Unmissable Mods Month: Quake Fortress and Descendants

I’d initially planned to write this entirely about Quake Fortress, but I’ve got something of a dirty secret to confess: I missed Quake Fortress - largely because, being seven at the time and restricted to a 56k modem, mods were a distant mirage I’d vaguely heard about on PC Gamer coverdiscs, and even multiplayer gaming was a lag filled, barely attempted fantasy.

Quake Fortress’ lineage has extended far beyond the original however, infiltrating every modable engine since the early 90s, from Unreal to Quake 3 and Half Life.  Like the Final Fantasy of the modding world, Team Fortress mods have been around for as long as anybody can remember, and played by practically every man and their dog.  Unlike Final Fantasy however, Fortress games have a habit of being rather good.

It’s a formula that works so damn well, that has an infuriating knack of making you feel both impossibly overpowered and abysmally outmatched – but crucially, only against the right classes – a beautiful formula that did everything it had always intended to do: enforce teamplay in a game where the best players had never needed any.  By encouraging a culture of cooperation instead of competition, the “rock paper scissors” approach – although in many cases,  it was closer to a “heavy sniper spy demo medic ninja whatever-else-we-can-build-into-our-mod” approach – the Fortress games built a model where you’d need strong teams as opposed to strong players.

It hasn’t always worked out quite so well, with the often precarious player balance being hopelessly skewed in many a mod – spies have been constantly either shockingly powerful or outrageously gimped with impressive consistency, and some Fortress mods added so many classes that they couldn’t hope to even aspire to balance – but even with a class that’s hopelessly underpowered, every gamer will tell you the level of satisfaction you’ll gain from learning the art of war for your chosen class is unmatched in any other form of gameplay.  No matter how great you became in Quake III’s incredibly competitive team deathmatch  leagues, you’ll rarely match the satisfaction gained from becoming the master of a specific class.

That’s why, 10 years from now, we’ll probably still be playing some variant of Team Fortress.  From Quake Fortress – the first Fortress game I ever played – to Unreal Fortress, Team Fortress Classic to Team Fortress 2, that fantastic urge to pick the class you’ve fallen in love with over all the others, becoming ridiculously knowledgeable about it’s mechanics, and then proceeding to kick some serious arse, is still there.  I don’t see it disappearing anytime soon.

Why is this on our list?

The Fortress games have been around  the modding community, ridiculously addictive and outrageously popular for as long as I can remember.  In some iteration or another, they deserved to be here.

Why didn’t you pick just one game, you lazy git?

Well, frankly, I haven’t played all of them, or even most of them, and don’t feel particularly qualified to judge them.  Sorry!  Go make your own mind up.

If I wanted an actual summary of Fortress history, where would I go?

Well, the wikipedia article is a decent start, but beyond that, I’ve got no idea.  So many Fortress mods never made it out of beta, or even to beta in the first place, that compiling a complete history would be one hell of a job.