Here's my story, from the perspective of a TF mod writer:

Waay back in September of 1996, my friends and I wired our apartment for ethernet (this was back in the dark ages before UC San Diego had ethernet in every building).

Naturally, being a group of 20 computer science majors or so with a fat-ass LAN on our hands, we were always looking for the best games to play. Red Alert, Warcraft II, Quake. I was the designated man to find new games for the LAN. So every couple days, I'd walk across campus to a computer lab, download any new mods that had been posted on Blue's, and take it back to the LAN to check it out. One day, I found something called "Team Fortress" - it sounded like a cool concept, classes and whatnot, and more importantly you started with a full weapons loadout, which was important when you were playing with people that always hogged the rocket launcher. ;)

So I took it back home and played it with my friends. Remember, this is even before 2fort2 had been released - we were playing TF on e1m1! At the time, snipers didn't have to hold down attack for a while to shoot, they just had to come to a complete stop. Hehe... I remember fondly the time five of us stood around in a circle, nobody moving, just sniping each other...

Anyhow, I deleted it after a while, and tried other things, like "The Banana Gun Mod" and "The Axe of Command".

But I always kept returning to Team Fortress; there was something compelling about the gameplay that made me keep downloading it every time a new map came out, and taking it back home. Anyone remember fast frags? Pyramids? 2fort2? Seige3? Storm1? Those were our staple, back in the day. (We got tired of 2forts after a week or so of playing. A feeling that has continued to the present :) Eventually, Robin and the crew put up on their homepage a server listing of the three or four machines TF. My crew and I every weekend would migrate over to a public computer lab on campus and play TF. I recall us fighting clan Braveheart on well2 back then -- the lag was so bad that we all got pissed and left. This was before quakeworld, remember.

Eventually, TF for Quakeworld was released and everything got a lot happier. The number of TF players and TF servers exploded, so we had no trouble finding fast servers. TF then released 2.5 in April, which included the new Spy and Engineer classes. And blast armor for the demomen, which made them a spamming nightmare. Right when it was first released, Engineers could build as many sentry guns as they could manage to keep supplied. I remember seeing 20 sentries in the Well's lake room. :) I really wasn't that unbalanced though. One sniper was able to destroy all of them. Eventually, they limited it to only one sentry per engineer (and a large groan went up from engineers everywhere!)

People so hated the spy class that most server admins chose to make the spy go invisible instead of the "totally uncool" ability of changing colors. :)

After playing TF 2.5 more than was probably good for my grades, I came to realize some of flaws in it, so I downloaded the source code for TF 2.5, which Robin and the crew were awesome enough to put on public display, and fixed various things that were bugging me, like blast armor for demomen for example. (Ever wonder why Well6 gives you wooden armor? It's to remove blast from the demomen!) Thus began what eventually turned into "The Evisceration Server" I stayed up late nights tweaking TF into a version that I thought was more fun for all involved, and e-mailed Robin about it. He said that while he understood why I'd do that, why not just email him, asking him to incorporate the features into normal TF?

Well, I said, because some of the features are rather unusual -- like the knife's backstab killing in only one stroke -- which would totally disrupt the gameplay of normal TF. And that I was just messing around with the TF code because it was fun.

He said "*grin* I know how you feel... TF started because we wanted to mess with quake's original qc during our computer science courses :)"

He also requested that I not distribute the TF mod, and only run it on a SINGLE server. This was also posted on the TF web page. The idea was that if a whole bunch of people started running TF mods, that people would get confused as to which is the original version. I didn't have a problem with that - I respect Robin, so I didn't offer the mod to people that asked for it. I just ran it on my rather slow cable modem server and left it at that.

A couple weeks later, MegaTF was released. Released, as in "Yeah I know that TFS doesn't want me to run my mod on more than one server, but f**k them - I want to do what I want. Who cares if its their code, and could legally stop me from using it? I want to be famous!" So Ambush, author of MegaTF, started distributing Mega and subsequently, Robin stopped posting the source code for TF. Which has cost me many hours of work, duplicating in my mods various features of TF whenever a new version has come out. People wonder sometimes why I flame MegaTF. Well, not considering the unbalanced gameplay or the fact that I personally don't like the author, this is why: he disrespected Robin for the benefit of his own fame. I don't hold that in high regard.

After a couple months of running the Evisceration server, I wrote another mod for clan *GOP* called "Mercenary TF" Clan GOP had seen the Evisceration Server, and how I had a brand new class in it (The Scavenger, it would pick up weapons from dead bodies) and wanted me to add a new class for them. So I did, and the result wasn't particularly interesting, but it was kinda fun. Only thing to note here is that in a three-way ICQ chat between GOP, me, and Ambush (yes, they wanted him to write the mod, originally), Ambush said flatly that a new class cannot be added to TF, and that's that. I got a kick out of that, especially since I had already added a new class to TF :)

Anyhow, Robin and the crew come out with TF2.6, 2.666, 2.7. I get tired of trying to update my code to mirror their developments, so after a while, I stop development on the Evisceration server.

Then, one night after playing BattleTech, I think to myself "It would be kinda cool if you could do that in Team Fortress... buy faster legs at the expense of lighter armor, for example." Thus CustomTF was born. I implemented it over a weekend told Satyr - an admin running the Evisceration Server - about it, and posted info on it to Bluesnews and PlanetFortress. I've been adding to it ever since.

In the two years that I've been playing TF, there has been a lot of fun with clan UVM, a lot of wins, a lot of losses, but I've always found Team Fortress to be the most fun game I've ever played. And with the release of Team Fortress 2 right around the corner, it looks like there's going to be many more years of fun involved.

Cheers,
Shaka[UVM]