A Brief Story

For Zami, APA landed right as the household upgraded from dial-up to DSL — a life-changing jump at that age. It was the first time being online felt like more than a novelty; it felt like a room you could stay in. He didn't know how to run anything yet — he was just a member — but something stuck: the idea that the internet could be cultivated, even if he didn't know what shape that would take.

The clan didn't last. As Zami tells it, people didn't want to stay grouped with someone pushing racist ideology, so everyone walked. Short-lived — but it still taught him what he wouldn't build.

In MCRES, Zami went deeper — not just playing, but peeking behind the curtain. He started learning how the Refractor toolchain worked and how to ship simple server-side map patches that clients didn't have to download. That mattered then: broadband wasn't a given, and games didn't have slick dedicated file pipelines — if you needed an asset, you were often sent to GameBanana or MediaFire and told good luck.

He rose to co-leader and server operator, hosting through providers like Gameservers.com. The community slowed down over time — co-leading turned out to be a fragile way to run a clan — but the technical foundation he picked up here would echo in everything later.

Team Edition was Zami's first real clan-and-community project — the place where hosting, modding, and how people feel on your server clicked together. He ran BFV, Killing Floor, and L4D during this stretch, chasing something he could already name: he wanted to build something lasting, even if he was still young and figuring out the playbook. At its peak, TE reached around 200 clan members — and it was wonderful.

He says he still remembers essentially everyone from that era — some of his closest friends, most of whom have drifted away from gaming, though a handful still keep little traditions alive. On BFV, the server felt personal: he knew the regulars, and they knew him. Eventually the bills won — hosting got expensive — and he stepped back. But TE was the proof-of-concept: he could run a room people came back to.

Zami already knew Chainsaw from the old days — APA in 2005, back when he was Bradshaw in Battlefield Vietnam. By the time AUK showed up, the person on the other end of the name had changed, but the structure around the project still felt shaky in the ways Zami didn't love.

Still: it was another server, another classroom. Counter-Strike: Source with a zombies mod — not TF2 yet — and another crowd of kids figuring out voice chat, admins, and chaos. Cynder and Beartato were clan members on AUK too — same voices, same stupid jokes, years before Purple. That's the connection: the Fun Haus era didn't come out of nowhere; those friendships were already forged in zombie rounds.

The demographic stayed simple. Just a bunch of kids playing CSS.

Two years later, around 2010, AUK went quiet. The story didn't end — it just hadn't picked its next map yet.

Then TF2 happened — and Jimmy ran a server with a philosophy that sounds insane on paper and perfect in practice: one map. The machine was billed as Cynder's Furry Fun Haus, but the Steam roster behind it was T.I.T.S. — Tirelessly Idiotic Troublemaking Squad — a group that predates Purple by years. He and Jared had already been around the block together on AUK; this was the same crew leveling up into a new game. That map was cp_purple_x, a purple-tinted variant of WhiteWolf_X's cp_orange_x (itself a TF2 remake of dod_orange from Day of Defeat). Same dev-texture minimalism, same long cap times — just purple, and somehow that was enough.

Beartato (Jared) took cp_purple_x, fixed what needed fixing, and shipped cp_purple_fix_b9 — the remake that became the foundation for everything that came after. While cp_orange_x spawned something like 70+ variants across TF2 history, Purple became its own thing: one server, one identity, three years of regulars who didn't need a rotation to feel like they had a place.

By 2014, internal disagreements pulled the plug — but the people didn't vanish. They carried the Purple legacy forward, even when the sign above the door changed.

Peanut Butter Cookies picked up where Cynder's left off — same spirit, same Purple map, new banner. Rena's name was on the paperwork, but the machine stayed alive because Zami was the one actually keeping it breathing: configs, crashes, late nights, the unglamorous stuff nobody claps for.

Meanwhile Pedango and The Hand of Nod helped pay for the thing, and Jello and Fallen held down admin duties so the rest of us could be stupid in chat without burning the place down.

The PBCookies Steam group is still out there with 175 members — a little fossil of that era. The shorthand used to be that everyone just moved on to GottamPootis, but the timeline was messier: a lot of the same people were already playing GP while PBC was still up, and Peanut Butter Cookies wound down around the same era the rgba-era GottamPootis machine did — when GP went offline in 2018, both banners were effectively done.

Mr Justy started GottamPootis around 2012—low gravity, RTD, raffles, the whole circus. GameTracker listed it as “[Low Grav/RTD/Raffles] GottamPootis!” It was genuinely fun: the kind of server where you joined for ten minutes and stayed for three hours.

Then, life happened. Justy left for college, shut the server down, and deleted the Steam group. To the community, that didn’t read like a pause. It read like a funeral.

Into that silence stepped rgba. They claimed the abandoned Steam group (which was founded in November 2014 and is still alive today with nearly 500 members) and rebuilt the server using public configs and rotations scraped from GameTracker. Dman stepped in to help run the day-to-day.

But when Justy eventually came back online and found GottamPootis breathing without him, the collision was inevitable.

A private Steam thread from October 2014 shows the temperature in the room: Justy demanding to know why rgba was running “a server that I created for my community,” rgba deflecting with “I just know what dman says,” accusations of being an “imposter,” and the whole night going sideways. The WordPress post that followed a few months later was the public explosion, but that chat was the thrum underneath.

After years of clans and servers—from Battlefield and Team Edition through AUK, Cynder’s, Peanut Butter Cookies, and GottamPootis—the line doesn’t just “end,” it lands. Team Fortress 2 Classified is the deliberate last chapter: a fresh start built out of everything that came before.

GottamPootis went quiet in 2018. The years between weren’t erased—life happened, other games, group chats, the odd revival swing—but there wasn’t another banner I wanted to run on purpose until the pieces for one final room felt right. April 2026 is when the new server went up and testing began to see if we should even attempt a new community. Same operator, fewer masks, no interest in repeating the old storms under new paint.

It’s meant to be open, free, and safe—a home for furries, LGBTQ+ folks, and anyone who wants to exist somewhere without hate. Less theater, more care. If you’ve been looking for a place to just play and breathe, this is the invitation.

(On a practical note: TF2 might see an orange map again someday if the mood hits. But either way, I am going to need people to step up as admins. The AI moderator I built helps, but it isn’t enough on its own.)

I’ll be honest about one thing, because the page you just read is a graveyard of servers that went dark: I can’t promise I’ll always be around as much as I’d like. Life doesn’t stop because you booted a TF2 server. But what I can promise is that this isn’t another project I’m launching just to abandon. The door stays open, the configs stay maintained. If I’m quiet for a stretch, it’s not because I forgot.

Twenty years of this taught me at least that much.