TF2: The History of Scream Fortress

if you've started playing team fortress 2 within the last four years you'd be forgiven for thinking that scream fortress tf2's annual halloween event has always looked like this with a bunch of new community maps and cosmetics imported into the game a bunch of missions that you can play to unlock free halloween restricted costumes and an apparently random assortment of official content tucked away in a secondary playlist the scream fortress is an annual tradition that goes back over a decade and is the origin of some of team fortress 2's most creative content so let's take a step through the scary door and see what is on the other side team fortress 2 originally launched in october 2007 and valve understandably spent the first two years working on many of the now core features of the game such as class specific mechanics and items called game modes and maps and most importantly the introduction of hats but by 2009 valve were ready to start on what would become an annual event for the game with the very first ever halloween updates then known as the haunted halloween special now remember that this update was very early on in team fortress 2's lifetime before man vs machine before crates and trading before free to play before the soldier demoman or engineer even had any unlockable weapons so in terms of the amount of content this update was rather modest but the nature of the content was important in establishing what would eventually become a much beloved pattern of the tf2 halloween events this inaugural haunted halloween special added the very first halloween version of a map harvest which in turn introduced the crit pumpkin pickups and the pumpkin bomb map hazards that we know and love so much as well as starting this edition of halloween costume themed items including the mildly disturbing halloween mask and what is now probably the most famous hat in all of team fortress 2 the ghastly gibbous or jybus if you think being technically correct is the best kind of correct to unlock the gibbous these days players must dominate another player who is already wearing one while originally it was unlocked through different means secretly stashed away in the haunted halloween specials web page was a link to a hidden second page where viewers could log in with their steam accounts and claim the first batch of gibberishes and it wouldn't actually be until three years later for halloween 2012 that valve added the domination unlock method that we know today but this hat wasn't the only thing hidden in that update webpage as it was around this time that valve was starting to tease snippets of the surprisingly deep team fortress 2 backstory the particular snippet hidden away in this update's webpage shared the last will and testament of man co-founder zephaniah mann and it told us more about why the battles of team fortress take place where they do and about zephaniah's relationship with his two sons who we'll learn more about later we also learned that it is zephaniah himself who haunts the event version of harvest and booze players who dare to get too close after the original halloween update valve decided to get even more creative and the next three years of the event now known as scream fortress all featured spooky themed versions of maps inhabited by halloween bosses who terrorized players on both teams and granted awards to those players who helped to defeat them there was man manor a reskin of mountain lab haunted by the horseless headless horseman who upon being slain specifically by melee awarded those who contributed with the horse's headness horseman's head and the haunted scrap metal which could in turn be used to craft the horseless headless horseman's head taker the spine challenge skull or the voodoo juju the next year's event took place on ayadek a creepy skinned version of king of the hill viaduct haunted by a giant floating eyeball called monoculars helping to take down this powerful foe awarded players with a hat of the same name and allowed them to collect the bomb and nomicon if they could make it to the podium at the end of loot island which spawns after monoculars is slain and thirdly 2012 saw players visit ghost fort an adaptation of king of the hill lakeside and fight against the great wizard merasmus himself as he periodically disguises his furniture and inflicts curses against the players such as giant heads low gravity and 100 crits after his defeat players were again able to visit loot island and this time claim the hat that marasmus himself wears the skull island topper the epic boss battles weren't the only creativity in these year's updates and other unique mechanics included the nine halloween masks which appeared randomly in gift boxes throughout man manor and could be crafted to create a coveted saxton hail mask the introduction of full halloween costume sets some of which came with unique voice lines and taunt animations the introduction of halloween limited availability unusual effects cosmetic halloween spells that could be applied to items to give that item an animated color changing paint job or give the player particle effect laden footprints and even a haunted extra tough mvm mission dubbed wave 666 these three events also carried on the tradition of tying into team fortress 2's ever-expanding law for example the horseless headless horseman is suggested to be the ghost of silas man about whom valve have never told us much but he appears to be closely related to man co-founder zephaniah the ghost from harvest the giant murderous eyeball monoculars on ioduct is actually demoman's disembodied missing eye haunted by the spirit of the bomber nomicon the comics released alongside both the monoculars and merasmus events also reveal a lot about the tumultuous relationship between merasmus and our beloved mercenary the soldier who were revealed to be ever-quarrelling on-again off-again roommates and of course most importantly as the years went on valve awarded players who already owned to give us additional styles to the hat enabling the player to wear the ghostly the ghastly the ghastlier or the ghastly arrest gibbous after three years of halloween bosses valve's decided to mix things up a bit again 2013's scream fortress 5 brought us another event focused around tf2's ever-evolving story with a halloween version of hightower dubbed hell tower but challenged players to push the corpses of bluetark and redmond the aforementioned sons of zephaniah man in a race towards hell once the objective is captured by either team all the players are transported to hell and have to fight in a race to another variation of luke island those who successfully make it to the top of loot island would then obtain the spell book which enabled players to collect and use chaotic magic spells against their opponents these collectible spells have since become a staple in many made halloween maps the comic that tied into 2013's update grave matters tells us about the relationship between redmond and blutac and their third brother greymann who in later comics actually goes on to become one of the key characters in the overall team fortress story both blutark and redmond believe that sending the other brothers corpse to hell will make them still dead but not as dead as the other brother and therefore able to claim both brothers shares of their father's inheritance 2014's scream fortress 6 also got creative and it sent players to the carnival of carnage on a customized version of the otherwise seldom played special delivery mode map doomsday the gameplay of this event map is perhaps the most creative and chaotic of any of team fortress 2's halloween events including random curses applied by merasmus similar to ghost forts making players move like they're underwater or shrinking everyone and restricting them to melee weapons only but most uniquely once the objective is captured all players are transported to one of three bumper car mini games with smash bros like damage mechanics requiring one team to score goals with a giant football collect as many rubber ducks as possible or survive the falling platforms both updates also continue the tradition of lots and lots of new halloween cosmetics and limited availability unusual effects in 2015 valve yet again did something different in so much as they decided to not develop anything new for this halloween but instead re-enable the events of 2009 to 2014 that we've been talking about so far the majority of new content in the 2015 update was community created content from the workshop featuring the now expected halloween themed maps cosmetics and usual effects as well as some taunts one thing that was a new feature created by valve for this halloween however was the introduction of morass missions these were event-focused contracts that asked players to complete objectives against the halloween bosses and in the various halloween themed maps now re-enabled in-game upon completion the missions would reward players with cases and halloween restrictive cosmetics at the time player's contract progress was tracked in a brand new item known as the soul gargoyle valve did actually address the lack of internally developed content this year before the update even happened releasing a blog post towards the end of september they said that they were instead focusing their attention on the next major content update which would go on to be the tough breakup date as well as readying manpower mode to release out of beta which they did actually end up doing ultimately releasing it alongside the enabling of the halloween mode 2015 was also the last year that there was a tie-in halloween comic and although it didn't advance the underlying story in the same way as some of the other years had done it is still a charming and high quality comic in the tf2 universe 2016 2017 2018 2019 and 2020 were all pretty similar affairs with the main content of those updates being just the re-enabling of previous year's events there was of course new community cosmetics and new community maps added as well as contracts to go with these new maps with the exception of 2017 whose halloween update actually dropped so close to the previous major update jungle inferno that there was no community content added at all 2016 did see the introduction of the unusual affire tool used to create unusual taunts and 2017 did change contracts from being managed via the soul gargoyle to the much more detailed interface of the contractor that got introduced in the recent jungle inferno update but overall the last five years of halloween updates have been almost entirely community made content imported from the workshop despite this tf2 regularly posts its highest player numbers during october when the screen fortress events are activated was the highest ever reported player count in tf2 and i don't just mean the highest ever halloween play account but the highest ever ever play account being recorded shortly after the event dropped in october 2020 so that is the history of halloween so far if you're curious about the future of team fortress 2 why not check out this video where i talk about five potential realistic futures that could be ahead of us as team fortress 2 fans or check out this video that youtube thinks you might like and please don't forget to subscribe if you haven't done so already goodbye

Channel: Casperr

Views: 60,647

Rating: 4.9780822 out of 5

Keywords: scream fortress 2020, tf2 halloween, team fortress halloween, tf2 2020, tf2 gameplay, let's play team fortress 2, tf2 last halloween, previous scream fortress, first scream fortress, ghastly gibus, how to get ghastly gibus, first ghastly gibus, tf2 hhh, horseless headless horsemann, tf2 ghost, tf2 event, tf2 even 2020, tf2 history, tf2 facts, cool tf2

Id: gbUHyrzryh0

Length: 11min 40sec (700 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 22 2020