Capture The Flag - Software and Games

Software and Games

In 1984, Scholastic published Bannercatch for the Apple II and Commodore computers. An "edutainment" game with recognizable capture-the-flag mechanics, Bannercatch allowed up to two humans (each alternating between two characters in the game world) to play capture the flag against an increasingly difficult team of four AI bots. Bannercatch's game world was divided into quadrants: home, enemy, and two "no-mans land" areas which held the jails. A successful capture required bringing the enemy flag into one team's "home" quadrant. Players could be captured when in an enemy territory, or in "no-mans land" while holding a flag. Captured players had to be "rescued" from their designated jail by one of the other members of the team. Fallen flags remained where they dropped until a time-out period elapsed, after which the flag would return to one of several starting locations in home territory. The 2D map also featured walls, trees and a moving river (enabling a wide variety of strategies). Special locations in the play area allowed humans to query the game state (such as flag status) status using binary messages.

In 1992, Richard Carr released an MS-DOS based game called Capture the Flag. It is a turn-based strategy game with real time network / modem play (or play-by-mail) based around the traditional outdoor game. The game required players to merely move one of their characters onto the same square as their opponent's flag, as opposed to bringing it back to friendly territory, because of difficulties implementing the artificial intelligence that the computer player would have needed to bring the enemy flag home and intercept opposing characters carrying the flag.

A common multiplayer gameplay mode (usually with team-based gameplay, as with the real-life game) called "Capture the Flag" is found in many first- and third-person shooters such as Team Fortress 2, Marathon, Quake, Urban Terror, Unreal Tournament, Tribes, the Halo series, the Call of Duty series, the TimeSplitters series (renamed "Capture The Bag"), and Metroid Prime Hunters. It is possible that the sandbox game Minecraft will release a CTF expansion. CTF is even in some sports games such as the Tony Hawk Pro Skater series and the racing series Midnight Club. Another useful example for CTF in just two dimensions (2D) is a game called Teeworlds. Each team has a flag and the players attempt to take the enemy's flag from their base and bring it back to their own flag to score. CTF is most commonly played in multiplayer games.

Possibly the first first-person shooter to feature CTF was Rise of the Triad, released in 1994, while the first real-time strategy to feature CTF was Command & Conquer in 1995. One of the multiplayer modes was called Capture the Triad, and conforms to the objectives stated above for CTF games in first person shooters, with the exception that the items to be captured and defended were triad symbols. Note that in First-Person Shooters, unlike the children's game, players can be harmed irrespective of whether they are in their own base.

CTF was popularized when it was first introduced as a modification to Quake by the company Threewave. CTF is also a popular mode in the Team Fortress mod for Quake, its remake Team Fortress Classic for Half-Life, and the standalone Team Fortress 2. CTF mods are available for multiple first person shooters, including Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, which is a free download using the game engine from the popular Return to Castle Wolfenstein.

Compared to a deathmatch game, CTF scenarios often feature some sort of transportation tool that can be used to travel faster and to reach areas which the player wouldn't normally be able to reach without this extra aid. Such tools might be a grappling hook or a portable teleporter. In Battlefield 1942 CTF the many vehicles available in the game serve this role, though in ETF the vehicles move slower than the players, and are vulnerable objectives in most missions. The usual reason for including such equipment is because it allows players to outmaneuver the flag carrier on his way home, as the flag carrier is often not able to use transportation tools. In Unreal Tournament 2004, for example, only players in ground vehicles can hold and thus capture the flag, whereas using air vehicles or the Translocator (a personal teleporter) will cause the player to drop the flag. The Halo series takes this concept a step further, preventing the flag carrier from using weapons at all, unless the carrier willfully drops the flag, though the flag-carrier can still board vehicles as a passenger (Halo 2 and 3) or as the driver (1 only). This feature gives the defenders a slight edge, thus making the game sessions last a bit longer. Unreal Tournament 2004 introduces a Vehicle CTF mode, differentiated from normal CTF maps by the presence of vehicles and in Unreal Tournament III and the replacement of the Translocator with a Hoverboard.