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United Fortress opened / Fortressmen of the Month: Aberrant & Cloud of MegaTF

You are reading the first article of United Fortress, or united.tf, a new web site aiming to pay homage to the legacy of Team Fortress games and mods. Ideally, the desire is for it to bring coverage from all Fortress domains, supporting them, fighting the disconnection between their communities. However, it is a personal, limited effort, so no promises are given for now. Currently, its biggest trick is the interview you can read below in this article, and The Wall. The Wall is a catalog for all the active Fortress titles, together with a selection of their most useful communities and platforms. It took more than a few weeks, dozens of hours and thousands of messages to dig through, asking around for the history and technical information documented there to present them honestly. The people who have helped find, verify and hone the information are credited below.

Fortressmen of the Month

The United Fortress blog opens with a new interview series: Fortressmen of the Month. The goal is to speak to two members of a Fortress community and document it, possibly every month, but at least every few months. The guests can be game developers, veterans, server hosts or anyone from any Fortress domain to bring insight and inspiration, and to shed light on some history.

The first of the series is an interview with Aberrant, a.k.a. Agent, and Cloud, a.k.a. MasterMind, from the MegaTF community, the former being its current developer while the latter a community lead, who have been playing and contributing to the game for almost 30 years now.

Güven:
Q1. First of all, briefly, what activities are you undertaking for the MegaTF community, aside from playing the game every week?

Aberrant:
Not enough. Mostly I just play on Friday nights. I only coded because Kevin needed some things. My other activities are spread throughout the community, CustomTF and AGR. There’s nostalgia, and the occasional person that wants to play. We do have four to seven active people that do play every Friday, and there are definitely two to five that play sometimes. Other than the nostalgia, they want to see it stay alive, but no one has any fire to really do much.

Cloud:
I am the gathering person that brings this nearly dead game back to life. I help everyone, get little back, yet I carry on for the love of the game. …I play much as I can to own and destroy the players in Quake and Quake products such as Team Fortress. It’s been one heck of a road: I created Frag Friday, the longest and most popular event we got left. [I] recently created the “Bots vs Humans” event which is going to run everyday at 5PM CST.

G:
That’s a brutally honest depiction of the state of things from both of you, and a good sense of humor. Just to make it more clear for all before we move on, I will say that you are the developer who maintains the game code, Aberrant, teamed up mainly with Kevin on that, and you are sort of an unofficial community lead, Cloud.

Though, I wouldn’t underestimate what you guys are achieving. I can name you at least three, and a lot more modern, Fortress titles that would be more than happy to have games going every Friday night until the morning. Also I don’t believe that nostalgia alone can keep things going for three decades if the game is not fun and promising at its core. Speaking more on that topic, let me ask you about the dawn of Quake, TF, and MegaTF, and what made them special.

Q2. What was FPS gaming like back then in 1996, right before Quake dropped? For you personally, and in general, as far as your observation went. You once told me you had some John Romero interaction then, Cloud, which is also curious.
What was the impact of Quake and Quake TF? You can also take into account QuakeWorld and QWTF which came out later in that year or around the beginning of ’97. What distinguished MegaTF for you, compared to the “regular” TF?

Aberrant:
It took me a bit to get into Quake. I was working on a modification to a Doom (1993) map. I had already added extra monsters. I joined IPX connections with friends and did the modem-to-modem thing. I was hard into modifying Doom when a lightning hit my house. Took out half of our electronics, one being the computer. It took me a month or two to come back, and when I did, I went to Quake. My first, lightning-struck computer was very slow, a Pentium 99. It ran Doom OK, but Quake was more intense, giving terrible FPS, 5 to 15, when I played it online. Team Fortress on NetQuake* [*the informal name for the original Quake engine/client] in these packed servers back in the early releases wasn’t allowing me to play either, even with the new computer, giving 5 FPS. Therefore I stuck with DM/Runes for a long time.

Finally when QuakeWorld came out, I found a catch22 server running MegaTF and I went in to check it out. (There were three MegaTF servers at the time: Clan Kevorkian, catch22 and Ambush’s server in Seattle to which I could not connect well on dial-up.) The Scouts were flying in air, or jet-jumping. The Sniper Rifle sounded powerful, the Soldier moved much better than in the old [regular] TF. It seemed like almost every class was better, and they had drops. Spike trap, lava pools, proxi mines etc. I can say that the extra toys in MegaTF were what drew me in. TF was awesome because it had a lot of toys anyway, but it could use more, like CustomTF. Also, it could just be the server settings, but regular TF wasn’t as smooth feeling as MegaTF. In MegaTF I have total air control: I can be blasted off the map with a rocket, and I can frisbee myself back over and onto the map. I never quite felt that in regular TF.

MegaTF had radio shows [probably via RealPlayer]. Ambush and Dyer Maker [Ambush’s wife and the map maker for MegaTF] used to talk to us about changes to the mod, or new maps they made. There was also another MegaTF radio channel hosted by That Hurt and Damage Inc. They sometimes called MegaTF players to put them on air. We had a full-on community with lots of top quality interests.

Cloud:
I enjoyed playing Quake as a kid, because I had just came off of mapping for Doom and Duke Nukem (1991). I was a mapper also on games like Graal, Furcadia etc. With Romero, we mapped on Doom together. Anyway, I went into mapping for Quake and playing in all the fun mods it had at that time (back then the Grapple Hook was in CTF). Soon after, TF was born. When TF came around, it was slow, but I did not notice this until MegaTF, which had faster everything. Overall, it was loads of fun to be a part of Quake first coming out, and it still is even in its dying days, helping it stay alive and live to this day.

CAQ vs ROT clan match, dated 10/01/2000, from the POV of LilBastard of Clan ROT, also showcasing Aberrant on the opponent team. More information on the clans and history on the YouTube description of this video, continued in the description of the Round 2 video of the same match.

G:
Q3. It has been almost 30 years of MegaTF, with you guys in it. We already made an introduction to its history. But how has it been in the 2000s, the 2010s, and how are 2020s going for MegaTF? In terms of its development, player base, gameplay, or any other aspect you want to cover. And finally, what are you wishing for its future?

Aberrant:
Well, I’m probably not perfect on my dates but TF for me progressed as follows.
– First, clan days and clan battles which were early in time to about 2002.
– Then as things started dying for us we just kept playing as bridge soldiers. There were often four [players]. Sometimes we would have more. (Personally, between 2005-2007 I was playing Neverwinter Nights all day every day, when I wasn’t working: I might have played Quake [including MegaTF] four times in two years then.) We did that until about 2006 when Coop started forming, but it wasn’t really at its peak until 2008.
– Then it is the peak of Coop around 2008 where games on Friday became prevalent again. I personally could not join that until some point, since I moved and my life took a change in 2008.

– Around 2013 there was not much going on, and I personally played little as well. I played more Quake Live [the remake of Q3A] because there were no games.
– People were playing again in 2016. I started seeing games in the browser [QTV], but my ping was way too bad for me to actually spawn, since I had moved away from society onto a mountain top and had satellite internet.
– By 2017-2018, I had moved back to my home town, I set up a place, a job etc. and re-joined everyone. I found others interested in MegaTF, but out of all the people the person most motivated was Klown who mostly played regular TF. We started the TF Discord server [probably this one]. We had tons of people interested. I made a few maps to show people how easy it was, as he setup Discord. I got on Facebook and other media and brought as many people over as I could, and it branched into others helping. Then it was decided the server needed to be organized, because there was so much activity in just chat. RegTF [“original” QWTF], MegaTF, and FortressOne [predecessor of the current “QWTF Live”] were formed, then things like Quake, Quake mapping, Quake modding etc. spawned. Now there’s still the huge following of that, through many channels, just depends on your taste. I play, a few others play, most are just editors and modders for us to play. The bad thing is we don’t have enough players.

So, Quake has actually had more activity over the past 5, 6, maybe 7 years. FortressOne kind of went in their own direction. It was the most played. Everyone went to FO. I played it some time until it required the FTE client to run.

On this side of the things, I think quad games (2v2) and Coop took most of the MegaTF players at that time.

– About 4 years ago, maybe 5, I started to modify the code a bit to add in some extra things. Some people don’t like it because I’ve steered away from MegaTF, but I was there when Ambush was doing the original, and I know he intended MegaTF to be different, and I know he had things he meant to do, and never got around to it. The build is incomplete. I mean some classes were given extra toys and some were not. So I tried to add to that that was missing.
But with each change I made, I added a switch to disable it, so our progs [customizations kept in the progs.dat file] can be however the server admin wants to run it. They can enable/disable features to make it whatever they need.

I also kept most of our stuff vanilla, meaning you can take a Quake map, and run it on our stuff, without the need for a special client, although some of the maps we make might exceed that.

I hope that some people in the future find this and experience it.

Cloud:
It has been growing like a plant with little water of mods here and there. In the future, I want it not to die again.

G:
Q4. Any shout-outs to your fellow community members?

Aberrant:
To Klown, for the newest burst of interest, even though that was 6-7 years ago, and for maps. To Kevin also, for outputting maps. To Doc, who has been our alarm clock. He gets people together on voice chat.
I also get people’s help when I mod difficult issues. I ask both Spoike [developer of FTE] and OfteN [developer of CustomTF]. So they contribute to Quake a serious amount.

Cloud:
I wanna give shout-out to the guys who made Quake and the guys still around to make it strive. And the biggest shout-out goes to God for keeping us alive.

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