has expanded with Halloween updates, including the characters of the "Horseless Headless Horsemann" and Monoculus (Gary Schwartz). 2012 and 2013 saw the addition of Merasmus, the Bombinomicon, and Redmond, Blutarch, Zepheniah, and Gray Mann (the first three all played by Nolan North). Previous unused voicelines recorded by North were later used for Horseless Headless Horsemann seen in the 2019 map "Laughter" and a jack-o'-lantern resting atop the Payload cart in the 2020 map "Bloodwater". The character Davy Jones (voiced by Calvin Kipperman) made an appearance in the 2018 map "Cursed Cove". In the video announcement for the "Jungle Inferno" update, Mann Co. CEO Saxton Hale, a hypermasculine Australian adventurer, is voiced by JB Blanc. Setting Although Team Fortress 2 is designed as an open-ended multiplayer experience without an active storyline, the game and additional material nonetheless feature a wider narrative centered around the fictional Mann Co., a large shipping and manufacturing company led by CEO Saxton Hale. The main PvP gamemodes are set during the "Gravel Wars", a conflict between the rival heirs Redmond "Red" and Blutarch "Blu" Mann for which the nine playable characters were hired out as mercenaries. Gray Mann later emerges as the third competitor, killing the other two brothers and forcing Hale to rehire the mercenaries to protect Mann Co. from Gray's robot army in the Mann vs Machine cooperative horde shooter mode. Development Origins The original Team Fortress was developed by the Australian team TF Software, comprising Robin Walker and John Cook, as a free mod for the 1996 PC game Quake. In 1998, Walker and Cook were employed by Valve, which had just released its first game, Half-Life. Valve began developing Team Fortress 2 as an expansion pack for Half-Life using Valve's GoldSrc engine, and gave a release date for the end of the year. In 1999, Valve released Team Fortress Classic, a port of the original Team Fortress, as a free Half-Life mod. Team Fortress Classic was developed using the publicly available Half-Life software development kit as an example to the community and industry of its flexibility. Unlike Team Fortress, Valve originally planned Team Fortress 2 to have a modern war aesthetic. It would feature innovations including a command hierarchy with a Commander class, parachute drops over enemy territory, and networked voice communication. The Commander class played similarly to a real-time strategy game, with the player viewing the game from a bird's-eye perspective