Team Fortress 2: Gold Rush (AppID: 3826520)

TF2: Gold Rush is a mod that restores and carefully enhances the experience TF2 offered in its early years. Expect a truly vintage flavor of the game, with fewer hats and weapons—but more polish, and a stronger visual direction.

Faithful to the Original Vision

This mod revives the original artistic identity of TF2, bringing it back to the familiar painterly environments and timeless 1960s spy movie aesthetic that won us all over back in the day. Gold Rush only features maps and items familiar to the game's formative years, meaning veteran players shouldn't expect to be pulled out of the experience. In other words, it's just good old fashioned TF2.

Carefully Evolved

As beautiful and genre-defining as TF2 was back in 2007, it was also very sparse in content–an issue its developers intended from the beginning to remedy through their post-launch updates. Gold Rush aims to incorporate only the best additions from this early era: balance adjustments like Pyro's compression blast, high-quality maps like Badlands or Lumberyard, and yes, even certain unlockable weapons and cosmetics.

That's where we've had to strike a balance, though—because while dynamic loadouts and hats boosted gameplay variety and player expression, there was a point where these items began to overwrite the original game's intended setting and style.

To avoid this, Gold Rush includes only a very tight, curated pool of early items that we feel interact gracefully with the game's initial premise and visual design. Each class is given a variety of loadout choices, but they all still resemble their original archetypes and gameplay roles.

A Living Tribute

You can think of Gold Rush as a purist effort to preserve an earlier vision of TF2, and a heartfelt tribute to the craftsmanship that was once poured into this one-of-a-kind cult classic.