Team Fortress 2 Classic

Not to be confused with Team Fortress Classic.

Team Fortress 2 Classic is a 2014 modification of Team Fortress 2, initially developed by Danielmm8888 and various contributors, before later forming a team under the name Eminoma to continue work on the mod. Defining itself as a "re-imagining of the 2008-2009 era of the original Team Fortress 2", it restores the character shading of the game's beta, reimplements cut content, removes many later additions to the game’s content and lore, and adds new content intended to evoke the spirit of older updates to the game.

Team Fortress 2 Classic
Developer(s)	Eminoma
Initial release	1.0.0 / 31 December 2014; 10 years ago (2014-12-31)[1]
Stable release	2.2.3 / 3 June 2025; 56 days ago (2025-06-03)
Written in	C++
Engine	Source
Platform	Microsoft Windows Linux
Available in	Portuguese (Brazilian), Bulgarian, Simplified Chinese, English, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Ukrainian
Type	First-person shooter
License	Proprietary (code) CC-BY-NC-ND (assets)
Website	tf2classic.com

Notable content additions include two additional teams which can be used by mappers to modify existing game modes, and an escort game mode based on the scrapped "Civilian" class.

After Valve's release of the Team Fortress 2 SDK in February 2025, Team Fortress 2 Classic announced that it would be released on Steam later in the year.^[2][3]

Development

Team Fortress 2 Classic was created on the Facepunch Forums in late 2014 by Danielmm8888, who ported leaked Team Fortress 2 code from 2007 to the publicly-available Source SDK, allowing himself and other community contributors to make changes to the game and add new features.^[4] It replaced earlier projects that used older builds of Team Fortress 2 directly, and couldn’t be modified to add new content.

An early addition was Deathmatch, a free-for-all game mode. In 2018, this mode was split off from Team Fortress 2 Classic into a standalone game, Team Deathmatch Classic, to be developed by Compucolor Pictures, as "it was too large, and felt like its own separate game. Any game mode that disables classes/weapons to function goes against some of the core principles of Team Fortress 2."^[5]

The remaining features were polished and released in July 2020 as a part of the Death & Taxes update, ending an extended period of silence that saw no public releases after 2016. The game was temporarily unavailable from September 2021 through June 2022, after a supposed arrangement with Valve fell through.^[6][7][8]

Gameplay

The core gameplay of Team Fortress 2 Classic is identical to Team Fortress 2 in most ways, described as "toning down TF2's less coherent elements in favor of gameplay-focused additions".^[9] Existing content (as existed in the game’s original 2007 release) goes largely untouched, in favor of removing in-game paid cosmetics and augmenting the game play with new weapons and game modes. Compared to Team Fortress 2, the new game modes include:^[2][10][11]

• VIP – Modeled after the "Hunted" map from Team Fortress Classic, which featured a unique Civilian class that lacked any ranged weapon and had to be escorted by a team of bodyguards to an objective. Team Fortress 2 Classic amends this by letting the Civilian buff his nearby teammates, removing the class restrictions of the original mode, and adding different types of objectives across the various VIP maps for him to capture.

• VIP Race – A symmetrical variant of the regular VIP game mode. Both teams have two capture points and their own VIP. In order to win, a team's VIP must capture the enemy's points in order. A team's ownership of the enemy's capture points is reset upon their VIP's death.

• Domination – A game mode where each team accumulates points by owning objectives, up to a limit where the team with the most points wins.

• Territorial Domination – A spin on the Territorial Control mode from the base game, removing the multiple rounds and separate stages, and instead dynamically changing team spawnpoints based on which objectives you own. Starting positions are randomly assigned at the start of each round, and each round is won by owning every objective simultaneously.
• Four-team – Variations of gamemodes from the base game (such as Capture the Flag and King of the Hill) redesigned to support two additional teams: GRN and YLW.^[3]

Team Fortress 2 Classic features extensive modding support, allowing client-side visual customisation and adding the ability to add custom content on private servers, such as new weapons.^[12]

Reception

PC Gamer’s Jonathan Bolding described it as "a remarkably well-produced mod that covers a lot of ground".^[13] GamingOnLinux’s Liam Dawe said "[it's] a fun mod and well made. Especially interesting timing now that Valve rarely do anything with TF2, so this could help bring back some of its former glory perhaps".^[14]