Good evening. CP Orange is one of the most, if not the most, popular unofficial Team Fortress 2 map of all time. It's so popular it's transcended TF2. This success is kind of shocking because, quite frankly, there's not a lot to look at here.

So, how did a map this simple captivate such a huge audience and stay relevant for well over a decade?



Today I'm going to talk about Orange's history, the reason people love and hate it, and its legacy. Let's begin.

In order to understand the history of CP Orange, we have to look at what inspired it.

Orange is heavily based on DOD_BSL, a custom level for the game Day of Defeat.



I wanted to get the scoop on the original map's history, so I tried tracking down its creator. I was a little off-put to see that the only credit listed anywhere was simply BSL. I couldn't find a digital footprint for any Day of Defeat mapper with such a name. After a good hour of searching, though, I realized it was unlikely that BSL was a username.

Let's say you picked that as your alias. You'd constantly be told that your username has been taken, and that's assuming you could even find a site that lets you use just three characters as a login.

So I figured that BSL was probably an acronym. But for what? Well, I've still had no luck finding out what it stood for, but I think I might have figured out who, or rather what, BSL is. Or was.


See, back when games like Day of Defeat and CS 1.6 were in their heyday, there were a lot of players who formed organized teams called clans.



They would fight against other clans in competitive matches, and they'd get pretty serious about it. A lot of them started their own websites with their own forums. Some of them expanded their arm into running their own servers for the game, whether private ones to practice on or public ones for the sake of advertisement. And some clans even made their own levels to play on.

So here's my theory. BSL was probably not an acronym for a person's name, but rather one of a Day of Defeat clan. Some member made a map which was either for the clan or simply named after it, and they started running it on their server. The map's name eventually shifted from .BSL to .ORANGE, as coined because of its placeholder development textures.

The name BSL might have even been scrapped due to some kind of falling out in the clan. Or maybe I'm looking into it too deep and BSL was just some guy's odd nickname.

Whatever. Either way, .ORANGE became really popular during Day of Defeat's golden age, and when the game got a remake in the form of Day of Defeat's source, .ORANGE came with it. To this day, the map remains popular in the small but loyal communities of both games.

When 2007 rolled around, though, the perceived identity of .ORANGE changed forever.

Valve was releasing Team Fortress 2, and there was a rush to be one of the first to make a custom level for it. You could cement your name in the game's history. But TF2's game design was pretty radically different from its predecessors, so community members really didn't have much of a feel for the game's balance yet.



With so few established guidelines, the idea of creating a map from scratch was intimidating. It seemed inevitable that you'd do something wrong and have to take the blame for your poor design choices later.

So the idea of just porting a map from another game came naturally. And what better map to port than .ORANGE?

Day of Defeat's territorial control game mode was nearly identical to TF2's control point mode, and since a lot of Day of Defeat players would undoubtedly be checking out Valve's new title, the cult classic Orange seemed like a perfect pick to leave an early impact on the game.

So mapper WhiteWolfX got to work on a remake of .ORANGE for TF2, what we now know as CP_ORANGE. He upscaled the map to accommodate 24 players, as opposed to the 6v6 standard from competitive Day of Defeat matches. He added the control points and directional indicators. And just to let everyone know who was responsible, he added an X to the title and placed his signature wolf logo into the level itself.

Four times.



WhiteWolfX had cranked out CPORANGEX by October 19th, 2007, just 9 days after TF2's launch. That's before the game even got its first patch.

Orange was an early hit.

You can find videos from the first month of TF2's life showing populated servers running it. WhiteWolfX might have guessed the map would be successful, but I doubt he knew it would grow to completely overshadow the level it was based on.

I also doubt he expected people to toy with it as much as they did. Indeed, Orange proved to be a spinoff magnet. In fact, the most popular version of the map, and the one viewers are probably most familiar with, is a spinoff.



Mapper GGODD2 got permission to edit the level from WhiteWolfX, and not long after, let loose his own version called CP_Orange_X3. This version of the map added more real textures and color, which made each team's sides better distinguishable, but it didn't make any sacrifice to the map's simplicity and charm.

X3 quickly became the most prominent version of Orange, and nowadays most edits of the map you'll see take after it. As I move into discussing the good and the bad of this map, I'll be using X3 for demonstration, though what I say will apply to most all versions of Orange.

Starting with its flaws…

On the original .orange, these two paths around the tower were not much of a concern, because day-of-defeat players had the ability to lay prone and crawl around to avoid getting sniped.



On the jumbo-sized CP_ORANGE, however, these sightlines are enormous, and the little cover that's still provided isn't very useful.

On this map, Sniper is king, and they can get pretty annoying.




Since the map is so open, there's not much opportunity for close-range combat apart from at the tower's peak. That makes Heavy or Shotgun Pyro not very fun to play.




The spawn rooms on this map are not designed ideally. There's no way for the less mobile classes to get back into their spawn, unless you're on blue team and have sick parkour skills. There's also no funk respawn room brush, that means that if you want to switch classes or adjust your loadout, you have to die to do so. And worst of all, this map lacks a team barrier, so if you are a mobile class, you can just waltz into the other team's base and spawn camp them. So yeah, it's pretty busted.


This map is barren. There are no health or ammo pickups. And since most people lack access to their resupply cabinet, this is hell. But if you can get past these problems, or just play on edits that try to correct them, you might find a lot to love as well.

Since Orange is just simple geometry with only a handful of props, it's easy to run even on very low-end computers. If you look online, you can find stories of people who considered refunding TF2 because their old machines couldn't handle the stock maps, but stuck around once they realized they could still play on the servers that ran Orange. I'm not sure if that's heartwarming or gut-wrenching.


You don't need to have a game sense or a cap strategy to play on Orange. You don't even need to know what's going on. You just need to be able to spot the giant tower in the center of the map, then make the choice to go towards it.



In X3 and most of its edits, this centerpiece is actually the only thing left colored orange, so it does a good job of catching the player's eye and beckoning them towards the action. Succinctly, the layout of Orange is so simple, it's hard for even the newest of players to get lost or confused.


The extremely long cap times and most players' general apathy toward the objective make Orange a great level to pop in and out of at leisure.



The map has 2Fort syndrome. Even if you're playing on a full 32-player server, a round of Orange can still last hours. And when players do focus on the objective, they usually just end up fighting over control of the central tower. That means the most intense experience you'll usually have on Orange is akin to a light-hearted King of the Hill match.


As was just mentioned, the points take forever to capture, and the rounds can go on ad astreum. That means that if you do for some reason choose to get serious on this map, capping the last point can be decently gratifying.

• When Orange was first released, people found nostalgia in it because it reminded them of Dodd BSL.
  
• As time went on, people found nostalgia in it because it reminded them of the early days of TF2.
  
• And nowadays, people are nostalgic for it because it reminds them of their youth.

And that's probably why a good amount of viewers clicked on this video. Moving on.

Now that we've covered why it's hated and why it's loved, here's the three most notable ways Orange left its mark on the TF2 community.


As we discussed in the history segment, some people saw the simplicity of Orange as an open invitation, and used the map as a canvas to express themselves. Some tried to adapt it to be more commensurate with Team Fortress 2's art design.



Some tried to pick up on the map's shortcomings, like its lack of ammo packs or its buggy spawns. Some added flank routes in the form of tunnels or sewer systems, and more cover for the purpose of making the map more competitive. And some just added their server logo to it to bog up your hard drive. Regardless, the huge amount of CP Orange edits that piled up over the years went a long way in establishing the map's place in our hearts, our minds, and our downloads folders.


Orange was simple, but successful. It seems like a lot of people found that inspirational and tried to follow in its footsteps and making dev-textured levels. Nowadays, Orange is seen not just as a map, but as a style. Map creators leave their levels unpolished and untextured on purpose, with no intention to ever finalize a setting. And people love it.




Orange came to be synonymous with the type of servers that ran it. The map's simplicity made it a great vehicle for goofy gameplay modifiers like 100% crits, low gravity, friendly fire, randomizer, you name it. And nowadays, if you search for a server running the map, most of the lobbies you'll find will be packed with these weird plugins. Now to wrap things up.

When you hear the word Orange in the context of TF2, you might think of the original CP Orange map.

• You might think of some bizarro Minecraft version.
  
• You might think of a myriad of other barely textured maps you explored when you were younger.
  
• Or maybe, just maybe, you might think of Tony Hawk.

But it doesn't matter what you think of, really. What matters is that you remember it at all.

For a map so simple and arguably unfinished to skyrocket to massive popularity and cement itself in the memories of hundreds of thousands of people is truly remarkable.

• Richter Overtime — The History of CP_Orange