline. But apart from the fact that it was built from the Quake 2 engine, very little is known about this initial stage. When news of this upcoming sequel got out, it caught the attention of multiple big league game publishers, even Activision. However, all standing negotiations fell through after Sierra Entertainment contracted the TF team over to work in Valve's offices, to help them develop a mod development kit for the yet to release FPS phenomenon Half-Life. Seeing and admiring TF Software's work, Gabe Newell personally approached the team and bought them out, with Valve absorbing both the Team Fortress IP and the developers responsible for it. So immediately after Half-Life's release, or possibly even before it, work on a Gold Source-powered version of Team Fortress began. First, the team began cranking on the heavily anticipated Team Fortress sequel. It can be presumed that most, if not all, of the Quake 2 build was scrapped, since the TF team was starting work on a new engine as a bigger team. Taking the Team Fortress brand forward was a bit of a daunting task, as none of the developers really knew what direction to take the game in. Eventually though, the idea of a tactical military shooter set in the desert captivated the team. There exists box art and in-dev screenshots of Half-Life Team Fortress and Valve's Team Fortress. Both different in-dev names for the same early Team Fortress sequel project from 1998. Indeed, 1998 marks the year Valve got involved with Team Fortress 2. This early phase of development placed a very heavy emphasis on realism and tactical combat, resembling something like Hall of Duty or Battlefield more than the original Team Fortress. It was marketed not as a first-person shooter, but as a first-person strategy game, with peculiar features like tanks, proning, jetpacks, and a commander class who would direct his teammates on where to go, presumably being an evolution of the observer once promised for the original Team Fortress. Unfortunately, it quickly became obvious to the team that such a sharp departure from the Team Fortress formula was going to require a lot of time and effort to handle correctly. After all, people don't like change. So in order to produce more palatable results more quickly, Team Fortress 2 was put on the back burner, and the team instead began working on a much simpler task, remaking the original Team Fortress on Half-Life's Engine. Oh, that's my century. I got a century-ass bitch, fucking. Hey, man, what the hell? Team Fortress Classic was released in April 1999, and it's a functional port of the original quick Team Fortress game with remade maps and models. It's kind of weird to think that Team Fortress 2's development timeline predates Team Fortress Classic, and that TFC even technically contains recycled assets from TF2. But on its own, there's not a whole lot to say about TFC. It's a faithful adaptation of Team Fortress to the Half-Life Engine, made entirely using SDK tools that were publicly available for modders at the time. Much like Rook-A-Shea, one of TFC's primary purposes was to show people the Gold Source engine's power and versatility. About a year after TFC's launch, Valve pushed a major update that added new maps and redone character models. These new character designs remain present on the current Steam build and also serve as the basis for the TFC mercenary classes' appearances in the official TF2 comics. As for the game itself, TFC is simultaneously more polished and also more janky than the original Quake mod. It has some questionable interpolations. I, for one, found it really weird to watch my character load the Half-Life 1 rocket launcher with 4 rockets and fire it semi-automatically. But in terms of content, it carries over all the same mechanics and, as an added bonus, makes maps from the original Half-Life available in the 4team deathmatch mode. I'd like to briefly mention that Team Fortress Classic also has a huge catalog of fan-made adventure maps. Players have to work together to solve puzzles and parkour to progress, some journeys spanning multiple levels. That's right, there's entire TFC adventure map campaigns. Really a whole rabbit hole unto itself, but I digress. On top of being better looking all around, Team Fortress Classic had better netcode and better anti-cheat than the original Team Fortress, and because of that, it effectively replaced it. So with Team Fortress Classic out the door and excellently received, Valve finally returned to Team Fortress 2 and once again began cracking at the military Desert Shooter idea. Let's face it, Valve's Team Fortress sucked as a title and with Half-Life 2 officially in development and just a few years out from release, tying Team Fortress to the Half-Life franchise was kind of off the table too. So entered Team Fortress 2 Brotherhood of Arms, the new and improved title for TF2, announced in 1999 just a few months after TFC's launch. It was basically a supercharged version of the same first-person strategy game premise they'd already been tinkering with, just with higher quality character models, better looking environments and a much more refined gameplay direction. No more jet packs, unfortunately. Brotherhood of Arms was so close to completion that at E3 1999, Valve allowed attendees to play-test it and it was apparently pretty fun. But in 2000, Valve announced that the game would be delayed due to them bringing the project over to their new engine. What was it called? Oh yeah, Source. It was also around this time that Valve quietly canceled the Half-Life 1 expansion pack called Hostile Takeover, which would have followed a quote, Junior G-Man protagonist and his sidekicks, the Team Fortress Classic characters. Apparently, the TFC classes would have been an employed militia in charge of defending a facility called Allied Processing, responsible for Zen exploration and excavation. Sounds like a fever dream, right? Well, I had a hard time finding much good info on it, but it's totally real. So, Brotherhood of Arms was delayed and the Team Fortress Half-Life fan fiction was canceled. What happened after that? Well, on the official front, Radio Silence for six entire years with Team Fortress 2, Brotherhood of Arms frequently referred to as vaporware on the same vein as Duke Nukem Forever. Behind the scenes, presumably some kind of disaster. Apparently, this military shit just was not working. It wasn't fun enough and the Commander class sucked because players didn't wanna listen to some guy tell him how to play, and they also wanted to shoot at enemies, not yell at their teammates and voice chat. It's kind of unclear the exact reason Valve was so dissatisfied with their Brotherhood of Arms game despite it being pretty much finished, but they were so sure that they could do better that they canceled it outright. Then they went back to the drawing board, snorted something, and started coming up with new ideas for how to take the series forward. So, what's something different from a realistic military strategy sim? Let's try this on a size. Aliens. It sucks. Oh my God, this sucks. This is the game we could have gotten, I'm much better than shitty AF2. Much like hostile takeover, official information regarding what I'm about to talk about is kind of hard to come by, but I'm gonna do my best. After TF2, Brotherhood of Arms fell through, Valve realized that giving classes different and more recognizable silhouettes could make gameplay situations easily readable. Born from this philosophy was the alien slash invasion phase of TF2's development. Toting a futuristic sci-fi steampunk aesthetic and gameplay based around territory control and resource management. Yeah, wrap your head around that one. This era of development was the first to bring focus away from realism and more toward unique stylization, which some people attribute to the influence of then fresh hire Moby Frankie. Anyway, there wasn't ever any formal announcement of this phase of the project, most likely because it was a bit of an experiment. I mean, they had been public about Brotherhood of Arms and that fell through, so with them doing another sharp departure from the TF formula, it made sense for them to keep it on the hush in case it was also a dead end, which I should note is precisely what happened. When the Half-Life 2 Source Tree leaked in 2003, the invasion source code and a handful of assets from the project were published online, eventually cobbled together and repackaged by a group called Team Gayben. This clunky and basically unplayable build really doesn't paint the most flattering image of invasion, but it's all anyone had to go off of until final TF2 shipped and the devs began feeling more confident talking about their failures. But even now, TF2 invasion remains one of Valve's most enigmatic projects. Some pictures and animations, two models and, well, that makeshift fan builder quite literally all we have. And even that fan build is only possible through some heavy creative liberties. You'll notice that the invasion photos featured on the official Team Fortress wiki include clearly unofficial assets, like the Counter-Strike Source Riot Shield and even the Halo Combat Evolved Assault Rifle, all marks of Team Gayben making do. And with so little concrete info, no one is entirely sure why it was ditched either. But we do know that what came right after was way better. Team Fortress 2 as we know it was first unveiled at the July 2006 EA Summer Showcase. Okay, maybe it was a little off. The classes had armbands, the Two Fort Bridge Roof was nowhere to be seen, and the classes had some peculiar loadouts. But this was the final phase of TF2's pre-release. It had the 60s spy movie aesthetic, the beautiful cartoonish maps, giant distinct characters designed to be recognizable from a mile away, all the pieces that make TF2 one of the most visually distinct video games in history. So, what was different about it from the original quick TF and TFC? Well, to many people's horror, a lot of content was trimmed out. There was no 4-team mode, no VIP mode with a civilian class, and no grenades, which really pissed the boomers off. Some even accused Valve of dumbing the game down for consoles. But when TF2's official pre-release beta went live on Steam on September 17th, 2007, it became obvious to the general public that with how much went into refining TF2's gameplay and building its mesmerizing art direction, Valve had more than made up for what was left on the cutting room floor. And, not even a month later, TF2 officially launched on October 10th, 2007, alongside Portal and Half-Life 2 Episode 2, to not just critical acclaim, but to cultural omnipresence. Counting the first year of the game's history to today, TF2 has technically been in development slash maintenance for 25 years, and it's been culturally relevant for pretty much all of that time. One can only imagine that working on the third phase of TF2's development was like climbing past the corpses of other hikers on the way up Mount Everest. But this final phase of TF2 successfully followed up on one of the most influential multiplayer FPS games of all time. And in most people's eyes, bested it. That, in my opinion, is a testament to Valve's creative process and justifies the game's lengthy development time. A PC gamer interview about Valve's failures shows that internally, developers did see TF2's development as three different phases. The military game built up from 1998 to 2000, the invasion era, and then final TF2. So, to answer the question begged in the title, where's Team Fortress 1? It was this thing from the start of the video. The prospect of following up on this weird quake mod from 1997 intimidated Valve so much that they ended up spending a decade meticulously turning it into one of the best FPS games ever. But while these early games might be unrecognizable from what we have today, TF2 itself has many traces and references to its roots. There's a hat called the Brotherhood of Arms, an alien-themed update called Invasion, a weapon for the Sniper based on the H&K G36 that appeared in Team Fortress Classic, and as mentioned earlier, even appearances from the TFC mercs in the comics. But before I let you go, here's some interesting TF trivia, some of which I learned in the process of making this video. One of Team Fortress 2 Brotherhood of Arms' biggest selling points was that player's character model's mouths would move in conjunction with voice activity. This was eventually shipped with Counter-Strike instead. Additionally, these images of TF2 Brotherhood of Arms are said to have inspired the Counter-Strike maps DE Dust and D Dust 2. There's a very famous Half-Life 1 horror mod called Day Hunger that makes frequent use of TFC ass that's like the G36 in the umbrella. TFC itself is one of the only gold-source-powered games that never got an official implementation of HD models. So if you like Gearbox's touch, I'd recommend Martin's TFC HD pack. There's a Source Engine-powered fan game called Fortress Forever based on Team Fortress Classic's gameplay that came out just four days before TF2 steamed public beta. And finally, there's a fan game called TF2 Classic that adds back content from TFCs such as VIP mode and 14 mode. Well, that's all I've got for today. I hope you enjoyed the video. If you did, consider checking out the links in the video description. Thanks for watching. Have a good day. If I was Big Joey, I'd be suicidal. Be like Kurt with my lips on a rifle. If I was Big Joey, I'd get me a rifle. I'll kill Big Joey right hand on the pipe. Fuck Big Joey, cause that Richter sucks. Blue lives matter, I'm counting the fucks. I see Big Joey, I'm fucking him up. He got a small head, it look like a nut. He dressed like a little boy. Playing peek-a-boo, whoever told you it's funny. He's good at food. If I had a plan, I would crunch straight into you. If I had one wish, it would be to turn into you. How you been criticin' this on the record? This is a record, you said that were a record. I'm gonna do it, I'm gonna do it. Make sure it's your record. I need it, they need it in the record. Suck all of them down, I don't want them to pee. Or brule up.