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A brief history of Gang Garrison 2, and its promising future

The Gang Garrison 2 community and community modders are preparing behind closed doors for something big. Something Super big. As we stand on this doorstep, let’s take a look back at the road that brought us here with a special focus on its development struggles and the community efforts in the final stretch, and then let’s catch a glimpse of what is being cooked behind the door.

If you haven’t played Gang Garrison 2 but have heard of it, what you heard was most likely faint praise, like, a “neat” little game, lumped together with the novelty freeware that had its time from late 2000s to early 2010s–perhaps a school computer game. It’s unlikely that you’ve heard about it by someone like me, for whom it has become his favorite game, and only around 2020. So what I am going to tell you not only has deeper and more recent insight, but also is not colored by nostalgia.

Beginnings, struggles, limbo: 2008-2020

Gang Garrison 2 is a 2D conversion of Team Fortress 2’s gameplay loop. It successfully implements the high-stakes gameplay you could feel in Contra to a multiplayer shooter. Although it has not dawned on many, it always had significantly more potential than what has been unleashed. Believe me– as being obsessed with Gang Garrison 2 as I am, I looked far and wide for any game like it. Soldat, for example, represented TFC’s gameplay loop more than TF2’s, and did not have the same charm as GG2.

Valve’s shoutout to the release of Gang Garrison 2.1 on the official TF2 blog in May 2009 marks one of the biggest moments in GG2 history in terms of recognition. Those years were also when Valve, with the “Class Updates” of TF2, was showing the industry how on-going development and support could be given via an online platform like Steam. Therefore it is not surprising that in 2012, demands of alternative weapons echoed loud in the GG2 community. As a matter of fact, the “Alternate Weapons Mod” of GG2 has 3000 downloads, as stated by its first programmer Lorgan in 2025, which is quite the number. The record holder in that sense is the Damage Indicator plugin, which enables one of the most basic features of today’s gaming. Unfortunately, despite the high demand from the player base, these were not going to be natively introduced to the game. Bots for offline gaming and tutorials for easing it off for newbies are some of the others which never became official.

Lack of developer support has become a repeating theme in the following years as well. In 2011, Gang Garrison 2 developers began a new project to jump over one of its tall, long-time hurdles: porting to Python. Game Maker 8 has been the free 2D engine that gave birth to GG2 and brought it to where it is. But Python would have the capability to overcome all its existing technical drawbacks. The problem in the previous years was said to be the lack of a willing lead for the porting project. Someone had finally accepted the responsibility, until, in 2015, when they disappeared, and it all went dark.

2015-2020 was a period of unstoppable decline. Due to the official community platform still being IRC, and the main communication channel being the word of mouth, people like me had a hard time finding out about the game. Its “unofficial official” Discord server is an initiative taken by a few people like YB and me in 2020. Mods and plugins that could previously be found in scattered and old forums where download links are only visible to members, are neatly and publicly archived on that Discord server today.

New beginnings, new potential, new formula: 2020-2026

The moment that really triggered the organizing of a diehard new running blood to Gang Garrison 2 was a fan, Lup, posting this one reddit post. At the wake of the TF2 bot crisis, they made a suggestion that we revive Gang Garrison 2, and that was soon followed with us getting a record-breaking 3 servers full, meaning 40 concurrent players!

Haxxy Awards 2025 led to the biggest boom of content! The overall winner became Heenok, a long-time winner with 11 medals across the history of Haxxy Awards. He had sent out an entire game as submission, reminiscent of his favorite class Detonator (a.k.a. Demoman).

Haxxy Awards’ excitement brought another, record-breaking player count of 20. Taking up from that point, the community started to show more activity. The organizational and collaborative spirits of European and American players led to a consistent boom of players once a week in periodic sessions. The 17^th birthday event of GG2 was another peak, as most birthday events were in the previous years. However, this would also eventually die out.

Many players often highly regard the Randomizer Mod (RM), a version of Gang Garrison 2 that adds the two most commonly requested features: chat, and alternate weapons. While organizing a game session for my unfinished RM version (forked from Murve’s) I found 7 new players coming out of the woodwork to play! Active development really encouraged some people to play again. And that has been an important takeaway about the correlation between game development and player interest.

Eventually we come to 2026, where the community long realized waiting on its current developers is fruitless. And us, the modders, didn’t want all our struggle to be for unofficial improvements trying to patch what is officially lacking at the core. We rolled our sleeves for something more. A behind-the-scenes project has been rolling, and seeing a lot more activity than the official GG2 Discord server. It is not ready for the public yet. But it will be, sooner than you would guess. Gang Garrison 2’s future is not dead yet. Far from it—it is more promising than it has been for more than a decade. Please keep an eye on the GG2 Discord server and other Fortress circles for more announcements, and join us when the time comes.

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