What? A Team Fortress Classic update?
It was surprising enough that Team Fortress 2 is forecasting activity this summer, but I don’t think anyone was expecting a new update for its predecessor, Team Fortress Classic! The last time we got an update for this game was the infamous March 29, 2013 update that pushed forward a few minor model upgrades and (much more importantly) reset everyone’s game folders, which wiped all customizations, mods, and configs. That’s right, a lot of people lost years of mods and settings if they hadn’t been bothering to back them up (and why would they? TFC never gets updates, does it?)
I’m not sure if this update similarly broke anything, my Scout no longer has her nude skin but I can’t honestly remember if I was playing on this computer when I installed that. And I highly doubt the weekend warriors on the Steam Discussions even know what mods are, every post is either someone asking whether to buy the game or whether they should reinstall it because they have fond memories of playing it years ago.
I’d love to see what the longtime-playing community thinks of this update, but the biggest forum of TFC veterans disappeared unceremoniously at some point since I last logged in. Once upon a time, there was a glorious website named The Catacombs that housed the oldest and largest collection of TFC players on the internet, but then its owner shut the forums down after losing too many internet arguments and sold the archives to a data-mining company, never to be seen by normal netizens again. The surviving Catacombs members collected at TFCommunity, much like we SPUFers are now chilling at SPUFpowered, but if you clicked that link to TFCommunity you probably noticed that they didn’t stand the test of time. Alas.
If you’re wondering why I haven’t actually said anything about the update itself, well, take a look. It’s just fixing some rare crashes. Matter of fact, it’s the exact same update that every Half-Life spinoff on the GoldSrc engine is getting. But truth be told, I just wanted the chance to talk a little bit about the Team Fortress Classic community, an ancient and noble race of gamers who played in an era where the comforts of modern gaming were completely unheard of. There was no Twitch, shoutcasted games were rare and memorable events, there was no easy way to make GIFs and the whole concept of internet fandoms was still in its infancy. But our own Team Fortress 2 community (and the many, many games who took any cues from TF2) all owe them a huge thanks. If you’ve ever wanted to learn a bit about the TFC classes who evolved into the Mann Co. mercenaries we all know and love, this article includes links to all nine articles I wrote about each of them, and this category includes a bunch of additional content covering various aspects of the game.