It was way back on August 24th, 1996 that the first version of Team Fortress took its first feeble baby steps out into the world. At the time it only had five playable classes, no maps, and--believe it or not--no hats. There wasn't even a concept of teams yet. That's right, we didn't actually get teams into a game called Team Fortress until a couple of releases after the initial launch. (The next time someone says their game isn't ready to release yet because they're missing a core feature, you can helpfully point this out to them.)

What the initial version of TF did have, though, was a Soldier class wielding the original Quake's iconic weapon, the rocket launcher. Now, fifteen years later, thanks to Bethesda and id software you too can wield that same rocket launcher in TF2, original sound effects and all.

It ended up being surprisingly difficult to integrate the Quake rocket launcher into TF2, mainly because any time we started working on it, we'd get sidetracked by hours of reminiscing: about that first Quake game, about its impact on us all personally, and on Valve overall. When Quake celebrated its 15th birthday this past June 22nd, we realized just how damn many of us at Valve are here because of id software. Some of us were inspired by their games' technical prowess, and others by getting their first taste of game development thanks to Doom and Quake's revolutionary approach to user-generated content.

So, thanks id, for... well, everything.