Team Fortress 2

The significance of Valve’s Orange Box is almost too big to be taken seriously. It seems too unlikely that there was ever a time when Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Episode One, Half-Life 2: Episode Two, Portal, and Team Fortress 2, the latter three of which were brand new, were released together. As if that’s normal. As if three of the most important video games ever made could just so casually be chucked in together, paired up with the biggest FPS ever, and then priced as if a single game. Sure, right, yeah, that happened. But given its longevity and online nature, it’s easy to forget what a crucial part Team Fortress 2 played within it all.

While online multiplayer shooters were so in vogue and plentiful at the time that you’d find them cluttering up the streets, they were all-too-often unwelcoming or outright hostile games to try and play. Team Fortress 2 took everything Valve knew about the genre from both Team Fortress Classic and Counter-Strike and put it into the Super-Fun-O-Tron-3000. This was an online shooter that even the most offline and single-player of gamers wanted to try.

It helped that the marketing for the game featured a series of hilarious “Meet The…” cartoons, that themselves became such a huge undertaking that they didn’t finish appearing until years after the game’s release. It made the whole thing seem so much more approachable, like it wanted you to give it a try, not just your mate Steve who plays this sort of thing.

For a good while, this leant itself to an atmosphere of fun and frivolity over hardcore seriousness. Valve’s many years of additions, improvements, community features, then making it free-to-play, has kept it alive. 2022 saw the game suffering from a lack of love, in the form of a bot infestation, but the latest updates have aimed to address this directly