#wolfenstein roleplay

[savior-of-humanity]

"YOU ARE THE CULMINATION OF A THOUSAND LIFETIMES OF PLANNING."

RULES / MUSES / VERSES

Independent & semi-selective blog, featuring Master Chief from the Halo franchise as well as a plethora of other characters from various video game, film, and anime franchises, all penned by Sharky. AU, crossover, and OC friendly!

Please like or reblog this post if you are interested in interacting, it’s greatly appreciated!

Original promo template can be found here.

[rpersearch]

i’m looking for a someone to do a wolfenstein rp with. I write paragraphs, literate. if you’re 18+ and interested, interact and i’ll message you.

-

[expvrgction]

Fall to the pain again Ash on the pyre

Call to the rage again Borne back to the fire

---

ESTABLISHED ON AUGUST 3RD, 2021. ANIMATED PROMO BANNER BY @markershub. OLD PINNED POST

Semi-selctive. Interaction priority to mutuals, but non-mutuals are still welcome to interact!

Canon and fanmade characters under related media are headcanon-heavy and canon-divergent. AU and crossover friendly.

Blog is for audiences 18+. Dark topics WILL be tagged accordingly for you to blacklist. Please do not follow if you’re below the specified audience rating.

I follow back from the-world-spear!

Text RP for this blog is written using PC only. Paired with Xkit Rewritten.

Low activity by default.

RULES (ALT. LINK FOR MOBILE USERS) | CHARACTER LIST (ALT. LINK FOR MOBILE USERS) | PERMANENT STARTER CALL MASTERPOST | THREAD TRACKER (May be shared with other roleplay blogs I run)

[obscurushydrae]

Rules of Play

Please at least give it a read! Liking this post also means it’s more likely I will follow back, as I know you have RAU’d.

Updated 04/20/2024

ABOUT:

Kar/Karmun/Karthonic either-or. If you want to separate min from muse, call me by my middle name, Asher instead.

They/Them is cool.

From New York, so the timezone is EST.

Birthday’s January 1990, so 30+

Spoonie with AuDHD

Artist, and educator, so I can get busy.

You can reach me on here or on discord. Just ask.

Personal blog @karthonic.

Sci-Fi Muse: @stellevatum

GENERAL:

Above all else: Be Excellent to each other and party on, dudes!

Lurking for a bit before reaching out is fine, but I would like genuinely interested folks. Optional but I have an Interest Tracker for organization purposes.

This incarnation Kar is for Contemporary Supernatural/Fantasy/Mythology like verses. You can find the Og/Sci-Fi flavored Kar at @stellevatum.

While she's BPRD based,  don’t sweat it if you don’t know the other stuff. If your fandom/verse has a way in, I can finagle her into all sorts of place (she's literally an cosmic horror at heart).

That ‘selective’ part comes into play. I have every right to not follow someone, decline a roleplay, just as you do. Just be polite and respectful.

Crossover/AU/Multiverse/Self Insert friendly. Not your thing, then feel free to not follow.

There will be casual mentions of recreational drug use, more often than not mentions of alcohol than drugs, but will be tagged upon request. Other possible triggers are her fatalistic humor. 

This is not a content resource blog. If you’re here for the pretty pictures, aesthetics, or memes, this is not the blog for you.

Communication is key. My muse might be intimidating, but I'm not-- just very busy and on mobile more often than not. Don’t know something, or want me to elaborate: ask! I forgot a reply or not feeling a thing anymore, lemme know. I'm good.

Godmoding is discouraged but I’m not going to stop it. I will likely try to out ridiculous you Bugs Bunny style. Even though she can’t die, you’re free to try and kill her, but let me know first (either way she’s gonna be pissed FYI).

Most art is mine but will be credited. If I reblog any art reposted without the original creator’s permission, let me know. I’ll remove it.

IN CHARACTER:

Compatible Fandoms (ie I am Familiar with): BPRD/Hellboy, Hades, Devil May Cry, Wolfenstein, Gravity Falls, WTNV, Obey Me!, Sandman, Good Omens, Hellsing, Persona, Durarara!!, Castlevania, Blood of Zeus, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, Basically anything with demons/angels/gods and the like. I will interact with Hazbin Hotel/Helluva Boss muses, even though personally I don't vibe with Viv.

Kar is an ancient cosmic horror who was supposed to destroy all reality. Raised by mortals, so she thought she was. But she's also got other forms, which folks may see.

As for appearance, unless you’re really looking you might notice the fangs. And for the most part, assume she’s wearing her signature sunglasses covering her eyes since those rarely are taken off in public.

While not usually brought up, but Kar has attempted to end her life and self-harmed. Nowadays it’s usually just masked with fatalistic humor, recreational drug use, and lots of drinking. 

There will be mentions of Nazis particularly of the occult sort, so if that makes you uncomfortable please feel free to step away.

SHIPPING:

Shipping is welcomed and willing to discuss the possibility, but I leave the rest to chemistry and just how we as writers write. Kar is into male muses, and will be polite about turning other people down, unless one doesn’t take the hint.

That being said, don’t ask to ship with me and just…drop off. I believe in mutual enthusiasm. If you're no longer interested, just communicate.

This blog is multiship, meaning each relationship is treated as its own separate place in the multiverse unless discussed and agreed upon.

Kar can be polifidelitous. She’s okay with having multiple partners and those partners having partners if your character is cool with it. But she can be selectively monogamous in your little bubble.

NSFW may be on here, or I might do it over discord. I'm playing it by vibes. As I don't really have any established romantic stuff since rebooting, I can't say with any certainty.

FOLLOWING/UNFOLLOWING:

Please don’t follow/interact if you’re under 21. If I follow anyone underage, it’s because I wasn’t able to access any about/ooc information, please don’t take it personally if I unfollow!

If I don’t follow you and you follow me, please just hit me up before doing something. Just because I don’t follow means I’m not interested, I just don’t think our characters mesh with the information given. If we chat about it, who knows!

If I follow you or like a post but not follow, it's likely because I want to check out your rules but can't find a mobile friendly/ need time to look through things.

I don’t usually greet/interact with personal blogs, so side blogs off personals give me a heads up. Otherwise, I might miss you.

ASKS:

Askbox will only be open for IC interactions, save for when the meme specifies Mun. IMs are for OOC communication. Anon feature is for sideblogs, multimuses to interact ICly with me. Any Anon messages good or bad directed to the Mun (outside of memes) will be ignored.

No Magic Anons, please!

There’s no need to wait to send me a meme if you’ve followed me for 5 minutes or 5 months, send the thing.

Reblog Karma is going to be enforced on this blog. That is, if you reblog an ask meme off me, please send me one. Otherwise, reblog the meme from @karref

THREADS:

Jump on any open post, there’s no need to ask permission, they’re there for that reason!

I will be keeping my posts simple! I don't have the time/energy to make formatted posts, and I like to keep things as accessible as possible. I do try to keep track of the heavily plotted stuff, but the casual things might drop off. Feel free to remind me if it's been a bit!

Communicate! If you’re having trouble writing a reply, talk to me! If you don’t like or not feeling a thread, say so and drop the thread. That also doesn’t mean things are done for good. Come to me if you want to skip/do something else.

If you’d rather we move things to discord, just ask! I’ll set up a server just for us!

TAGGING/ HARD LIMITS:

Blood, Gore, Body Horror, Drugs, etc, will be tagged with (name); for instance drugs; . Special Tags on request.

Posts will be tagged upon request, just let me know!

If you read and understand this, I appreciate if you'd leave a like on the post, that way I know you have without forcing a password.

But if you'd like to message me, here's a DM icebreaker: What's your favorite extinct animal? (If you're lucky I may have cool fact about it.)

HOPE TO WRITE WITH YOU SOON! :D

[vokulyolos]

I don't know why, but when I post on blogs, there's always a huge story coming out about everything :/

I recently remembered about Bethesda's Wolfenstein series in my steam library after upgrade my pc. Before I played only "Wolfenstein: The New Order" and created my fan-character for this universe just because. But, again, I recently remembered about three another games of this series and few days ago finished "Wolfenstein: The Old Blood".

This drawing was and remains just a joke for my friend's text-roleplay chat, when I came to help her and wrote profile on that character for roleplaying. And, unfortunately, I have it only in this quality. Haven't any idea if the file has been kept and, if so, where... But if I find some free time, then I would like to draw his reference.

(honestly, I need to draw a lot of references of my character, but I'm either lazy and want to play videogames or I don't have time for this p_p)

Original of meme, if you interested, is attached :p

[askfpslol]

RULES AND ABT SECTION

I will add to this periodically when needed <3

This blog currently updates whenever I am able to do so. Sometimes I am not able to for a while, or I just flat out forget, so please be patient with me. Apologies in advance for unannounced hiatuses :(

I don't know if this is normal for ask blogs? But I'm not necessarily roleplaying as any of the characters. If you send in an ask, I'll have the characters replying thru comic form lol. Sometimes I'll also just post random comics I make.

All asks must be legitimate and not things such as harassment or spam. thank you in advance for following this guideline. If you disobey this, you will be blocked. No warning, just a block.

~FAQ~

What games does this blog contain?

For now, it contains Doom, Metroid, Halo, Half Life, Dead Space, Atomic Heart, Postal, Duke Nukem, and Wolfenstein. Depending on how I feel/my ever-expanding, autistic interests, this list will expand accordingly.

Do you ship any characters?

Yes, as of this time solely Samus and Doomguy. If you dont like it you can block the tag, as I'll tag them accordingly.

But Master Chief isn't transfem! Gordon Freeman isn't Black! etc.

Yes, in canon this is true. Media is meant to be interpreted though and I have fun with it on my end. If you dont like things like that, this blog isn't for you. Sorry bud.

Don't you know Atomic Heart is Anti-Ukraine Propaganda?

From where I stand, I don't think it is. I say first and foremost, I 100% support Ukraine and I havn't actually bought the game, I got it off of gamepass. But due to the concepts and actual development of the game starting years ago (concepts go back to as far as 2008 if you look hard enough), from my opinion I don't believe the game has Communist propaganda. I do not support Russia in any way right now, I just want to like my silly, stupid game. I want to get that out of the way in case I get any asks about it, although I don't know if that controversy is still on-going.

I can't think of many other rules, so a proper introduction to the admin, yours truly!

My name is Flynn, and I'm a 17yrold transmasc autistic dude lol. I have a great fondness for old games, particularly FPS boomer-shooters, and I'm fuckeng insane lol. I like making shitty (or sometimes not so shitty) forms of art to express this fondness. Outside of making comics for this blog, I occasionally do serious art I might post here, along with 3d modeling, being a part-time game dev, and I love collecting things, naturally games and old mlp toys from the 80's. Also if you couldn't tell by the PFP and straight up what my name is, I project HARD onto Doomguy I am so sorry about this guys. Anyways,

[talenlee]

Game Pile: I Was A Teenage Exocolonist

Watch this video on YouTube

Script and Thumbnail below the fold!

I was a Teenage Exocolonist is a game from Northway Games that came out in 2022, a year when I am more and more feeling like media production did something weird to affect me, personally, deliberately. It launched on Basically Everything, including macOS and Linux, which speaks to a desire to include people in this big sprawling game that Wikipedia calls an RPG, that the Steam copy calls a Narrative RPG and which I keep thinking of as a dating sim.

[pops, neutral expression]

In this game, you’re going to play a character that starts out as a ten year old on a colony ship, which then lands and explores the story of a human colony on an alien world, for the first time in history. You follow the character across a sequence of years, confronting challenges, learning about who you are and who you want to be, developing experiences with other people, which you will save and slot into a deck of cards you then use to overcome challenges later. This is a game I find incredibly exciting and I like playing and I like enjoying is experiences it offers me and that’s great. Especially if you know me and my personal challenges grappling with playing and enjoying visual novels.

[scrolls]

When I say it’s a ‘visual novel’ or ‘dating sim’ I want to do that in a way that properly puts respect on the term. Because I think it’s very reasonable to describe I Was A Teenage Exocolonist as being in the same genre as Roommates, in the same way that Wolfenstein 3D and Battlefield 1941 are games in the same genre. There’s a lot of fundamental ideas that are lined up, but one of them has access to a lot more different ways to express their ideas.

There’s a pre-emptive sneer in the critical space around visual novels and dating sims. When Dokidoki Literature Club was The Topic, there were a lot of people like me, who don’t play many games in the genre, talking about one game that was doing something remarkable that they hadn’t seen before, and used that to suggest this game elevated the form. I found this discourse tiresome, because the game didn’t really do anything that surprised me, which was I think a byproduct of my being aware that it wasn’t doing anything new in the genre. That whole period made me cautious about talking too decisively, too seriously, about what the game genre does or has in it, because what I’m mostly aware of is the things I don’t know about. Ahah, people muse, what about these interesting ideas of a game that tells you it doesn’t want to play with you? Isn’t that interesting? Isn’t that something new? All while ignoring that the game is very much not doing that, and also, that this is something games have been doing for decades in that genre.

I’m not saying I’m a better critic than people who were impressed by Dokidoki Literature Club mind you.

(Maybe a little)

Point is, that it’s very possible to describe IWATE as a visual novel and dating sim and have that feel like I’m presenting it in the wrong way. I could just as much try and call it a deck builder, or a life simulator, or yes, a roleplaying game and those wouldn’t be wrong ways to describe it otherwise. Thing is, why NOT describe it as a dating sim? It’s a game where the mechanics of romances and relationships are front-and-centre, with room for players to explore them, and it seems to me that they’re as important as any amount of shooting Geth is to Mass Effect. If you want to define ‘dating sim’ and ‘visual novel’ down to the point where this game can’t be included you’re kind of paring down what those genres can even be in a way that’s deliberately designed to exclude almost every form of those games that doesn’t fit a very narrow band. Basically, it’s saying ‘these things are boring because anything that isn’t boring isn’t one of them, definitionally.’

And if you know me, you know how much I don’t tend to buy definitional arguments when it comes to game experiences.

So.

IWATE is a dating sim.

It’s a really, really good one.

It’s a visual novel.

It’s a really, really long one.

I am not a big reader, as may surprise those of you who see the amount of words I put out or the books I have to engage with for my study. I do not, typically speaking, like reading a lot, and it’s partly because I need to do A LOT of reading. My reading is compulsory and it’s slow and it’s difficult. When I don’t have to read – not BOOKS at least – I do kinda try and do that instead for my leisure time.

There’s a lot of reading in IWATE. It is honestly so vast a reading task that I do not feel confident – a mere twenty four hours of playing through the game – being confident about what is or is not in the text. I can’t say that there’s not some plot spur or some specific idea that I personally wouldn’t like, because there’s just so much of it. And what’s more, as a game, any given play through is going to show you just one particular version of it.

A text where there are multiple versions that you’re expected to experience in multiple different iterations is a hypertext. Some pre-digital hypertexts include things like ambigrams, sentences that change meaning when read backwards, or mystery novels. It’s not a new thing, it’s just a thing we needed terms for when we started talking about videogames, and then realised that, once again, videogames were connecting to a longer, greater culture of engagement with art.

Point is, that IWATE is an extremely hypertextual game; it’s full of different choices and ways to engage with its problems, and I think it shaped my experience of the game trying to imagine what it might be doing or might be about to do. I thought it was really interesting, and I didn’t want to just list to you, hey, here’s stuff I cared about in this game, in a way that meant when you played the game (because I think odds are good you will like this game). Part of what I liked about IWATE’s experience was the way that the game I engaged with in the beginning wound up presenting totally reasonable changes to my expectations. Basically, stuff I thought I’d care about in ten years when I was ten, I did not care about the same way – my relationships were shaped by randomness and circumstances and I wound up feeling entangled in a story in a way I wouldn’t have chosen to be.

This enmeshing is really interesting and I know when I loop back through this story, I’m going to do it without these changes being unexpected. It’s going to change how I relate to things in this game, and for that reason… I kind of don’t want to show you too much about what’s in the game. Hence this video being full of slow pans across promotional art and uh, me.

But I don’t want this to just come across as a sort of token effort of a video, I don’t want you to look at this and come away with ‘wow, IWATE is a big game and Talen hasn’t played all of it yet, because that would take ages.’ What I want to talk about instead, and what I keep thinking about as I play IWATE is the work of one Roger Caillois.

<intro to Caillois>

Roger Caillois or ROGER KY-LOIS for those of you who’ve only ever read his name rather than heard it said aloud, was a French intellectual whose career started out before World War 2 and kept on publishing until he died in 1978 and then, because he was influential and wrote a lot of stuff that’s still being translated and published, kept publishing until 2006, which is pretty good running for a dead guy. If you want to frame him as positively as possible, Caillois was part of an academic tradition that sought to involve as many people as possible from as many different places, and founded the academic journal Southern Cross, which helped introduce authors like Jorge Luis Borges and Victoria Ocampo to French-speaking audiences. If you want to be a little less charitable, he was an advocate for western oppressive and exploitative colonialism as a necessary good to correct the failings of all other cultures that existed at a level of civilisational quality below the level of white western Europeans.

What can one say, of course, but yikes.

I could spend a lot of time talking about different criticisms of Caillois from the funny (he hated clowns) to the vague (he was very good at intellectualising what was ultimately only his personal experience and generalising that out) to the deeply damaging (he didn’t respect women or nonwhite people at all). But instead I want to talk about one of his most well-known contributions to academic culture, with the proper framing up front so you know full well that these ideas did come from someone who needs to be considered with a degree of scrutiny. He’s responsible for the book Man Play and Games, which is probably? his most influential book.

In Man Play and Games, Caillois describes a lot of ideas. He talks about the idea of cultures’ destiny, reflected in their games, and about the distinction between types of play as expressive or rules structured – a paradigm of ludic play, versus paidic play. Then he describes a model of game classification, for considering different games not based on the components that are in them, or their length or size or form or outcomes, but instead about what experience motivates people to play them. And I want to talk about this model, because I think it can be a great way to look at IWATE, a game that can offer you everything.

First up, the summary: Caillois considers games to be broken into four basic motivating factors, reasons people play them, things they play them for. They are agon, alea, ilinx and mimicry.

Agon refers to competitive overcoming of obstacles. Agonic games are games where difficulty are important, games where you’re meant to be able to test your skill. You might recognise good examples of agonic games such as the Indian game chaturanga or the Japanese game go, games with a lot of open information and correct forms of play building around strategic windows. You might recognise it, but Caillois didn’t – he didn’t think Asian games produced meaningful examples of Agonic play.

Alea refers to games of chance, where your best choices are going to be consigned to the whims of fate. Caillois liked to connect this to his existing ideas of the sacred and divine, like there’s some part of people that just wants to give up offerings, but we don’t need that here, not really. I just think Aleatic games are games where players need a random, chance-based element, because they are looking for that feeling of getting lucky.

Ilinx refers to games of vertigo, of the voluptuous panic of a loss of control of the senses. This is your games where you’re losing the ability to perceive and experience things correctly. If you’re having a hard time thinking of games of ilinx, then think about things you see little kids doing: Spinning on the spot, rolling down hills, swinging on ropes. Or maybe that’s monkeys. Caillois argued that adult games of ilinx didn’t exist until the invention of the roller coaster. I argue that this means nobody invited Caillois to any really good parties. Drinking games, playing videogames while stoned, these are ilinx experiences, and you play in part to enjoy that experience of not being in control of your experiences and perception.

Then there’s Mimicry, which refers to games about being or pretending to be another person. These are games of simulation, of recreated experiences, which you may recognise from almost every videogame you’ve ever played in the past twenty years, since these days it’s very common for videogames to include some kind of character for you to inhabit as an agent. But most keenly you’ll see this stuff in play experiences like roleplaying games or life simulators.

And then there’s a secret, fifth thing.

Now, Caillois believed that games were fundamentally games of these traits. Chess is an agonic game, because it’s played for a winner and a loser with open information and people are trying to get better at it. If you’re not doing that you’re not playing chess. Which betrays one of the ways Caillois’ thinking was kinda bent at odd angles to mine. I don’t think games are agonic, I think you play games in agonic ways. There are absolutely people who play Chess in ways that aren’t agonic, they’re thinking about some other way to play, they’re looking at rules systems and aiming for a particular vibe, a joke to pull, or whatever. Chess is not agonic, it’s just we culturally, assert that chess should be treated as if it is only agonic.

And it’s that distinction – that you can use these tools to experience games in different ways – that brings me to IWATE.

IWATE is a game of Agon. There’s a lot of reading to do but at its beating heart is a resolution system that operates as a good-faith puzzle game where you spend time getting yourself the best puzzle pieces that are meant to function together in as optimal a way as you can. Your cards are known to you – you can refine them with currency and you can amplify them with stats you build up through carefully chosen processes. The game pieces are not random and do not ask of you to guess what they do in any given interaction. If you want to, you can math out layers upon layers of game strategy, and optimal play involves correct routing and correct execution. It can even be unlocked into a harder mode so that you need to do this to push through the game’s challenges. While losing isn’t the end of the story, you can always, always approach problems with a mindset that this is somehow winnable. It competes with you, it defies you, and it keeps escalating and demands you escalate with it. And then when you feel like you’ve failed, you can loop back through and do it all again, harder, and armed with more knowledge.

IWATE is an game of Alea. There is a constant presence of gambling in the game, where sometimes all you can do is consign your fate to the cards presented to you. You are going to accumulate cards (if you don’t try and stop it) and that means you’re going to wind up over the course of the story naturally building up a collection of memories that are at the very least, unreliable or weird or don’t fit together well, and the ways to approach and experience as much of the game as is possible mean you’re going to wind up believing in the heart of the cards and stacking a lot of Ls when they don’t come through for you. This is setting aside the social elements of the game too – there are a lot of things that have a chance to just go wrong because the game is unpredictable in a lot of deliberate ways. Keeps you on your toes. You need to capitalise on random respawns and lucky encounters because you won’t always get the best versions of things you want. You need to be at least a little bit lucky.

IWATE is a game of ilinx. Oh sure the game doesn’t reach in through your USB port and get you high, and there’s no playing with proprioception that you might get from a VR game or, try to scramble your brains through nonsexual sissy hypno like 1995’s Zoop — [annoyed]what do you mean I’m the only person who remembers Zoop? — but the character you play is constantly being thrown through a series of experiences that are about a sudden and panicking loss of control. The helplessness of being a child in a truly alien space aside, there are numerous encounters in the story that are about an immediate and wholehearted loss of control over your own body regardless of what the rules say. And your character does kinda get high a few times, as their consciousness is expanded by other’s actions. This is a really interesting thing to consider, because the game’s only recourse to make you experience this ilinx is not to deprive you of agency or information, but to instead instil in you what it feels like to feel this way, with metaphor and simile.

IWATE is a game of mimicry. It’s a life simulator game, where you get to settle into the identity of this kiddo in space who is going to go through the weirdest thing in their life (so far). You’re going to choose what they prioritise, who they prioritise, what they do with their limited time as a child and what those priorities mean for you. Are you a planner? Do you have set goals? Or do you just handle what comes your way? How well do you stick to the plan if you have one? Do you think you can stick to it even when confronted with an ugly, unpleasant choice? What, and who, and how do you care about things? Not just the character but you, as that character?

…

What’s that?

Why, that’s Astrid Ensslin’s music!

Yeah, so the history of games studies is a lot of white dudes in privileged positions deciding hey, you know, games are pretty much like this and not connected to anything else, and then women, queers, and people of colour (and queer women of colour) showing up afterwards to say hey, no, actually, people’s material conditions do matter here. In Caillois’ model, he conceived of those four reasons people might engage with a game, but that is missing a category that Ensslin describes in Literary Gaming: Rhythmos.

Rhythmos is engaging with a game because of the pure intersection of its rules as systems. It’s the kind of people who find the way that game behaviour all slots together neatly satisfying, the people who like finishing their turns with no leftover points, or pare a speedrun down to its minimum frames. Rhythmos is the play experience of liking the interaction of rules in interlocking systems for their own beneficial form. Rhythmos is using all eight letters on your first turn in Scrabble and it is ghost-running a Dishonored level without using any stun darts. Rhythmos cares about the things that can be done in the rules and the ways those executions can be done perfectly…

And IWATE is a game of Rhythmos, because of just how everything in its vast sprawling spread of interactions beckons to you with the idea of a perfect run. You can tell there are choices to be made, you can see there are places you waste investment and overflow and if you can just talk to everyone in the right order, if you can approach this system in the right way, map out the right direction next time, you should be able to unlock all these things and hit this goal and successfully make the whole thing fit together like a puzzle box of numbers.

Thing is, IWATE has a lot of different reasons to want to engage with it. You can approach it in a lot of different ways. Some of those ways are going to be incredibly engaging. I know I found it got its hooks in me hard and I had to literally assign myself homework with a post-it note on my desk to make sure I didn’t just open it up and vaporise a second day on it.

And there’s something else that’s covertly missing from IWATE.

See, growing up, you are going to have decisions about yourself, about your priorities, that you’re going to make and things that are going to change. You might find, like I did, at some point, that one of the people you assume is just as good as everyone else needs to get hit with a brick. Something that IWATE has space for and doesn’t do is a grapple with your own sexuality or gender, too. At any point in IWATE you can decide you want to try out some new pronouns, a new appearance, just pivot your slider over to the side and things are different now.

It’s interesting because it’s a reminder that for all there are things about your character that are a little bit defined, bumpers you bounce against on the way to your end of the story, they are also details that the game leaves entirely up to you to express. You get to choose if that’s a thing you want your exocolonist to do during the story. There is a room for where you play, where there are rules, but also there is a space for individual expression

It’s this space that Caillois – who died shortly after the first videogames were being made – describes:

This latitutde of the player, this margin accorded to his action is essential to the game and partly explains the pleasure which it excites. It is equally accountable for the remarkable and meaningful uses of the word ‘play,’ such as are reflected in such expressions as the playing of a performer or the play of a gear, to designate in one case the personal style of an interpreter, in the other the range of movement of the parts of a machine.

Roger Caillois, Man Play and Games, page 8

IWATE is an amazing game.

And it wants you to play with it.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

#GamePile #Games

[davidjhiggins]

Pause to Reload

The gaming community (both roleplaying and otherwise) are divided on what makes a good or bad game. Having started playing Wolfenstein: The New Order a couple of days ago, I was reminded that perhaps the most important criteria for me is a subjective rather than objective one: context. …

[everglow-synth]

@kcnhub asks... 'Abandoned Mask' 'Mask's Calling' 'Another Mask' 'Try This Mask' (i offer, the little [big] bastard that is grandpa bj blazkowicz and his dumbass not knowing how to turn off a coffee machine in a train... but ONLY if you desire my homie!!!!)

Hoo boy, this is gonna be a long one. Alright ya' bastard, let's tackle this one by one.

Abandoned Mask: A character I no longer roleplay

Luigi (The Four Players)

So, this one's a bit of a weird one, and was admittedly me feeding my own niche interests. This is a take on Luigi from an old Polaris mini-series called The Four Players, which featured grittier takes on Mario, Luigi, Peach and Toad, being The Fixer, The Addict, The Star and The Soldier(which is like, the only one I really don't care for lmao).

A mixture of nobody really interacting with him (save for one person; you know who you are and I still love you for it ;D) and just kinda falling out of roleplaying for a while just made me drop him. Would I pick him up again? I dunno, maybe. But he isn't exactly a popular muse from my old blog, so I don't see him making a huge comeback.

Mask's Calling: A character I'm on the fence about roleplaying

So I was having a hard time with this one(it was this one or an OC), but I think I've landed on a decent candidate.

Rimuru Tempest (That Time I Got Reincarnated As A Slime)

My girlfriend got me hooked on this anime over the last few months, and we haven't finished it(well, she has, but I only ever watch stuff with her anymore, so I haven't). However, I've been watching TenSura with the thought that I would really like to RP as him.

As it is, I was planning on him maybe taking over my old Villain Deku MHA blog, mostly because I've fallen out of watching My Hero for a good while and the concept I had for Villain Deku was flawed anyway, but I don't know if he would be popular enough to warrant having a whole blog to himself.

Another's Mask: A muse I have on another blog

Cole MacGrath (InFAMOUS 1 and 2) - @the-devils-toybox

InFAMOUS is honestly one of my favorite series. Just ever. For starters, the neon powers used in the game InFAMOUS: Second Son (and subsequently its expansion First Light) inspired Matthew's powers, but Cole is the main character of the first two games.

The basic rundown for the uninitiated is that the series starts off with Cole, a college dropout bike courier, delivering a mysterious package. He suddenly gets a phone call that tells him to open it when he's basically at the heart of the city, an event which causes a massive explosion that kills dozens, but mysteriously grants Cole with electrokinetic abilities.

As the city comes under lockdown, it is full of rioters, looters, and overall just gangs that are trying to take over the city for their own reasons, plenty of them either super powered themselves or run by those with powers. Cole, discovering and learning to use these powers, takes matters into his own hands to either free the city... or to take it over for himself.

I roleplay as both versions of Cole; either the Hero of Empire City, beloved by the people for his selfless acts in the face of adversity, or the Demon of Empire City, a heartless beast who took as much power as he could for himself, ruling the city with an iron fist as revenge against the people for turning on him upon initially finding that it was him at the center of the blast.

...Or I would, if InFamous as a series hadn't fallen out of the public eye. I highly suggest at least giving the games a watch, they're made by the Sly Cooper devs, Sucker Punch.

Try This Mask: A Character you think I can roleplay well

William Joseph "B.J." Blazkowicz (Wolfenstein)

This one's... tricky. See, I would be willing to roleplay as him, but I haven't the slightest goddamn clue about anything Wolfenstein. As it is, I only just recently got into Doom a bit after 2016 came out, and I'm interested in Wolfenstein as well... but I have a huge fucking backlog so I haven't had the time to really get around to looking into it.

Literally all I know are a few funny scenes from... I wanna say Old Blood? I'd need to go and actually play the series for myself before I can definitively pick him up. Or, at the very least, watch all the cutscenes or something lol.

[sweetiecenter]

Fallout, Borderlands, and how a Medium Compliments a Theme.

Fallout, Borderlands, and how the Theme can serve the Medium well, and vice versa. A small essay by me about two of my favorite game series.

2K Games and Bethesda are industry giants. Both of these studios have built their companies on the backs of extremely successful game franchises.

In the case of 2K, they built their franchise around sports, as well as Sid Meier’s RTS, Civilization, as well as delving into many other genres. It wasn’t until 2K started to delve into RPGs like Bioshock, from the creators of System Shock 2, that they started to develop their formula.

For Bethesda, they got their massive start a bit earlier with id software with games like Doom and Wolfenstein, which almost singlehandedly popularized the FPS genre.

Both of these industry giants are responsible for thousands of hours of love and enjoyment, and Bioshock 2 is singlehandedly responsible for growing my love of video games, and their writing.

There are two franchises from these respective companies that are both known for being notable open-world, first person RPGs: Borderlands and Fallout, and both series were published by their respective companies around the same time, with Borderlands 1 entering development in 2005, and Bethesda being commissioned to work on Fallout 3 in 2007, which later turned into Bethesda buying the rights and absorbing Interplay. Fallout 3 was released in 2008 on October 28, with Borderlands coming out almost exactly a year later.

As time has gone on, both companies have paid mutual respect to each other, particularly in regards to these FPSRPG games; Borderlands 2 even has a gun called thre dog in reference to the infamous Three Dog from Fallout 3. The similarities between the themes and playstyle of these games has led to many comparisons, but I would just like to take the time to talk about how each respective game does justice to the themes of their stories and the medium they use.

So what are the themes of these games, really?

The more unique taglines and themes of these games would be “war never changes” and “everyone is the hero of their own story” for Fallout and Borderlands, respectively. The underlying themes that go unspoken (mostly), seem to be anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism.

The anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism arguments are where it gets interesting.

First, let’s look at how both games use American culture and atmosphere to their advantage and to get their point across.

We can all agree that governments are, at their core, made to protect folks, right? That is their stated job. It is in their job description. Especially in America, the idea is that you should never, ever have your rights taken from you. We are surrounded by people who believe in the government, and if not in the government, then in your country itself. Patriotism has its own dedicated holiday! This is why Fallout has such a huge focus on how the government of their universe shifted away from protecting people, and how they have become imperialistic, jingoistic, and xenophobic. Even if you hate the military, the world of Fallout is intended to make you go “shit, at least we aren’t THAT bad”.

And this tone helps to set the theme for the Fallout games. Everywhere you turn, you are completely let down by the people you rely on. Looks are deceptive, and yet they aren’t. The dark and gritty atmosphere of the games are constantly screaming at you that the world has already ended, even as Ron Perlman tells you it is only the beginning. Happy endings are nonexistent in almost every case, with the sole exception of perhaps the Courier... but then, the Courier is the only one with no ties to a Vault. No delusions of grandeur, no expectations.

It should be noted that in the dialogue choices as the Courier, you are the most aware of everything that has happened. Instead of being shocked that someone shot you in the head, you are apathetic at best and mostly want the package back; even if you roleplay your courier as a revenge-driven mailman, they are never surprised. Disappointed? Oh, almost certainly.

The first time I booted up the original Fallout and saw the Overseer start talking, my first thought was:

“This is it. Humanity has degenerated into ridiculous blue cavemen.”

I think the design of the Overseer was very intentionally made to be odd, and to showcase that the people have changed. Then you step out into the wasteland. You see the disconnect between the Vaults, the only remnants of pre-war society in the first game, and the rest of the world.

The discovery that the government willingly let all these experiments happen only adds to our disgust as we piece things together, piece by piece. You become jaded and cynical, and in your quest to save everyone, you truly have changed. Sure, the Overseer exiling you because “you’re different” may seem weird and a flimsy excuse to keep the experiment going, but it has a hint of truth to it. You’ve changed. You’re knowledgeable. You can no longer be controlled by the propaganda you had taken as the truth, that all Vault residents had taken as the truth. This disconnect between reality and the Vaults is further explored whenever you reach a new Vault.

Finding out the horrifying truth about what the Vaults were, what they were made for, never gets any easier. The game’s sound design is always made to harken back to something behind you, in some way. The base game’s sound design usually invokes paranoia and fear, while the radios that constantly play music from a bygone era invoke a general feeling of “nothing will ever be the same”.

All in all, Fallout does a fantastic job of setting the basis of its universe. Worldbuilding is a massive part, and their is little to nothing left unknown for a savvy player, should you be willing to listen to exposition. The overall tone is tragic and bleak, in order to juxtapose itself with the pre-war propaganda.

Which brings us to Borderlands.

Borderlands does not ask you as a player to think. It does not ask you to feel. The main focus has never been the story, and yet it is still a beautiful aspect of it, in the way of all the things that go left unsaid. How did the sirens come to be? Who knows. How did all the Eridians die out? Who knows. Why is it so much god damn fun to shoot a vertically challenged man in a gas mask and watch his head explode? Who knows.

Borderlands never gives you enough time to reflect on the overarching theme of the series. Compared to Fallout the game is much more fast-paced and linear, but if you take the time, you can see everything fall apart as the story progresses. You have no choice. Nothing you do ever matters, especially in the face of corporate overlords. All these bandits you’ve been fighting? They were normal people once. Convicts, sure, but they were also taken advantage of, brought to this strange alien planet and used as slave labor. Fresh off of the heels of Fallout, you could ask yourself, “what sick government would do this?” The answer is it isn’t a government. It is a corporation that styles itself as a government.

There lies the sick joke of the Borderlands series. This isn’t some far fetched, awful alternate reality. This is the future, where corporations continue down the same path they are on now - unchecked, allowed to ruin the worlds, contracted by governments - and nobody did a god damn thing. These guns you buy? Produced by Atlas. The clothes you’re wearing? Probably Hyperion fashion. The planets you come from? Owned almost completely by corporations. Atlas has an iron grip on Promethea, and Mister Torgue literally blew up an entire PLANET, even if it is played for laughs.

Just like in Fallout, nobody is on your side - and yet you know this. You embrace futility anyway; you buy Atlas, you buy Hyperion, and you buy Maliwan because at the end of the day, they are more powerful than any Vault Monster you could hope to kill. The bright tones and dark humor of the Borderlands are a direct result of embracing futility. The fun does not lie within facing your oppressors, it lies within killing them over and over. The thing that makes Borderlands so celebrated is its replayability; in Fallout, everything you do is permanent. Borderlands has next to no permanence. No matter how many Hyperion soldiers you kill, you won’t put a dent in them. These corporations span six whole galaxies.

Borderlands doesn’t need to set an atmosphere to make you immerse yourself in the story. We already know corporations are horrible. Jeff Bezos spends his money on space while Amazon employees die of exhaustion.

The horror of these two games directly correspond with each other. Fallout is horrifying because of past deeds, because of what could have come to pass. Borderlands is horrifying because of what still could happen.

Both of these game series have, in many’s opinion, fallen off in recent years, but I personally will always have a special place in my heart for these wonderful games and their storytelling.

Thank you for reading.

[savior-of-humanity]

Like this post if you would be interested in interacting with BJ Blazkowicz.

[reichabsolution]

Willkommen

Hey! Welcome to this Tumblr, I’m doing a roleplay and worldbuilding project based around an alternate history. In the 1940′s, the Axis Powers won the war, subsequently, I imagine what life would be like not just in the 60′s (The Man in the High Castle, Fatherland, Wolfenstein) but in the 21st Century, how the Reich would look after a century of being in power in the world. Let me know what kinds of things you’d like to see! I’m always making edits!

[poisonrant]

My personal GOTY shit

It’s that time of the year, pointless and opinionated GOTY argument lists! Yay! I have my obvious biases so if you don’t agree with anything I DON’T CARE AND SHUT UP. >=| 

When I deem it necessary to explain a bit I will, but since some of these directly line up with popular opinion and/or Geoff Keighley’s “Definitely Not VGA” The Game Award’s (sponsored by Bad Dragon). Without further rambling, let’s do this.

Best Art Direction: Cuphead - Duh.

Best Score/Soundtrack: NieR:Automata - As good as the music in Cuphead and Persona 5 are, neither are as universally amazing as Automata’s score.

Best Audio Design: Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice - If you don’t agree with this you didn’t play the game. Or you stupidly didn’t heed the warning about headphones being required.

Best Performance: Melina Juergens (Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice) - See above.

Best Action Game: Wolfenstein: The New Colossus - You get to play with pneumatic stilts and ride a fire breathing robo-panther! Pure fun.

Best Roleplaying Game: Persona 5

Best Indie Game: A Hat in Time - Hardest category for me. So much good this year but few games in recent years have been so outright joyous to play.

Most Important Social Message: Night in the Woods - As The Game Awards called it “Games for Impact” the messages in Night in the Woods are important and cover subjects you rarely, if ever, see in games. Honorable mention: Tacoma.

Best Narrative: NieR:Automata - Fite me, brah.

Overall GOTY: NieR:Automata - So much good come out this year with Breath of the Wild, Persona 5, Cuphead, Horizon Zero Dawn and countless others; but none of them had me constantly reflecting on my time with them and itching to reinstall them and go down the rabbit hole all over again. And this is after I made the ultimate sacrifice asked of the player in ending E of Automata. It’s simply THAT GOOD.

[obastard]

A tweet

This was me at 14 yrs old, playing Wolfenstein, teaching myself HTML to create anime websites and roleplaying in Yahoo chat. ~20 yrs later, here is me, on Bungie's game design page (come work with me!), creating worlds and leading teams. You can too. #SheCanSTEM #MakeWhatsNext pic.twitter.com/yyi6KFqn7Z

— Raylene Deck (@raylene_deck) September 15, 2018

via http://twitter.com/twinforces

[imersaoetecnologia-blog]

Imersão nos Jogos

Atualmente os jogos tem evoluindo constantemente, não é surpresa que cada vez mais temos superado a barreira entre o mundo real e o virtual, há um ponto do jogador se dedicar quase que integralmente para a construção da personagem, porém essa dedicação não vem dos anos 2010 para cá, antes mesmo disso já havia essa noção de imersão quase que completa.

Graças a série Stranger Things, onde a história se passa nos anos 80, que faz uma homenagem aos jogos de RPG - Role Play Game, traduzindo do inglês, jogo de interpretação. - ao trazer Dungeons & Dragons para auxiliar na construção da história no ponto de vista das crianças do show, podemos ter uma noção que mesmo em um jogo de tabuleiro já se almejava essa imersão num personagem fictício. Esses jogos de RPG dá ao jogador uma série de detalhes de um mundo pré-definido completamente distinto do real, por exemplo: “O cenário é um reino em que as terras não estão ligadas a gravidade do mundo por ela está suspensa por causa da tecnologia que é capaz de manter ela voando sem que afete as condições de vida da população”. Dentro deste local, você é pode pegar um personagem e construí-lo gradativamente no jogo através de suas ações, missões, etc. O jogo te dá quase que total liberdade para criar uma temática totalmente distinta e única, por meio de uma série de tópicos que facilita sua imersão e apego ao seu personagem porque de certa forma, você é seu personagem, decide o que ele fará a cada nova situação. Existe alguns tópicos que ajudam nessa imersão:

Cenário: Alguns jogos já trazem um local semi-pronto, mas há muitos grupos de jogadores que se reúnem para criar mundos mais originais.

Personagem: O jogo pode te fornecer um perfil de personagem, mas isso é só um apoio para construção dele.

Ambiente: Certos jogadores sentem a necessidade de um ambiente mais propício a dinâmica desejada do jogo, criando uma ambientação próxima.

Música: Não é um tópico pertinente, mas que pode facilitar a entrar no jogo.

Interpretação: O tom de voz, gestos, entre outros…

Ainda nos 80, a Disney lança o filme Tron: Uma Odisséia Eletrônica, que trata da imersão completa do protagonista em um mundo totalmente virtual e independente, já se tinha em mente na possibilidade ou o desejo dessa imersão perfeita.

No final do anos 80 já entrando nos 90, temos a criação do console Game Boy, em que a pessoa pode jogar qualquer jogo através deste aparelho portátil. Com esse artifício, os jogos de RPG passaram para o meio eletrônico disseminando ainda mais a proposta imersiva, dentre esses jogos os mais famosos são: Pokémon Ruby, Fire Emblem, Final Fantasy VI… Apesar do jogos serem em pixels, pela primeira vez o jogador teria a capacidade de visualizar ainda melhor o contexto do jogo. Tanto o console quanto o gênero de jogo se tornaram uma febre tão grande que nos dias de hoje a gente ainda ver os reflexos, por exemplo as franquias quase que infinitas desses mesmo jogos, consoles portáteis ou que facilitam a jogabilidade, etc. Quando os computadores pessoais começaram a ser comercializado, alguns jogos foram criados com a proposta de ter a jogabilidade em primeira pessoa, como em Wolfenstein 3D, o mundo teve pela primeira vez um “gostinho” do que seria essa primeira quebra entre real e virtual.

Em novembro de 2010, o console Xbox 360 ganhou a extensão chamada Kinect onde ele mapeia o corpo do jogador através de um sensor que é capaz de identificar os movimentos realizados, assim a pessoa pode reproduzir uma movimentação se utilizar nenhum equipamento físico que interfira na interação entre jogador e jogo. Finalmente se teve uma imersão sem utilização de nada que tivesse de segurar ou vestir, outros consoles que tinham uma proposta parecida mas ultrapassada, como a do Wii U que você ainda precisaria segurar controles para reproduzir os movimentos, perderam espaço rapidamente e logo já ficaram fora de linha por não ter uma tecnologia que superasse a do Kinect. Estamos em 2018, e até agora não obtivemos nenhuma tecnologia nos jogos que seja acessível para o público comprar que superasse o mapeamento dos movimentos. Muitos jogos dessa extensão continuam em alta e sendo produzidos, como o caso da franquia de jogos Just Dance, onde você pode cantar e dançar as músicas que são disponibilizadas e em modalidades diversas.

Em março de 2016, foi lançado pela desenvolvedora Oculus VR o equipamento Oculus Rift - óculos de realidade virtual.- onde, de certa forma, o jogador teria um distanciamento do mundo exterior pois só seria capaz de enxergar o que o jogo fornece, apesar de ser precário em relação ao Kinect, a pessoa estaria quase que completamente fora do mundo real por esse mecanismo de isolamento.

A propagação de jogos e aplicativos relacionados a eles, só vêm aumentando após a tela touchscreen dos celulares por facilitar a interação e a internet via 3G ou 4G que te permite jogar conectado. No final de 2016 e início de 2017, a possibilidade de interagir no mundo externo foi além com os jogos de realidade aumentada, destaque para Pokémon Go onde o jogador pode encontrar as criaturas pelo local está andando, além de outras possibilidades de interagir com o jogo.

Em quase 40 anos, o salto dos RPG de tabuleiro para a realidade aumentada é quase que assustador, porém a cada convenção das empresas de jogos é procurada uma nova tecnologia que quebre completamente essa barreira do real e do virtual, recentemente foi lançado um filme que fala dessa imersão, Jogador Nº 1 adaptação de um livro de mesmo título. Estamos mais próximo de uma conexão perfeita com jogo a cada nova tecnologia lançada e muito provavelmente logo não haverá a distinção entre o indivíduo e a personagem criada, no ponto de vista social, isso pode prejudicar ainda mais as relações presenciais das pessoas, todavia tratando de tecnologia, seria possivelmente o ápice e grande feito na história da indústria de jogos.  

Referências:

http://www.flexinterativa.com.br/blogflex/imers%C3%A3o-mundo-virtual-e-universo-virtual

https://www.rederpg.com.br/2018/03/04/teoria-da-imersao-no-rpg/

http://rpgnext.com.br/dicas-de-roleplay/imersao-rpg/

https://jogos.uol.com.br/ultimas-noticias/2016/07/29/conheca-dungeons--dragons-o-rpg-jogado-na-serie-stranger-things.htm

http://g1.globo.com/tecnologia/noticia/2010/11/conheca-os-bastidores-do-lancamento-do-kinect-no-brasil.html

[barbosaasouza]

Threading the Needle: The Making of Quake Team Fortress

Last December, Shacknews published Rocket Jump: Quake and the Golden Age of First-Person Shooters, David L. Craddock's book-sized account of the making of id Software's Quake franchise and other influential FPS games from the 1990s. Presented unabridged, the following chapter is an oral history that recounts the making of the Team Fortress mod for Quake. The full edition of Rocket Jump is available for Mercury subscribers and up for pre-order in hardcover and digital formats from crowdfunding publisher/platform Unbound.

Following the release of Wolfenstein 3D in 1992, John Carmack started a tradition. Any developer interested in locking and loading a first-person shooter of its own could cut id Software a check and license its technology. Apogee was one of many companies to secure a license, building two Blake Stone titles as well as Rise of the Triad on the foundation Carmack had built.

The release of Doom over a year later sparked widespread interest in the engine, dubbed id Tech 1. Droves of "Doom clones" followed. Some titles, such as Digital Café's Chex Quest and Raven Software's Heretic, stuck close to id's template—the latter swapping out shotguns with magic wands and the former yanking out hellish landscapes and inserting bright color palettes that would have looked at home on the back of a cereal box.

In the weeks leading up to June 1996, the industry shook from the foreshocks set off by previews of id's next game, Quake. It would trade pixels for polygons and 2.5D engines for six degrees of freedom. Denizens of its Lovecraftian world would fly apart in showers of gore and dismembered limbs instead of slumping to the ground as one-sided sprites that twisted to match the player's viewpoint, only ever revealing one side of artwork.

"We were having a lot of fun playing it, so I guess we weren't so surprised that people liked it. The wonderment was more around how fast the word of mouth could travel and how fast a TF community developed within the Quake one." -Ian Caughley

More importantly to aspiring developers like Australian players John Cook, Ian Caughley, and Robin Walker—whose preternatural reflexes and astounding decision to aim with a mouse instead of keyboard keys made him the envy of his opponents—Quake would offer total access to the scripting language id Software's designers used to make the game tick.

At the outset, their plans were humble: assign Quake's default weapons to certain characters to put a spin on conventional deathmatch, group them into teams, and play ordinary deathmatch. They called their mod Team Fortress. Almost by accident, the three friends did more than switch up the game's elements. They made something new—and arguably more ambitious than id Software's 3D masterpiece.

Robin Walker. (Image courtesy of PC Gamer.)

Any Town, Australia

While Doom opened the floodgates to user-created hacks known as mods, Quake and QuakeC promised to take custom maps and game modes to the next level. An old-school hacker and programmer, Carmack practiced the credo that information should be shared. Pro developers could license Quake's engine to build commercial-quality titles, and thanks to QuakeC, even kids like Cook and Walker could dabble in game design by changing the way Quake played. But before Quake, before Doom, and long before id, there was the BBC Micro, pen-and-paper games, and a small town where two boys grew up dreaming big dreams.

ROBIN WALKER [co-creator of Team Fortress, programmer/designer at Valve, 1998-]

     For perspective, John and I met when we were five or six years old.

JOHN COOK [co-creator of Team Fortress, programmer at Valve 1998-2016, founder of Sodium, 2016-]

     We went to the same elementary school, and our fathers played guitar together. There would be these guitar jams where you'd have 10 people from around the town getting together and playing away. They were at Robin's dad's house.

ROBIN WALKER

     We grew up in the same town of 800 people. We went to primary school, high school, and college together.

JOHN COOK

     He had a house out in the woods. It was a house they built themselves, so basically a log cabin out in the woods. It was a fun place. I'm pretty sure I was around three years old when I went over to Robin's house for one of those. He would have been four or five then.

ROBIN WALKER

     Then when we got to Valve, we immediately moved to opposite ends of the company. We're like, 'This is great, but you need to get away from me.' It was a mutually agreed upon separation.

JOHN COOK

     When we were in elementary school, which was right near my house in this small town, he wouldn't get picked up until an hour and a half after school let out. He would just play in the yard at the school by himself, or with one of his siblings. Since I lived just down the street, I would come and play with him.

Raven Software's Hexen, sequel to Heretic, let players choose between three archetype classes, each with unique weapons and powers.

ROBIN WALKER

     I had a BBC [Micro] computer growing up, and you basically couldn't buy BBC games in Australia, but you could write code. All the games I had were ones I'd typed in from the backs of computing magazines, so most of the games I played as a kid, I had the code for.

JOHN COOK

     Both Robin and I, and our friends, were all very interested in board games, card games, and roleplaying games. We would make card games ourselves, and make our own board games. We played a lot of stuff like Talisman. When computers came around, we had some games, but we wanted to make our own games. There wasn't really a lot of knowledge about computers, though, in this era and in this place. Luckily Robin's father was a programmer for IBM. Without him, I wouldn't have actually known that computer science existed.

ROBIN WALKER

     My dad was a computer programmer, so we'd immediately start hacking around with stuff even back then. My brother and I made a Miner 2049er clone with eight levels. When we finished it, we started making more levels because we had all the code there, and levels were just a bunch of raw data sitting at the end of the code.

JOHN COOK

     From age 13, I decided I wanted to make video games. I thought, I should go to school, learn how to program, work as a programmer for a few years until I know enough stuff, and then get a job making games. That was my original plan. The point was always to make games.

ROBIN WALKER

     The most fun part of programming, to me, is the problem-solving of it. I've always enjoyed writing code irrespective of what the code is supposed to do. I've enjoyed working on databases as much as I've enjoyed working on Team Fortress.

JOHN COOK

     In junior high, I did a play-by-mail game. You had a sheet for strategy or roleplaying, like, 'Here's your character and the situation. What do you want to do?' We'd fill out a bunch of options and mail it back. They would process a turn, and you would get post mail back with the next steps on it. And it would be multiplayer, so sometimes you'd have lots of people posting things. I could never actually play them because they were all in the states.

ROBIN WALKER

     Whatever code needs to be written, I've enjoyed it, which has served me very well. It's made it so I can enjoy myself while working on any part of [development].

JOHN COOK

     I made my own that I played at the school. I started out by having a strategy game, which I'd modeled on a white board in my bedroom. People would submit their turns. I'd take [their letters], and I would process them and then give them letters the next day.

     When computers came around, I realized I could automate that stuff. I wrote a program to do it. While I was entering these play-by-mail [answers] into the program, I thought, Oh, I could just have people play the computer version instead. I realized I could make it a multi-terminal program, so I did that. It was early days.

A BBC Micro computer.

Party Scene

Walker and Cook's passion for games and programming computers led them down the same path, at least at first. They graduated from the same high school and enrolled at the same Australian university, intending to write software for a living. Shortly after entering college, their daily schedules diverged, but their nighttime routine became a fixture.

ROBIN WALKER

     John and I were both doing computer science at RMIT, the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. It's a really fancy name, but it's a tech college. I couldn't deal with college very well.

JOHN COOK

     I was a year behind Robin in college, and I was a lot better at it than he was. He was just not interested in showing up to classes at all, basically. He was six months into his [first] year, and he basically wasn't going, so he got a job.

ROBIN WALKER

     John stayed in college, and I started working as a programmer full-time at NEC, working on embedded systems. By day, he'd go to college and I'd go write code that ran on remote power stations in Australia and Tasmania.

JOHN COOK

     I was finishing my year, but by the end of that year, we'd made Team Fortress. The next year I actually deferred university for a year so that we could work on Team Fortress. I ended up never going back to university.

IAN CAUGHLEY [co-creator, Team Fortress]

     I was a friend of Robin's brother, James, at university, and we met through him. When James went off to Singapore, I spent more time hanging out with Robin. We were having lots of LAN days as well as running gaming competitions at a local Internet cafe. John, I met through Robin.

ROBIN WALKER

      Ian was a friend of my brother's, so he was a good friend of ours. He came to LAN parties a bunch and participated [in Team Fortress] on a design level. At night, we had modems and we played Quake deathmatch online on one of the seven or eight servers in all of Australia.

JOHN COOK

     We were very active in the Quake clan scene. We played competitively and traveled around to tournaments. We also had friends we'd met in IRC as well. The Quake community was a big part of [the attraction to the game].

     We just played in Australia. The farthest we went was from Melbourne to Brisbane for a tournament. That was a 20-hour drive. Two of us drove the car, which was stacked with computers. The other four people took the bus. I was one of the few people who had a driver's license, so I had to do the driving. That was fun.

ROBIN WALKER

     I have very fond memories of that time because everyone sort of knew each other. The total population of Quake players was probably sub-100, so you knew everyone. It didn't really matter what server you ended up on, because there'd be people on there you knew.

JOHN COOK

     We did well. Robin probably didn't tell you, but he was the best Quake player in Australia for several years. He's too modest. There wasn't a final tournament that he decided everything, but he was definitely great.

"Just the fact that people wanted to do it, and then followed through and did it, made us also feel like, hey, maybe we should be doing more." -Robin Walker

ROBIN WALKER

     I remember, in those early days, being one of the only people who used the mouse, so playing on Ziggurat Vertigo was awesome. It was an exercise in cruelty.

JOHN COOK

     He would have been using the mouse in Doom first. By the time Quake came around, it was all mouse [and keyboard].

ROBIN WALKER

     There was a group of us who had LAN parties regularly. I can't remember if it was every week or every two weeks, somewhere around there. Technically I'd dropped out of college at this point. I was working as a programmer, and I shared a flat with John.

IAN CAUGHLEY

     Robin's parents had a flat in Melbourne where the kids got to live. After James left, Robin was living there with his sister Jane. The flat became the hub of much gaming. I was involved from the start, I think.

JOHN COOK

     The Internet really wasn't that good for multiplayer games at the time. We just had dial-up, so it was too slow for Doom and Quake being popular, and Diablo was the other [popular] one.

"Fortress," a custom Doom map, influenced the design of Team Fortress. (Doom on Xbox 360 shown.)

ROBIN WALKER

     Every weekend or thereabouts, we would have regular LAN parties at our house. Everyone would lug their computers over at that time, and we alternated between playing Quake Test and Duke 3D. This was the height of LAN parties, at least in my life.

JOHN COOK

     Next thing you know, you've got 14 people in a two-bedroom flat with their big computers and their big CRT monitors stashed all around. People underneath the table, other people on top of the table, that kind of thing.

ROBIN WALKER

     We liked Duke 3D a bunch: its versatility, its combat, its deathmatch. The primary reason we mixed it in with Quake Test instead of just playing Quake Test was because while Quake was full 3D, which was much more interesting, Duke had a much broader set of weaponry: trip mines, pipe bombs, and so on that were really fun.

IAN CAUGHLEY

     I remember when the demos of Quake first came out, none of us had the hardware to run it properly. We were all huddled around a machine playing it at like 320x200 pixels in the middle of the screen.

JOHN COOK

     We had a cyber cafe just down the road from us. We met people through that. It was an early Internet cafe. We played games there, and we ended up helping the owner run tournaments for video games. He wasn't getting enough traffic from people just [using the Internet], so we showed him how to install Quake and got people around to play there as well.

Walker's, Cook's, and Caughley's mutual interest in Quake went deeper than its brown, polygonal surface. They took a keen interest in id Software's semi-regular updates about the game's design and technology. The fact that players would be given access to QuakeC, a customized programming/scripting language with which to design modifications for the game, was an even more exciting prospect than Quake itself.

IAN CAUGHLEY

     We had gotten a bit bored with all in deathmatch and started playing team-versus-team in whatever we were playing. I can't recall if the games supported it, or we found some way to mod differently colored player models.

     But it wasn't really till Quake came out as the most moddable game to date, thanks to QuakeC, that we saw the potential to make the team-versus-team game we wanted to play.

ROBIN WALKER

     These days I think we would think of [creating mods for] those games more like content editing. Quake was the first game to say, all right, here's all the game rules. They gave you access to everything. You didn't have the engine, but you had all the rules for the game at the fingertips and you could go in and change them all.

     We were programmers, so as soon as someone said, 'We're going to write a scripting system so you can write code,' that seemed instantly far more powerful, and it was, compared to what you could do with Doom and Duke.

JOHN COOK

     The foresight of John Carmack was to do two particular things: the client-server architecture of the game, which made it easy for people to have a large-scale game that's server authoritative; and his adding of the QuakeC modding system.

ROBIN WALKER

     We'd done some Doom modding and had built Doom maps, and I'd messed around with the way you could sort of hack game rules together. We'd build our own deathmatch mods that were fun and ridiculous. We kept talking about what we would do with Quake when they released Quake C, because we were pretty excited about that.

JOHN COOK

     Not only did we like Quake, but it was clearly [inviting users] to work with it. Without QuakeC modding platform that was created, we would not have made Team Fortress. The idea of mods didn't exist before that, really. Not in a product-like fashion. That was huge.

ROBIN WALKER

     Literally the day they released Quake C, we started on TF. We were waiting. We'd already started by taking Quake Test weapons and dividing them up into classes, all that sort of stuff. John came over and started writing TF, just hacking away with Quake C.

QuakeC.

Class Warfare

Cook, Walker, and Caughley didn't crack open Quake's ribcage and dig into its guts without a game plan. Before the game and its toolset were released, they discussed design ideas and jotted them down on a Blizzard Entertainment-branded notepad that Walker had pulled out of his Diablo II Collector's Edition box. Those scribbles, combined with inspiration gleaned from the games they played at LAN parties, impelled them to go outside their wheelhouse and design a team-oriented shooter.

ROBIN WALKER

     Five minutes down the road there was another group of people, and we'd go down and have LAN parties at their house. They were primarily Doom players, and they'd play this Doom map called Fortress. It was a really neat, 2v2 map.

JOHN COOK

     We were super impressed by the extra layer of strategy that the game added. It's hard to remember how basic FPSes were back then in terms of the gameplay options that were available.

ROBIN WALKER

     You spawned inside a room and chose to drop down into the real map by falling into one of two or three different holes, and in each hole there was a different loadout of weapons. Rocket launcher, versus a plasma gun, and other stuff [in the third hole].

JOHN COOK

     The enemy had a base, and your team had a base. You had to run up into their base and press a button. That would unlock the next area of their base. In the first areas of each base, you had basic weapons: the double-barreled shotgun. But once you unlocked the next area of their base, then they would have access to the rocket launcher and a couple other weapons.

     Then you would go and you'd have to fight them [when they had] better weapons, trying to get to the third part of their base and unlock it, which would have more weapons—the plasma rifle, specifically, being the best one. Then you'd have to get all the way through the third [section] and hit a button, and you'd win a map.

ROBIN WALKER

     It was a super rudimentary way of making a choice about loadout, but we played a lot of that and really liked it.

JOHN COOK

     So, the whole time you're balancing offense versus defense, who stays back [to guard the base] and who goes out. There's also a nice progression ramp. It's like, okay, it's getting harder and harder to get through because [progressing] powers them up.

(Quake) Team Fortress.

ROBIN WALKER

     We named Team Fortress as a nod to that map. I think the main thing we took from it was, hey, classes seem like an interesting thing to focus on. I tried to find the map years later. I've talked publicly about this in the past and have always hoped that someone might ping us and say, 'Hey, I made that!' It's never happened.

JOHN COOK

     Doom didn't really support [enough customization] for the gameplay to work exactly how they intended. You'd press the last button, and nothing would happen. You could also go into their base and get their [better] weapons, but the agreement was, 'No, don't do that. These are the rules of the game.'

     It was a map that really could only work on LAN play, and Doom didn't work well on the Internet anyway. But you had to know the rules and [communicate with other players] because the game didn't enforce the rules.

ROBIN WALKER

     We made plenty of Doom maps and none of ours were interesting in any way, but then we played that, and it was like, hey, here's someone subverting [the norm]. It's like, well, I can't show a menu to players, so how do I do handle selection? Handle it from a level-design perspective: We'll partition it into spaces. That stuff was cool.

JOHN COOK

     We did make a version of the fortress map for Duke Nukem 3D, though. We fell in love with Duke Nukem for a little bit. It was really fun, but it just didn't have the modding capabilities that Quake did, so we went back to Quake.

ROBIN WALKER

     Team Fortress is literally a team-based version of the [Doom] Fortress map. Probably 10 or 15 years ago, I spent a bunch of time looking for the Doom Fortress guy. I never found him. It opened my eyes to good design.

[Author's note: On December 11, 2017, one week after Rocket Jump was published, I finally tracked down the Doom Fortress map that inspired Walker, Caughley, and Cook. You can download it here.]

In the beginning, plans for Team Fortress were modest. Over hours of programming and informal play tests with friends, the scope of the game grew organically into what Walker would later describe as an "obvious" conglomerate of mechanics.

ROBIN WALKER

     The first couple of versions of Team Fortress didn't have teams. It was pure deathmatch.

IAN CAUGHLEY

     The weapons of the first classes were all based on existing Quake weapons. We just tweaked them to adjust damage.

JOHN COOK

     We made someone who had a rocket launcher, because the rocket launcher in Quake was awesome. We made the Scout, the Sniper, the Heavy Weapons Guy.

Deathmatch in Quake.

ROBIN WALKER

     A lot of stuff in TF didn't come from game design. The Heavy Weapons Guy and his assault cannon came from Predator. It was an amazing movie; we loved it.

JOHN COOK

     I think we knew we wanted to work up to some sort of challenge. At first, all of the characters looked the same, which was sort of confusion. Basically, we just sort of split up the Quake weapons amongst [the classes].

ROBIN WALKER

     I think there were five at the time. We had a fairly standard, what I would think of as a fairly obvious set of initial classes. We started with a fast-moving class to the opposite end, a heavy, slow-moving class, and divided Quake's existing weapons amongst them.

JOHN COOK

     We did the thought experiment to learn how to apply the fortress, but decided not to do it. We decided to do it later. That's always the way you decide not to do things: You decide to do them later.

ROBIN WALKER

     We played a lot of Dungeons & Dragons like everyone else, so we thought [character] classes made a lot of sense. We also had a bunch of different people at our LAN parties, too.

JOHN COOK

     We played Hexen a lot at our earlier LAN parties, and one of the things we would do was make levels for it. You could make levels so quickly that you could make them while people were playing the game. We'd have two groups of three go through levels and see how quickly they could get through them. We'd time them so it was competitive. We really liked how the classes interacted with each other.

IAN CAUGHLEY

     At the same time as playing lots of multiplayer FPS, we were also playing other [genres] such as RPG and RTS. In these games you often controlled a team of characters with different skill sets, and we wanted this in our team-versus-team FPS. I remember Syndicate being a particular influence.

"What of his first questions to us, during the first lunch we were having after flying in from Australia, was, 'So, tell me what's fun about team play?' We just looked stunned at each other." -John Cook

     These games also had your typical rock-paper-scissors mechanics and taught us that each class would need both strengths and weakness as well as easy kills and nemeses.

ROBIN WALKER

     We had a very broad spectrum of [players with different] skills. There were some people who were not really hardcore gamers at all, but who wanted to come home to LAN parties and play. Classes seemed an obvious thing for us to do as a way to make sure everyone was having fun.

Relying on suggestions and comments from friends as well as stories from other realms of pop culture, Team Fortress grew to incorporate more complex weapons that had transformative effects on moment-to-moment gameplay.

ROBIN WALKER

     The strange thing was we were hardcore deathmatch [players], too. When we were at those parties, all John and I played was one-on-one deathmatch. We played as competitively, and in tournaments, as you could in those days. It always struck me as sort of incongruous that what we played was so different from what we worked on. We played TF when people were there, but at nights we'd play deathmatch.

JOHN COOK

     The order that the classes are listed in the menu is the order in which they were built, to give you an idea of when things came on. We released five classes originally.

ROBIN WALKER

     Between deathmatch and TF, one was easier to play because you only needed two people. The player counts were low in those early days. That was a material factor. In a lot of our LAN games, if we didn't have enough people, we couldn't really get a fun game of TF going. But if there were only three or four of us, we could always have fun deathmatches.

JOHN COOK

     There was a lot of stuff that was emergent, like being able to blow yourself across the map with a concussion grenade.

ROBIN WALKER

     There was definitely class impact. The Soldier was absolutely the class made for anyone who wanted to do deathmatch. We kept the rocket launcher and core gameplay. When I look at that stuff, my takeaway is that there wasn't any effort spent on trying to build good team mechanics into those early classes. We were influenced a lot by our [habits].

IAN CAUGHLEY

     Since we had lots of people during the LAN days, we had lots of play styles represented. We also listened to the feedback from players. For example, the Pyro was added after QuakeWorld came out to help out players with slow network connections.

JOHN COOK

     Originally it was, you throw the concussion grenade and it knocks people away, isn't that cool? There were customers who thought, I'm going to throw the grenade at my feet and shoot myself across the map. That became this key part of all clan play in the Quake version of Team Fortress.

ROBIN WALKER

     I think the Pyro largely grew out of a mod done by another guy, whose name I can't remember. That feels terribly unfair to him. The early Quake-mod days were like that. There was a lot of sharing of mods and techniques, things like that.

IAN CAUGHLEY

     As you can imagine, when you consider the slight time delays involved with the server telling a game where the enemy is, followed by the game telling the server that the player fired in a certain direction, it becomes quite difficult for the server to calculate if a weapon hit its target. This is compounded by the server not being able to trust the game, since a cheater could be playing with a modified game designed to make weapons always hit.

     The Pyro's main weapon, the flame thrower, did not need to be targeted accurately. Instead of looking along a line to see if the weapon hit, we looked in an invisible box in front of the player, as if that area was filled with flames, because it was. If the weapon hit its target, they would be lit on fire, causing damage over time so, once you hit your target, you didn't need to keep hitting them.

     Couple this with the fact that faster units would typically have less health, and a pyro could be quite an annoyance—deadly—in a confined space. On the downside, they had no range, so were almost useless out in the open, though the flames could be used to make it a bit harder to see where your head was—always a good thing when there are snipers about.

JOHN COOK

     The most frustrating class was definitely the Pyro. There were a lot of things we wanted to do, like set whole areas on fire. We got that working, but the performance was bad. Having 20 flame sprites on the screen started to slow things down.   

     Plus, it turned out that area denial is not that fun in FPS games. Running through areas is fun, but having a grenade that sets a whole area on fire for half a minute is not a good gameplay idea.

Working in QuakeC, Cook and Walker rejiggered Quake's grenade launcher as a flamethrower for the Pyro class.

ROBIN WALKER

     It was a bit of a game in and of itself: Trying to figure out how to get Quake to do something was fun. If you managed to figure it out, you wanted to tell everyone. I think that's why you see things like grappling hooks showing up everywhere. It was such a neat that to even be able to get Quake to do that. I think everyone wanted to try it.

JOHN COOK

     The Sniper was the class we had the most fun making, mainly because it was fairly straightforward to implement. You aimed and shot forward using the mouse. We wondered, 'How do we get the charging mechanic right for powering up? How do we make it slow to shoot but still rewarding when you get head shots?'

     We played a lot of matches of just us playing Snipers against each other. We did try a few [implementations], and that one sort of balanced the difficulty of shooting and feeling like you really accomplished something when you shot someone.

ROBIN WALKER

     We were a group of people who got together a lot or LANs, and you could yell out to each other. I think the clarity of design we reached years later, when fundamentally we had a design for 32 people who don't know each other—and who probably won't know each other again after this game—and they're all going to have their own individual goals, and a small view of everything going on—our goal was to make it so that as they all individually and locally optimize for their experience, optimization at the team level falls out of that.

     They could look left, look right, and see teammates doing some stuff and go, 'Man, we're working well as a team,' even though we started with the base assumption that they were all ignoring everyone else, because it turns out that's the way most players work.

JOHN COOK

     Really, a lot of the time spent making Team Fortress was spent working out, what are the capabilities of QuakeC? What are the extents of this game engine? What can we take advantage of to do more gameplay? You can't just do anything. You have to understand limitations and work with them to make the best game we could.

ROBIN WALKER

     I feel like we had a shallow understanding of teamwork and so did obvious stuff. There's a combat medic: A medic is an obvious [class] to build if you're trying to have people care about each other. But this is the core problem of multiplayer game design: You're trying to get a bunch of people to work together as a team, but they want someone else to play Medic; they want someone else to [defend the base].

     The Demolition Man had a tool we used in a bunch of maps that let him alter the map. He had a big bomb, he could go put it [somewhere], if it blew up before the enemy stopped it, it would destroy a wall and his team could get through. We didn't keep that concept in TF2 because we kept finding that it was a perfect example of everyone wanting someone else on the team to do that.

JOHN COOK

     A lot of decisions, like how concussion grenades, were based around us asking: What can we get Quake to do? What are its capabilities as a modding platform? I ended up writing a pre-compiler for it just to, okay, we want to make this thing; how do we do it?

QTF's Demolitions Man.

ROBIN WALKER

     At a design level, you were constantly torn between providing enough value to that [type of scenario] so that when someone does it, the team is rewarded and happy, but not such that everyone feels like, 'We're screwed if someone doesn't do it, but I don't want to do it, so I'm going to jump into Demoman, do it, then flip back to the class I actually want to play.' We didn't like making players make that kind of choice.

JOHN COOK

     We could take a small amount of code and have the pre-compiler generate a large amount of code so we can deal with all these limitations of the system.QuakeC didn't have a lot of conditionals. You couldn't concatenate strings together. I had to make a system that was, okay, I want to concatenate things, so really, I need a giant if-else statement which handles all the different ways these four strings can be concatenated so we can share a status bar at the bottom of the screen. It was limiting, but it was still awesome.

ROBIN WALKER

     At a design level, you can create choices for players that are not really choices. They're more like induced friction or punishment. It didn't seem like a good long-term strategy. I think the Medic is a good example of that. TF's Medic is not really a fun role. We made him a thing that needed to exist if teams wanted to be competitive by making him powerful, but that's not really a good solution.

JOHN COOK

     The Medic seemed very simple to build initially: Just add a healing pack and you are done, right? But getting him fun to play and actually heal other players required constant tweaking and we didn’t really get him good until TF2.    

ROBIN WALKER

     We had a much better solution [for the Medic] in TF2. I'm sure it's far from perfect, but at least we understood that the right way to treat this class was to make it the single most important person on the battlefield for specific points in time, and make him be the way teams can break stalemates. I think that was a lot more successful.

JOHN COOK

     It certainly was pretty crude. We just printed a bunch of text to the screen, and made the person hit a number that corresponded to the [option] on the screen that they wanted. If you wanted to make a menu with a bunch of transitions, that was never going to happen. if you wanted to just print out some text, you could.

ROBIN WALKER

     A lot of the things we were dealing with [were new problems]. You couldn't add any data to a Quake entity, so every entity had the exact same data. The player has a variable for the amount of nails ammo they've got; that means every other entity has that variable as well. But you couldn't add variables, so what you'd end up doing is [repurposing data].

JOHN COOK

     If you wanted to tell someone they were on fire, you just printed a message to the screen: 'You are on fire.' That's literally what we did.

ROBIN WALKER

     So, on a flag, item 'nails' is a piece of data that will store a data that means a completely different thing: the skin that should be shown when it's dropped by a red team member.

All classes in QTF sporting red-team colors.

JOHN COOK

     There were things that seemed like a limitation, like saying 'You are on fire' and flashing that on the screen instead of showing flames. People just thought that was funny. The low fidelity was consistent enough that that was just how the product was. People accepted it. They found the [humor] in it.

"It came completely out of the blue to us. The idea had never occurred to us that we be planning to sell, or that anyone would want to buy it." -Ian Caughley

ROBIN WALKER

     The code was such a mess because there's all that kind of stuff where you're stuffing things that mean [something different] into pre-existing variables, and the variable names are all misleading.

When the going got tough, Cook and Walker took comfort in the fact that they weren't the only ones trying to flip the script on Quake. A burgeoning community of amateur developers was hacking the game and pollinating email lists and Internet forums with their results.

ROBIN WALKER

     Quake C was a puzzle in two parts. One part was the standard coding to get what you wanted. The other part was: I want to do this specific thing, and at face value there's no way Quake will allow me to do this, but maybe there's some way I can make it. Sometimes you'd come up with solutions where you'd completely misuse something from the way it was intended just to get what you wanted. Every now and again we'd get something to work that we didn't think we'd ever be able to get to work. It was a puzzle in that sense. I really enjoyed that. It was really fun.

JOHN COOK

     The nailgun is one of the guns we brought over from Quake to give to the Scout. We wondered why people always switched over from it to the base shotgun. Does it not do enough damage? Well, it does good damage, but you have to [land a lot of hits], and the nails are slow.

ROBIN WALKER

     We were doing that sort of stuff, but at that time, everyone was doing that sort of stuff. The Quake C mailing list was full of people saying, 'Oh, wow, I just realized that if you do this and this, you can do this!' It was a global effort, which was one of the fun things about it. Steve Bond and John Guthrie at that time, at Quake Command, were doing all sorts of bizarre stuff. They weren't making mods so much as they did short-form experiences. The Quake Rally guys were turning the whole damn thing into a vehicle-based game.

JOHN COOK

     If you have a LAN party where a bunch of people come over, you play the game and see what's fun, and make it better.

ROBIN WALKER

     Once you saw that someone had done something, it was just as much fun pulling it apart [as building mods of your own]. The grappling hook is a good example. I can't remember who built the first grappling hook. I think it pre-dated CTF, but I can't remember. But once you saw it was possible, you wanted to learn how to do it. That was really fun.

A view of the blue team's base from high atop red's fortifications in the classic 2fort map for QTF.

2 forts

Team Fortress. Team Fortress Classic. Team Fortress 2. No matter which version players tried first, no matter which class they favor, no matter the art or gameplay styles they prefer, the words "Team Fortress" call to mind a vivid scene: Red and blue teams fighting to defend their flag and capture the opposing team's. For most players, this scene plays out a map that's been synonymous with Team Fortress players as well as its developers since 1996.

ROBIN WALKER

     At some point, we shipped our first map. I want to say that was the third release, but I'm not super sure.

JOHN COOK

     We couldn't really work out how to get the fortress mode working in a more generic environment. It was kind of what we wanted, but instead we went ahead and did capture the flag because we understood it. I started making a map for that, which was 2fort.

IAN CAUGHLEY

    It's amazing how well this map did considering it was one of our earliest. I think a lot of its design came from John. He did a great job of making different parts of the map suit different classes and allowed for many different strategies.

ROBIN WALKER

     CTF and 2fort had such a symbiotic relationship for the longest time. We really only had one map for some period of time; we were simultaneously making the game using the map, and making the map.

JOHN COOK

     2fort was basically the map which Team Fortress was developed on from that point on. Every time we were playing it, we were playing on an updated version of 2fort.

IAN CAUGHLEY

    It developed as we added more classes with the second version, making it even better with multiple ways to get everywhere.

ROBIN WALKER

     Inevitably, each class had sort of a place to be on the map. You've got this case where the classes were molding themselves to fit the map, and the map was molding itself to fit the classes. In retrospect, it didn't surprise us that 2fort was the most popular map. It embodied Team Fortress's gameplay better than anything else.

JOHN COOK

     All the classes were balanced around being fun on 2fort, the roles of the classes. The core gameplay evolved at the same time at that map, so it's not a surprise that it worked the best out of all the maps.

ROBIN WALKER

     You end up with these relationships between classes and areas. The Sniper needs a place to be. Snipers want to be up above enemies, and have a place to retreat, so the battlements show up. Once the Engineer appears, you think, What's the Engineer's role in this? or Where would Soldiers hang out? You have all these places where classes end up in terms of 3D positions in the map, and we would iterate on those rooms just to make them more fun to be in as a Soldier, or an Engineer, [or other classes].

2fort as seen in Team Fortress Classic, developed using Valve's then-nascent Half-life SDK (software development kit).

JOHN COOK

     I don't know how we just decided that it was 2forts facing each other across a bridge. I don't know who builds forts like that in real life, and why it's a '2' instead of 'two.' That's just how it worked, but it worked out well.

Newer fans may be surprised to learn that 2fort was not packaged with Team Fortress right at its humble beginning. Likewise, the idea of fighting over sheets of cloth affixed to poles was a concept that arose shortly after Team Fortress's initial release. Cook and Walker weren't the only ones to take their design in that direction. David "Zoid" Kirsch, creator of the popular Threewave CTF mod, got there first, but players still debate over which implementation was more popular.

ROBIN WALKER

     It was the third version when we added Team Fortress map goal support. We never specifically coded Capture the Flag into TF. This was before Threewave [CTF mod], if I recall. The only reason I remember that is because there was this fight online between various fans about who came up with flags first, like it was Quake that had invented flags.

The reason I point this out is because it wasn't clear that Capture the Flag was going to become [the de facto mode of play]. We wanted to build something that hopefully would support [the type of gameplay] people wanted to do.

JOHN COOK

     Zoid [Threewave CTF creator David Kirsch] had contracted at id for a while, and that's when we talked with him. He was helping test the new version of Quake World. The new version broke Team Fortress, so he talked to us about that.

ROBIN WALKER

     We thought that things like flags could be thought of generically. They could be an object, and the game rules could be encoded by the map maker into the object. Say, if the player touches this, it should be attached to the player; if the player carrying it dies, it should fall to the ground, or maybe it should return back to where it was, or return back to where it was after a certain amount of time—all that sort of stuff.

JOHN COOK

     We thought of ourselves as in competition with Threewave. I think Zoid was a lot better at communicating to people. He was friends with all the big Quake sites, and [Threewave] CTF was held up as the most popular Quake mod. It wasn't. It was us. Team Fortress.

ROBIN WALKER

     We wrote some code that started polling all the Quake servers in the world every 15 minutes or so, and left it running for a few weeks. It pulled off data that anyone could pull off a Quake server at that time. The data showed us that there were more people playing TF than Quake itself. More than anything else. That was a shock to us. That was something that caused us to believe we had some hope at doing it professionally.

JOHN COOK

     It showed that there were around 2500 people playing Team Fortress, and only 1500 people playing [Threewave].

CTF is simple in concept: Each team defends their flag while waging assaults on the enemy base to steal theirs. For all its versatility, QuakeC made executing such a seemingly straightforward mode quite tricky.

ROBIN WALKER

     No one really had a good way to teach anyone things inside of Quake; you could just put text on the screen. One of the positives of TF's map system was that level designers had a lot of power to control exactly how the game played out on their map. One of the negatives was that level designers had lots of power.

What that meant was you might play two maps that both call themselves CTF maps in TF, but they might have subtly different rules.

JOHN COOK

     Robin pushed for this, to make it so people could do more with their maps. He spent a lot of time making a system so that the map makers could do a little bit of programming without all the setup and do more interesting things with the maps. That's how you ended up with maps like The Rock and other [gameplay] variants.

IAN CAUGHLEY

    I would say about six months in, Robin decided to re-write the code behind the objectives. I think he did most of the design and implementation of this bit on his own, and what he came up with was pretty amazing. He effectively wrote a 4GL language that map builders could use to define map behaviour and objectives and opened up modability like never before.

    Now map makers with little coding experience could build games, not just maps. Well, at least within the context of TF. This is when we saw so many more ways to play TF get developed. So many of the game modes that are seen today in FPS were created by map designers using Robin's toolkit.

ROBIN WALKER

     If you touch the flag on this one after it falls, it's returned; on the other map, maybe it sits there for 30 seconds and you have to defend it [until it returns to your base]. That was entirely up to the map maker. We unified those decisions across the [CTF] maps we shipped as a way of promoting the rules we thought were best.

JOHN COOK

     Robin tried to make a C&C map for Team Fortress. You would get stuff from the enemy base and take it back, and build up structures. These structures would rise out of the ground and power-up your weapons as you [upgraded them], but we hit the wall, technically, on what we could do. In terms of dynamic worlds, Quake wasn't suited to that.

ROBIN WALKER

     In particular, I think one thing that confused lots of people who came from Threewave to TF was that in most TF maps, if the enemy dropped your flag somewhere and your team touched it, it didn't return to the starting point. It had a timer above it, and you had to [defend] it where it fell for 20 or 30 seconds; then it would return.

     We liked that because it meant that instead of the only place you defend your flag being your starting point, we liked the fact that [defending a dropped flag] caused teams to suddenly have to spring up defense in another place.

2fort as seen in Team Fortress 2.

Team Fortress didn't make its way online until late August of 1996. Once it did, feedback trickled and then flooded in from the mod's growing fan base. Weeks ahead of release, Cook and Walker availed themselves of a more immediate method of feedback.

ROBIN WALKER

     At that point, we were having LAN parties, and we'd have games where someone would complain about X, and we'd immediately change X and start the server back up again.

JOHN COOK

     We didn't spend tons of time coordinating what stuff we would add. We just went at it as we could, and trusted that we could fix it up on the weekend when we were playing it with other people.

IAN CAUGHLEY

    Early on we were all contributing everything. Lots of coding, tweaking the 3D player models, new textures, map design. None of us had great artistic skills, so after the mod had a little initial success, we started getting more art contributions from the other people in the community. This made the game look much more awesome.

ROBIN WALKER

     On any given Saturday or Sunday where we'd play for hours, we'd go through several versions of Team Fortress on that day and just keep changing things. Everyone sort of contributed to design ideas. In the later versions of Team Fortress, as they got bigger and bigger, John and I started alternating. On one update, one of us would do 75 percent of the coding and the other one would relax. I don't remember organizing it that way. We just fell into that [routine].

JOHN COOK

     I was trying to finish school, get to my second year of classes. Sometimes it would just be: He did the capture-the-flag system, I did the pyro class. We'd sort of bounce back and forth that way, just taking a big piece.

ROBIN WALKER

     At that time, I was like any 22-year-old: I thought I was right and that John was totally wrong, and that if he'd stop working on the game it'd turn out so much better. Now I can look back and realize that if not for him, I would have petered out much earlier. The game was better for having two of us with [preferences] for what should be in it.

IAN CAUGHLEY

    Modding was such in its early days that the whole community was super interactive and supportive. The first gamers to download and play our game would have been other modders; we were all trying out each other's ideas.

JOHN COOK

     Part of the issue was we didn't know anything about source control. I think we were forced not to work on the codebase at the same time because we didn't have a tool to share code.

ROBIN WALKER

     There's the old military [proverb]: Strategy never survives contact with the enemy. I think you could adapt that to, 'Game design never survives contact with the player base.' We start shipping updates, players start playing it, and that changes everything. Feedback changes things, ideas change things.

The Scout (left) and Pyro, as seen in TF2.

Thanks to the advent of social media, blogs, YouTube, and indie publishing channels on platforms such as Steam, fans are able to follow nearly every step of a game's development leading up to its release. On August 24, 1996, the date of the initial Team Fortress release, Walker and Cook didn't think of themselves as developers. They had made a mod for a game, and they published it with all the fanfare they felt such an effort deserved.

JOHN COOK

     At some point, we put it on cdrom.com. There was no official release.

ROBIN WALKER

     The first release just contained Scout, Sniper, Soldier, Demoman, and Medic. We added some stuff that wasn't all Quake. The Medic had a medikit, and the Sniper had a sniper rifle. The rest of them, I'm pretty sure, just used Quake weapons.

JOHN COOK

     There was ftp.cdrom.com. He had a directory on the FTP for Quake mods. We had downloaded Quake mods from there, and we were kind of done making Team Fortress with its five classes. We put it up there with a little readme file that said, 'Hey, we made this thing, check it out.'

ROBIN WALKER

     We were subscribed to all the Quake C mailing lists, but we didn't really say much. We hadn't really entertained the idea of releasing it. It was written for our LAN parties, so we had a group of Quake players who showed up every couple of weeks and we'd just play it. Those were our core customers and play testers for quite a while.

JOHN COOK

     We kind of forgot about it until people emailed us and said, 'This is pretty fun. Are you going to do any updates?' We said, 'Oh, sure. If people like it.'

ROBIN WALKER

     The initial Team Fortress, at least for the first few versions, you played on Quake deathmatch maps. There weren't flags or anything because there weren't maps built with the idea of [CTF] in mind.

JOHN COOK

     It was more that we found [ftp.cdrom.com] useful because we were doing our own mods, so we would give back to the community. We put new versions up and mailed the people who had written us [to let them know]. We got some more play-time in, and more people kept mailing us to the point where we built a website for it and hosted it off the university. It was a very organic process.

ROBIN WALKER

     I think our allergy to self-promotion was true, even back then, and I think it absolutely hurt the rate at which the game was adopted. Something about the two of us even then, we just really didn't like the idea of promoting what we did.

JOHN COOK

     You downloaded maps separately. We thought about how Quake had this ecosystem of mods coming online. We thought about maps in the same way. We wanted it to be that people would find good maps, instead of ours shutting down other people from making and playing other maps.

IAN CAUGHLEY

     I think the way Quake worked was that you installed mods separately from how you chose your map. So, you could effectively play TF on any map, but only TF maps would link to our objective system. But we were very open about how to write a TF map, and collaborated with other map makers as much as we could.

     I'm reasonably sure that once we had done the big objective code re-write, we didn't do much of our own map making from that point forward. Other map makers were better at it than us, and we were too busy playing their maps.

JOHN COOK

     In hindsight, that was silly, but that was the idea: Here's the game, and you can get the maps separately. We put the maps up separately from the game, so it was almost an invitation for people to make their own maps.

At first, Cook and Walker were as bemused by the attention as they were delighted. Learning how to promote their efforts proved more difficult for them than building the mod.

ROBIN WALKER

     We pretty quickly started focusing on what people were saying online, what they wanted. But we still weren't thinking of ourselves as [professionals]. If you'd asked us then, 'Are you guys game developers?' or 'Do you work in the games industry?' we would have said no. That never even occurred to me.

JOHN COOK

     I think we're still learning how to [self-promote]. We were proud of the product and thought it should speak for itself. We know now that doing that is doing an injustice to a product. If it's good, it's worth telling lots of people about, telling people why you're excited about it. It's just not quite in our nature. Even though you know it's worth telling people about, you also know it's a bunch of work for you, a bunch of socializing.

ROBIN WALKER

     Even as a kid, playing Way of the Exploding Fist, which was a game that I just loved and played the hell out of--it would start up with a Melbourne House logo, and I never connected the dot that Melbourne House meant Melbourne, the city near me. The games industry to me seemed like it was in the UK, and to a lesser extent, the US. The UK dominated it. I had a BBC and a Commodore 64 later on, and everyone making games seemed to be all over Europe.

JOHN COOK

     As more people kept contacting us, we got more interested in making it. Just knowing people are consuming your work and going and playing with it was pretty awesome.

ROBIN WALKER

     In that period from 1996 to [2004 when Steam shipped], as a mod maker, your biggest problem was, fundamentally, distribution. You could make a really good game, but you didn't have a good way to get it to customers in a way where they could give you money in return. You could put it online and people could download it, but if you decided you wanted to sell it, there wasn't an opportunity for you. There was this narrow window we went through.

"Another Gabe thing was, 'Deliver all your value as fast as possible. If you have value in this Team Fortress but it's not being delivered to our customers, fix that. Get it in there for them.'" -John Cook

IAN CAUGHLEY

     The guy who was writing the story for Kanon also produced the TF promo movie which I think was the first FPS promo to have classical music as its track instead of heavy metal. It was pretty awesome at the time, and I think influenced future music choices across the industry.

ROBIN WALKER

     Once things like Steam appeared and you no longer needed a publisher to connect to a whole bunch of publishers... It wasn't just Steam. Really, the whole Internet just got to a point where a whole bunch of people were buying [products] through it. If we had done what we did four years later, we would never have gone to Valve, because I think we would have been far more convinced we could have done it ourselves. It all seems incredibly naive to me in retrospect.

     John and I have talked since about how much we threaded the needle in life. That the path we followed didn't exist before Quake, and it was a path that ended not long afterwards.

IAN CAUGHLEY

     We were having a lot of fun playing it, so I guess we weren't so surprised that people liked it. The wonderment was more around how fast the word of mouth could travel and how fast a TF community developed within the Quake one.

     It was also very awesome that we could effectively develop our game iteratively. Companies do it all the time now with early access, but it was a new concept back then for games. I guess that's because games still came from ships, but mods came from the net, so in a way the free mod market back then was the pre-cursor to the modern online game markets.

     Looking back now, I should be surprised how many people donated their time and artwork to the game, but like I said, there was lots of sharing within the modding communities.

JOHN COOK

     At some point, some game developers started contacting us, including Activision. They said, 'We love your game. Let us know what you guys are doing next.' I think they assumed a level of professionalism that was not there. But that did make us think, oh, maybe there are some real opportunities here.

Originally packaged as part of Valve's Orange Box bundle in 2007, Team Fortress 2 continues on as a free-to-play title.

Platforms

Walker's and Cook's proficiency in game design and in wrangling QuakeC grew in parallel to the Quake community's enthusiasm for Team Fortress. With more experience came more ambitious character classes and styles of play.

JOHN COOK

     By the time the Engineer was added, it was later in the cycle. We were a little more thoughtful about the product at that point.

ROBIN WALKER

     The sentry gun came from a love of Aliens. Everyone loved aliens. They started as a concept: 'Oh, man, we've got to have that in the game.' But the Engineer, which we didn't get to until later, is a much more rounded concept than that.

JOHN COOK

     We really wanted to make [a class] that was easier for a non-hardcore FPS player to play. Between that and a lot of playing Command & Conquer, we decided building structures would be a fun thing. From there we just tried a bunch of ideas, and the dispenser and sentry gun came up.

     The Engineer was a lot of fun to make. The sentry turret felt like we were doing something that had never been done before in an FPS, and it had all these implications on map design and game balance beyond just adding a character with a new gun.    

ROBIN WALKER

     We understood that the Engineer was a class that should exist to draw in people who wanted to be in combat and have an impact, but didn't necessarily want to do it directly. Maybe they don't have the aiming skills they would like, or maybe they just want to spend more time thinking about which way enemies would be coming in, and where enemies would get to, and exploit that.

     The sentry gun was a tool to serve game design problems we were interested in solving, which I don't think is how we started out. That's game design: Things you want to do come from all over the place.

JOHN COOK

     Balancing got easier as it took off on the Internet because you could just go play with other people and see what they were doing, and make changes appropriately. Just because of the situation, we were very comfortable updating live, basically.

ROBIN WALKER

     The Spy is a perfect example of [design ideas] coming from lots of different places. If I remember correctly, the Spy came from a bug. For a while, we had a bug that made players appear like they were on the other team. There's a chunk of code responsible for making sure you're the right color and the right skin, depending on the team and class you picked. At some point we had bugs where players would look like they were the wrong class or the wrong team.

Somewhere amidst all that, as we worked on fixing it, we thought, Hey, that might be an interesting idea for a class.

JOHN COOK

     It was, 'Okay, we'll just do a big update, and some customers will like it and some won't.' We could take a lot of risks by just updating [the game].

QTF's Spy, looking dapper.

ROBIN WALKER

     We did an obvious set of things. The Spy should be able to look like any class. At that point we had target ID: When you mouse over a teammate, you get info about their name and health and so on; Spies needed to be able to fake all of that. The Spy was a nightmare to code. There are so many exceptions in the code that exist just for the Spy. There were a bunch of things we could do in TF that were kind of hard to do in Quake, the big one being that if you were a Spy on team red disguised as an enemy on team blue, then team blue players saw you as team blue, but team red players also saw you as on team blue.

     That meant your own teammates saw you as an enemy. The number of times we'd see new players trying to kill a Spy only to be confused because, hey, this guy's not taking any damage, and how did this enemy get into our spawn area? We fought that as much as we could in Quake.

JOHN COOK

     Eventually we did beta releases, but at the start, a lot of it was just, okay, let's make some logical guesses about gameplay changes and see what happens.

ROBIN WALKER

     The Spy invented this whole other concept: Everywhere you've got a piece of code that says, 'Is the player I just shot, or bumped into, or am looking at, or whatever—is that player on my team? If so, do this. If not, do that. Or, is it on my team but disguised as being on the enemy team?' Those are exceptions you have to think about, and in some cases, code, because any of them could be a giveaway.

JOHN COOK

     You play, and you watch other people play, and you see how they're actually using [items]. You have some creative process afterwards to take that data and turn it into something actionable. Like, okay, they're using it or not using it in certain situations: Why is that? You come up with a theory for that, and come up with an idea for a [solution]. You say, 'Okay, here's a more fun way to do the same thing.'

ROBIN WALKER

     One of my favorite things with the Spy, which is one of the dumbest, simplest tricks, was running backwards. One of the mini-games we'd play in our one-on-one deathmatches was to run backwards. I don't know why. We played a lot of Quake, so we just tried everything. We'd do one-on-one deathmatches where you were only allowed to move backwards. You had to run past your [opponent] to be able to shoot at them, and then circle around them.

     It was a strange way of playing, but fun. You'd play the map so well that you could get across lava jumps and [other obstacles] just by jumping backwards because you knew where everything was, you'd played it so damn much.

Over 1996, Team Fortress garnered more attention from players. The transition from tinkerer to developer happened so quickly that it took Cook's and Walker's mutual friend, Ian Caughley, to point it out, and to suggest taking the next big step.

ROBIN WALKER

     Quake 2 was coming out, so the expectation was that Quake 1 was going to die, or was going to [lose support] in some way.

JOHN COOK

     We had another friend at college who had just a little bit of money. He said, 'We should all start a company.' This was Ian; he was the third co-founder.

IAN CAUGHLEY

     I was only part-time since I was completing my second degree. I was still coding and designing, helped a bunch on the promo. I was also doing a lot of managing of third parties that were providing art, sound and music. Also, importantly, I was paying the rent and buying the food.

ROBIN WALKER

     Ian's super fun to work with and a smart guy, a good programmer. There wasn't any good reason that he didn't work on Team Fortress that much, other than that most of that work was happening at our flat where it was just John and me, so we could share code easily between the two of us. When we started working on TF for Quake 2, [Ian joined in].

JOHN COOK

     Ian said, 'We should start a games company and make games because we have an opportunity.' We said, 'Yeah, sure, that sounds cool.'

IAN CAUGHLEY

     It just felt like the natural progression. I don't think we delusions of making it big, but we thought we could make some good games people would pay for. We started working on our TF2 which would have much more map interaction and a setting more grounded in reality, and a game called Kanon which was to be a story driven team based co-op.

     We also kept improving TF, supporting the map builders and adding better art, and put it out as 'donateware,' which made us tens of dollars.

ROBIN WALKER

     I guess another factor was we did a donation drive, and a lot of people donated to us. The primary reason we did that was just because people kept telling us they wanted to donate. Just the fact that people wanted to do it, and then followed through and did it, made us also feel like, hey, maybe we should be doing more.

IAN CAUGHLEY

     We had no idea how to monetise what we had. I can think of much better ideas now, and those at Valve giggle at those ideas as small-time.

ROBIN WALKER

     In retrospect, looking back: Oh my god, we didn't know what the hell we were doing. We were so screwed. If Valve hadn't bought us out, I think we would have failed massively.

Immediately after joining Valve full-time, Walker and Cook helped the team finish Half-life's multiplayer modes.

The roadmap for Team Fortress was simple: id was developing Quake 2, so the trio of Team Fortress Software would break ground on Team Fortress 2 tailor-made for the Quake 2 engine. Fans weren't the only ones interested in seeing what lay in store for the mod.

ROBIN WALKER

     I don't have any recollection of us [receiving interest from] anyone in the Australian games industry. It was a big, successful place, I guess. I just managed to avoid it. It was strange.

     I got interviewed by one of the main Australian newspapers a few years later. They ran with the only quote they got from me in the end, which was, 'We never heard from anyone in the Australian games industry.' They used it as a damning statement; I didn't mean in that way. It did seem like everything interesting was happening around Quake, first-person shooters, and online.

JOHN COOK

     Scott Lynch reached out. He saw an opportunity for Half-life to be like Quake where it would be a good platform for mods and to build things. He had this idea that Team Fortress 2 could be a mod that was sold for both Quake 2 and for Half-life, because Half-life was supposed to come out around the same time as Quake 2, which it did not, obviously.

ROBIN WALKER

     We got interest from a bunch of publishers who were interested in what we were planning to do next. We did some contract work for EA or Activision on some games. We built a version of Quake for arcades for a company. They wanted to build an arcade box that played Quake, and take it over to id to see if they could get id's blessing to manufacture them. We wrote software for them so you could play through Quake through a timed mode. We did a bunch of random pieces like that while working on the Quake 2 version of TF.

JOHN COOK

     The Valve guys liked the idea of us coming in and co-working with them to educate them on what makes a good modding platform. What do mod makers need and look for in a game engine that makes it able to be modded extensively?

ROBIN WALKER

     I think the main difference between them and everyone else who had talked to us--we'd by then sort of gotten used to publishers mailing us to say 'Hey, we're interested in doing X and Y,' and those turning into long email threads that never went anywhere--the difference was that within a few days, maybe overnight, us saying, 'Yeah, we're interested,' and Valve replying back to say, 'Okay, here are your plane tickets. Let's do this.'

TFC, created as a feature of and selling point for Half-life's multiplayer offerings.

Walker and Cook packed their bags and headed to Seattle to meet the powers that be at Valve. Although there was some buzz around Half-life, meeting with Gabe Newell and the folks at Valve was like being set up on a blind date.

ROBIN WALKER

     At the time when Valve contacted us, no one knew anything about them. There was a small number of screenshots of Half-life. So, they were working on stuff, but no one really new anything about them at this point. We probably had more visibility to Ritual, who was working on Sin at the time, which looked much cooler [than Half-life]. There was more media out for it.

IAN CAUGHLEY

     Everyone was very excited about Half-life coming out and knew Valve from the promos. Then they offered us free flights, free accommodation, and three seats for three months at Valve. It blew our little modder minds.    

JOHN COOK

     When we first came over, it was March of '98, so they were working on Half-life. We co-worked with them for three months.

ROBIN WALKER

     Ian, John, and I sat in a room at Valve and worked on porting over Team Fortress. I think we showed up and said, 'Hey, we've been working on this thing we're calling Team Fortress 2 for Quake 2. Instead of porting Team Fortress, why don't we bring Team Fortress 2 over?'

     I think they were happy with that, so we started working on Team Fortress 2—the first version. If you asked me to recap all the versions, I'd need to spend some serious time thinking.

IAN CAUGHLEY

     Valve wanted the next thing we did, be it TF2 or something else, to be built on their engine, and they saw the best way to make that happen was to put us on the floor with the Half-life folks. We never felt like they wanted to influence what we were building, just how we were building it. They were a bit busy with their own game, and Valve was helping us with lots of connections, too. They introduced us to Sierra to look at publishing and to their lawyers so that Sierra didn't do us over.    

JOHN COOK

     The idea was we would work on Team Fortress 2 for Quake 2 and for Half-life. They'd interact with us, sort of see what was there.

IAN CAUGHLEY

     It was an odd combination of fun loving and hard working. Everyone was super friendly and did lots of things together. Everybody spent a lot of time at the office, but there was some game playing, but mostly work. Lots of the people there were working for reduced wages and shares in company, so everyone was very success focused.

     I remember when a box full StarCraft games turned up, it created a slight dip in productivity. Even though we were clearly only working at Valve, not for Valve, they were very open about everything they were doing.    

Compared to more public industry figureheads like John Carmack and John Romero, Valve Software co-founder Gabe Newell was an enigma. He stepped out from behind his wizard's curtain to talk with Cook, Walker, and Caughley about the future of Team Fortress and games as a platform. The long-time friends did more than listen. They were mesmerized.

JOHN COOK

     Gabe used to talk about eSports back then. He'd say, 'We want arenas of people cheering on people playing your game.' He was thinking so far ahead. It was dizzying in a lot of ways.

ROBIN WALKER

     Gabe is like that. The world will never, sadly, be able to fully understand him. For years I just sort of assumed that all CEOs, people who had managed to achieve the things he's managed to achieve, were lucky.

JOHN COOK

     He was certainly intimidating to work with. What of his first questions to us, during the first lunch we were having after flying in from Australia, was, 'So, tell me what's fun about team play?' We just looked stunned at each other. The notion of breaking down elements like that hadn't occurred to us yet. I probably still couldn't tell you what's fun about team play. So, he was challenging, but he understood the future.

ROBIN WALKER

     I've since met many CEOs, very big people in terms of what they've achieved, but Gabe remains a really interesting fellow.

JOHN COOK

     Valve basically was taking advantage of Quake's modding ecosystem to hire people. They were looking for anyone who had made anything interesting with Quake, and with other games, but Quake was certainly a focus. They were one of the earliest companies to look on the Internet for people doing interesting things, and try to hire them.

     Gabe, specifically, had a lot of admiration for Carmack had made it so other people could add value to his game. That was something he wanted to capture himself. Gabe worked at Microsoft, and he'd worked on Windows for a long time. All the thinking over there was about platforms. You're making a platform that lets developers quickly add value to customers, and lets customers communicate back to developers. That's what he wanted games to be.

ROBIN WALKER

     He's an intellectual force. There's no one quite like him. I love working with him for that reason. He's a pretty amazing guy.

JOHN COOK

     We didn't have the high-level thought of, Maybe we'll end up working here. We were way too naive to think of that. But the entire time we were there, they were actually interviewing us pretty heavily. I look back and realize, 'That was actually an interview question this person was asking me.'

IAN CAUGHLEY

     At the end of the day, I suspect it was a three-month job interview; we just didn't know it.

Once it dawned on Walker, Caughley, and Cook that they had been going through an extended interview process, the next step seemed logical.

IAN CAUGHLEY

     Valve was being very smart, in my humble opinion, and using the modding community as a way to find people who were thinking outside the box, were self-driven and had skills. They were offering jobs to many of the top names in the scene.

     It was a bit unfortunate for them that we had incorporated. They could have just offered us jobs, but I think they wanted to do right by us, and didn't want to just discard the work we had done. They basically gave us back pay to when we started the business and we gave them the rights to TF.    

ROBIN WALKER

     About a month and a half into that, they said, 'We've watched you guys work. We're interested in just buying you guys out if you're up for it, and you would stay here.' We took them up on their offer, obviously.

IAN CAUGHLEY

     It came completely out of the blue to us. We had been talking to a lawyer one week earlier when they asked if we had plans to sell the business. The idea had never occurred to us that we be planning to sell, or that anyone would want to buy it.    

JOHN COOK

     Gabe called us all into his office and said, 'We like working with you guys, and it seems like you like working with us. We should make this a permanent deal. What do you think?' I thought, Fuck yeah. Yes.

Meet the Team: All of TFC's classes sporting blue duds.

ROBIN WALKER

     In retrospect, based on everything I've done since, whenever we say, 'Hey, come work at Valve for a little while,' we're asking you to do that because we think seeing you work is the single best way to find out if we want to hire you.

JOHN COOK

     It was good, too, because we had no idea what we were doing with our game company. It's very different experience when you're saying, 'We're going to build this and make money.' There's a lot more to think about [when you run a company] than just, 'I'm going to make the game better and see if people like it.'

ROBIN WALKER

     I've never worked anywhere else besides NEC, my company [TF Software], and Valve, so it's hard for me to speak to the rest of the games industry. Valve was a concentrate of the smartest bunch of people I'd ever met in my life. I remember having a couple of thoughts.

     One, I didn't realize people could be that smart. That's sort of a goofy thing to say, I guess, but I'd never met people who seemed to be so good at thinking through the problems they're working on. And not just one or two people, but sitting in a room where there was a whole group of them. I learned more in that first month or so at Valve than I had in years prior.

JOHN COOK

     I was struck because I'd never met people that smart before. I didn't even know people that smart existed in the world. I was just blown away. I was always the best programmer in the vicinity all the time.

ROBIN WALKER

     My first several years at Valve were ones where I got addicted to self-improvement. I met people who made me want to be better. I'd never had such a strong desire to get better at something, because I guess I'd never realized what I could aspire to. That was the truth of it. I'd never met a group of people who made me want to get better.

     For years, I got addicted to be able to look back to a year earlier and say, 'Holy crap, I was an idiot. I didn't realize how much I didn't know.' I tried to drain as much knowledge out of these people as I possibly could.

JOHN COOK

     Suddenly, here are these people at a whole new level. I must continue to work with these people and learn from them, because this is like nothing I've ever experienced before.

Like his friends, Caughley was having a blast at Valve, but turned down Valve's offer. As much as he enjoyed working on Team Fortress, his path in software development amicably diverged.

IAN CAUGHLEY

     I had a girl and a city that I loved and wanted to come home to. I was also felt like everyone there was amazing, and I wasn't quite amazing enough. They didn't make me feel that way; it was just me.

     They were nice enough to print Caughley the tool down the side of the Engineer's spanner in TF Classic, both imortalising me into the game, and [good-humoredly] letting me know what they thought of my decision to not stay.    

Walker and Cook became full-time developers at Valve Software in early 1998, roughly eight months before Half-life was due to ship out to stores. Both developers jumped in with both feet, helping tidy up loose ends on Valve's to-do list. Once the game was more or less complete, they turned their attention to revamping Team Fortress in the form of Team Fortress Classic, a version customized for Half-life's more robust engine and feature set.

JOHN COOK

     After Half-life shipped, we spent some time thinking about what was next. Really, we were thinking about how to make the Half-life SDK as good as possible. One of the things we realized was, if there's not enough people playing the game multiplayer, Half-life is not going to be a good platform to make mods on.

ROBIN WALKER

     We, along with other people at Valve, helped build their SDK. We did the work, and there were many of our ideas [incorporated into the product]. Half-life's multiplayer [deathmatch] was still in development. We helped out there.

Cook's and Walker's efforts on Half-life's SDK made modifications like Counter-Strike possible.

JOHN COOK

     Even if the tech was good, there needed to be an active customer base. Half-life's deathmatch itself wasn't that popular. We said, 'We have this valuable property in Team Fortress. We should get that working in Half-life and bring those customers over to introduce them to this game mode that we think is really fun.'

ROBIN WALKER

     The Valve guys had all been thinking about single-player, so we collaborated with them on multiplayer. From there on out, it was Robin and me being a part of figuring out, how does multiplayer work? How does the SDK work? We were part of all that.

JOHN COOK

     We looked at all that Quake C code and said, 'We can't rewrite all this from scratch. It would take too long.' I sort of get teased at work for my initial estimate: 'Oh, man, we could probably do this in three or four weeks.' I think it took us three months.

ROBIN WALKER

     At that point, we'd been working with Quake for years. As any programmer will tell you, if you spend two years with a product with a bunch of code, being play tested by thousands of people around the world, you fix a ton of bugs. If you decide to go and rewrite that, you have to be careful. You'll write cleaner code, but in all the places where the code is cleaner, you've actually not brought over bug fixes and design changes that were nonobvious and made the game better.

JOHN COOK

     But that was part of making the SDK as successful as possible. I feel like that was a good move, because out of that came Counter-Strike. Without that, without the level of people playing multiplayer in Half-life [and Team Fortress Classic], I don't think Counter-Strike would have been made, or it would have been made for some other game platform.

     The decision [had] two tracks: We're going to make Team Fortress 2, and we're going to make the game's multiplayer environment as good as possible, because that would in turn create opportunities.  Another Gabe thing was, 'Deliver all your value as fast as possible. If you have value in this Team Fortress but it's not being delivered to our customers, fix that. Get it in there for them.' That was really it.    

David Ogilvy is regarded as the father of modern advertising. In 1968, he published a paper on management principles in which he wrote, If you ever find a man who is better than you are - hire him. If necessary, pay him more than you would pay yourself. Another popular story goes that Ogilvy once gifted each of his company directors with a set of Russian nesting dolls.

Opening the dolls one by one, the directors found a note folded in the smallest doll that read, If you always hire people who are smaller than you, we shall become a company of dwarfs. If, on the other hand, you always hire people who are bigger than you, we shall become a company of giants.

Reflecting on their journey, Walker and Cook agreed that it was the prospect of surrounding themselves with giants that attracted them to Valve more than the chance to continue developing Team Fortress games.

"One of our fears in that conversation was, 'If we can't get some kind of similar development process, our games will be worse than all these mods.'" -Robin Walker

The many twists and turns of 2fort, as seen in TFC.

JOHN COOK

     I was always impressed by the community scene that emerged, especially the clan players. There was a lot of really smart players organizing games, battling rivals and just making the game better. Great players are what make a multiplayer game great.

IAN CAUGHLEY

     Three things. First, as new games were developed after TF, I felt it was clear that our game had a reasonably significant influence on the design of FPS games. I think we showed that the community wanted more from multiplayer FPS than just deathmatch, that they could work as teams and wanted to, and game developers saw that and built games for those players. We showed that players wanted more interesting goals than killing everyone, they wanted to work out strategies and work as a team to put them into action. And now we have games like the amazing Overwatch and team MOBAs.

     Second, people are still playing TF—Team Fortress 2 counts—and we're coming up to our 20-year birthday.

     Third, it took Valve 10 years to come out with TF2, and when it came out, it was very similar to the original. I know they went through a lot of iterations to get there, and it was amazing to see them decide that the original had so many things right.    

ROBIN WALKER

     I'm a realist. I think there are people who want to say that things got created because a specific kind of person was really smart. I look at TF, and so much of it seems really obvious, and so much of it comes from lots of people. TF is a huge bundle of things, and in some cases, we were people who created things that other people proposed. It's hard to know where we started and where TF began.

     I remember a conversation with Gabe [Newell] and a bunch of people at Valve, not long after we joined Valve. I can't remember who proposed the theory, but there was this idea that game developers were all going to lose to the mod community. That the mod community had done more iteration on game design through its sheer number of people, in a couple of years of [playing and creating mods for] Quake, than the games industry had done for years prior.

     It wasn't that they were smarter than the game developers; it's that they had a fundamentally better method for creating games. Iterating in public, iterating in front of your customers, was a fundamentally superior way of doing games.

     One of our fears in that conversation was, 'If we can't get some kind of similar development process, our games will be worse than all these mods.' I think that was accurate. Today, game developers don't necessarily choose to take advantage of that [style], but we have the opportunity to build products in the way that mod makers were building them for Quake and the games that followed. You can see a huge amount of innovation that happened as a result of that.

     There was this period of time where a ton of people, far more than John, Ian, and I, were channeling their thoughts into a bucket for Team Fortress. It was super fun to be a part of that.

Last December, Shacknews published Rocket Jump: Quake and the Golden Age of First-Person Shooters, David L. Craddock's book-sized account of the making of id Software's Quake franchise and other influential FPS games from the 1990s. Presented unabridged, the following chapter comes from the full edition of Rocket Jump, available in full for Mercury subscribers and available to pre-order in hardcover and digital formats from crowdfunding publisher/platform Unbound.

Threading the Needle: The Making of Quake Team Fortress published first on https://superworldrom.tumblr.com/