Birthday mode

“

Today is a good day! Click to listen — The Soldier

”

Birthday mode is a mode that disables the use of blood and gibs and replaces them with streams of confetti and balloons, and all players appear to wear novelty party hats. It is enabled on servers with the command tf_birthday set to 1 in their server.cfg, on clients launched with -sillygibs and when the server clock hits August 24; the release date of the original Team Fortress in 1996.

Birthday mode features a full set of replacements for most violent graphics and animations, including sound replacements for Critical hits. Instead of the standard Crit sound, the sounds of party horns, champagne poppers and people cheering and clapping play. Many of the gibs seen in this mode are used in the German "low-violence" version of the game as full-time replacements.

On August 20, 2010, a bug in the game saw birthday mode to be turned on 3 days earlier than usual. This was fixed in a patch. A "Happy Birthday" beachball was also added to tf_birthday 1 in this patch.

Gallery

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  The party hat each player wears, on a Soldier

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  Team BLU donning party hats

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  Party mode gibs

Gibs

See also: Gibs.

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  Balloon

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  Boot

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  Burger

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  Can

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  Clock

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  Duck

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  Fish

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  Hubcap

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  License Plate

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  Teeth

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  Unicycle

Props

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  Birthday skinned Beachball

Trivia

• It is possible to kill another player by propelling the beach ball towards someone at a fast enough rate, regardless of whether the player is on your team or not. When a player is killed through this method, it will appear as if that player committed suicide.
• Due to a bug, there were occasions when a spy would cloak and become invisible, but the party hat would still be visible; the hat would appear to be moving through the air of its own accord when the cloaked spy moved. This bug has since been fixed.