The Furry Pound started as a pretty minor flicker of activity in the grander scheme of Team Fortress 2 server communities.  Many know the tales quite intimately, others only foggily.

In the beginning, not long after Gabe Newell created Da Hevvens & Da Urfs, there was a bunny.  A purple bunny named, appropriately, Renee the Witchiebunny.   Witchie had made many friends on some of the more popular TF2 servers, this collection of which loved to play around with TF2 and with one another.  A rowdy and often racy crew, the servers were often their most talkative and spontaneous when any number of these friends, furry and non, got together to play.  Yet after a while, a plan grew in the purple bunny’s head:  To have a place to play Team Fortress 2 separate from the politics of the old places to be, created as a club-house of sorts to knock around in when not on the more populated locations.  And with the immeasurable aid of friends like Endeavour3D and Ailure, the very first server was brought online at the start of the summer of 2008.

As Taross, the co-leader of a group whom many of this initial clubhouse cabal belonged to offered his sponsorship of the server, it became known as the US-based FOR group (Frontier Operational Recon) server; a compliment to the EU-based server which would eventually become TFP Server #3. However, as time passed and the servers began to gain more notice by word of mouth, various changes were exercized which would take the FOR server from small, local hangout to a more mainstream 24/7 server.  This included the addition of a second sister-server to the first and Taross voluntarily stepping down as the head of the server and elevating the purple bun, Witchie, to position of lead.

With this elevation coincided Witchie’s rendering of our first (and current) Steam group icon and the rechristening of the servers as “The Furry Pound”.

From that moment, The Furry Pound (or TFP) only grew with notoriety and advertisement.  The raucous wild-west style of TFP began to attract more attention and frequent players.  Like a rock hardening from magma to a stone, TFP’s small staff saw the growth of their community and were faced with the possibility of having to draft specific guidelines and treat TFP as a more viable and authentic Furry-owned and operated Team Fortress 2 community. Ailure and Witchie raised the little community of several dozen’s first forum.  This forum frequently migrated due to the amount of bandwidth and other technical issues.  TFP also began hosting events like public custom map testing; achievement-box nights where the sight of a Heavy boxing multiple scouts to the theme of Benny Hill’s Yakkity Sax is still remembered with mirth; Left 4 Dead server hosting (which while available was never as popular as TF2 hosting); And certainly holiday events like Haunted Fortress, which converted the servers to use the popular TF2 “Zombie Fortress” mod and is still remembered as one of TFP’s more entertaining events.

The rest is history.  Advertisement on some internet websites who caught wind about us, then a banner advertisement offer with gracious thanks to Dragoneer and the FurAffinity.net crew, helped bolster the word-of-mouth notice of TFP as a fun, foot-loose Furry-friendly public server community. Our server population had to expand to compensate for the near constant 24-man filling of servers.  There was an exponential upward curve of applicants and invites to the community, and the staff has tripled in number since the FOR server’s humble beginning.

The Furry Pound started as a single-server hideaway for a baker’s dozen of friends to fool around and no true aspirations to grow beyond that. Now, a year later, with well over a thousand registered members, seven TF2 servers (and additional servers used for alternative games like Killing Floor and Minecraft), a Youtube community page and a popular Steam chat, we’ve added our own website to the list and will continue to ride this train for as far as it’ll take us.

Welcome to The Pound!