Birthday mode

“

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 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.