Balloons and party hats abound today on Team Fortress 2 servers in celebration of the original Team Fortress’ twelfth birthday. Team Fortress, a mod for ancient relic Quake, was created on the 24th August 1996 by Robin Walker (now working at Valve), John Cook (ditto), and Ian Caughley. Play a bit of TF2 today to join in on the fun.

In other TF2-related news, Doug Lombardi has informed Kotaku that Xbox 360 owners can expect a huge update to their version of the game later this year. It will contain all the content added to the game over Steam post-release, including the three class updates for Medic, Pyro, and Heavy.

The flip side of the coin is that the update will be made available on the Xbox Live Marketplace, for a price. Valve are aiming to lower the price as much as possible, hopefully to somewhere around the $10 mark.

Speaking of updates to TF2, another small one has been released in the wake of the Heavy Update. It will install automatically when you restart Steam:

Team Fortress 2

Fixed startup crash related to loading the tf2_playerstats.dmx file

Fixed material system crash

Added -noborder command line option to play windowed-mode with no border

Thanks to CS-Nation for noticing the birthday goodies, to Kotaku for the latest from Mr Lombardi, and to Valve for yet another set of fixes.