User:Mikado282/Who invented TF2?

Lest anyone be mistaken, user Mikado282 makes no suggestion that the inventors of the Team Fortress series are anyone other than Robin Walker, John Cook, and Ian Caughley. Mikado282 means only to share the memories that playing Team Fortress 2 has provoked from the first days of creating a Steam account for the sole purpose playing one game and editing one wiki.

The point of asking "Who invented TF2?" is to illustrate that basic elements of Team Fortress 2, particularly various game modes, were traditional youth games and military training for centuries before computer gaming drew us all indoors ....

Baden-Powell Two Fort Scout Camp, Pennsylvania, USA

Baden-Powell invented Team Fortress 2

Sir Robert Baden-Powell was the founder of Scouting.

One of Baden-Powell books for Scouting was Scouting Games (1910). One game that proved most popular was Capture the Flag, which is still played in Scout camps today (pictured). (No, really, my son got to play CTF there in 2013.)

Another game mode he wrote for the youth was Dispatch (Escort).

SCA Casual Arena Mode, Pennsylvania, USA

The SCA invented Team Fortress 2

Legally incorporated in 1968, the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA) is, in the main, a massively multiplayer role-playing first-person Medieval Mode combat game; and, as soon as the pre-Internet telecommunications of the United States became advanced enough for BBS, the SCA grew into full MMORPG, albeit with a huge IRL ARG.

Particularly popular modes include Dueling (Launch), Tournament Mode (Launch), Arena (Launch), Capture the Flag, King of the Hill, Two Fort, and Control Point; but, we also developed variations of Player Destruction and PASS Time (like The Blood of Heroes), all with none of the tiny baby server limits of only 36 players (a few IRL "servers" host thousands of players).

Particularly into the 1990s, the SCA began to develop semi-permanent, and eventually permanent, IRL levels, generally of the Attack/Defend arrangement.

Pauline Palmer Meek invented the Team Fortress 2 Storyline

Published in 1966 but read by Mikado282 in early 1969, Pauline Palmer Meek's book Just-Alike Princes invented the Team Fortress 2 Storyline.

• The story is about twin sons of wealthy parents. As such, the twins have many nice toys.

• However, the twins are rivalrous, bickering over toys, unable to share; whatever toy the one attempted to play with, the other would destroy.

• Each broken toy is carried away by their chamber maidservant.

• Attempting to end the jealousy, the father gives the boys a new collection of toys split evenly between them both, each boy receiving a complete duplicate set of clothes and toys, one set colored RED and the other colored BLU.

• Nevertheless, the boys continue to fight over each other's toys, and now twice as many toys are broken.

• The last set of broken toys that the chamber maid carries away is a large box of the mixed broken RED and BLU trains.

• The boys have all of their toys taken away and are forced to sit in chairs.

• At this point, the boys wish they had a toy to share; and the chamber maid brings back the remains of the RED and BLU trains, from which the boys build a RED/BLU train to share!

• The story closes with the twins dressed in matching purple.

Glacier Lodge Estes Park, Colorado, USA

Glacier Lodge invented Team Fortress 2

No, really, in August of 1968, Dad took my brothers and I here in Estes Park to meet the soon to be other half of our family. For eight years, I had my birthdays here. We would go up the mountian behind the cabins to play 3v3 Two Fort in the granite boulders.

(This was also the first place I ever actually played shuffleboard.)