Threewave CTF
Threewave CTF is an unreleased Valve game that was found in a folder called "wmods" during the Half-Life 2 leak in 2003. The game is not commonly talked about and is regarded as one of the least important parts of the leak.
History of Threewave
Threewave started out as a Quake mod created by David (Zoid) Kirsch. It became very popular shortly after its release. Many community-made maps were created for the game-mode, and it quickly caught the attention of id Software. Zoid stopped working on Threewave on July 26th, 1997, when he was hired by id Software to work on Quake II's multiplayer functionality.
While Valve worked on Half-Life 2 in 1999, they also worked on Deathmatch Classic , A small team worked on a port of the popular game-mode Threewave CTF to the GoldSrc engine. No one really knows what Valve was planning to do with Threewave, and they never officially discussed.
When Half-Life 2 leaked in 2003, a bunch of other projects Valve was working on at the time surfaced on the internet aswell, such as parts of Team Fortress 2: Invasion's source code plus 2 models, the nearly complete Counter-Strike: Source Beta, an incomplete version of Half-Life:Source, and a folder called "wmods". No one knew what "wmods" was and most people just thought of it was just a broken expansion pack for Deathmatch Classic. The obscurity of the folders was rarely talked about and no information about "wmods" was found, until 13 years later.
Restoration of Threewave
After digging around for beta content, Tyler McVicker found old forum posts on the WayBack Machine about the folder "wmods". After a whole month's search, he found it on a mysterious Vietnamese FTP server. After attempting to launch the "3wave" folder build, The game kept crashing on him, and when attempting to load a map locally, the spawn points were broken and almost all the textures were missing.
Tyler McVicker contacted his expert GoldSrc programmer, PistonMiner and he was able to get "3wave" to work within a day. Tyler McVicker uploaded a video to Valve News Network on September 21st, 2016 releasing a full playable version of Threewave CTF. He also hosted (for a short time) a Threewave server for the community to play on. Now we have one mystery of the Beta unsolved.
