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Team Fortress (also written as TeamFortress and abbreviated as TF or QWTF) is a multiplayer computer game mod for QuakeWorld that was originally created by Australians Robin Walker, John Cook, and Ian Caughley in 1996. The original developers later joined Valve Software and ported TF as a Half-Life mod called Team Fortress Classic.
The first Team Fortress was written as an add-on patch for Quake and released as freeware on 24 August 1996. The first TF for QuakeWorld, called version 2.0, was released on 22 December 1996. After the success of TF, Walker, Cook and Caughley created TeamFortress Software to create Team Fortress 2 as a new commercial mod for Quake II. Instead, TeamFortress Software merged with Valve and created Team Fortress Classic and worked on Team Fortress 2.
The last version of Team Fortress for QuakeWorld was 2.9, released on 20 October 1998.
Recently the developers of Team Fortress gave permission to another Australian to continue their work and improve the original Team Fortress. The result of this is OzTF which contains many updates and bugfixes.
Team Fortress has evolved into an entire genre as fans of the original modification have created a multitude of slightly different versions for various games. Currently there exists a community-created version called Q3F for Quake 3, Unreal Fortress abbreviated as UnF for Unreal Tournament and most recently ETF for Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory. There have also been a few failed attempts: Fortress Evolution for Quake 3 intended to create a very close replica of the original QWTF and UnF 2003 was supposed to be a version for Unreal Tournament 2003 but seems to have transformed into a work-in-progress called for Unreal Tournament 2004. Another mod currently under construction is Fortress-Forever for Half-life 2.
The original Team Fortress was one of the first popular online multiplayer games and Team Fortress Classic enjoyed perhaps even larger following when counting by pure numbers. None of the other modifications have managed to find a lasting following and with the inception of the Tactical Shooters spearheaded by Counter-Strike even Team Fortress Classic has mostly stagnated.
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