How to Install Medal of Honor and Join a Server

Everybody remembers the beach. Medal of Honor put a player in a landing craft at Omaha in 2002 and opened the ramp. Most of the men standing next to you died before you had worked out which way to run. It is the sequence that defined a decade of war shooters and it was in the campaign, which almost nobody who kept playing this game was there for.

The people who stayed were playing something else. Small maps, no respawn timer worth mentioning, a rifle that killed in one shot if you put it in the right place, and a server full of the same forty regulars every night for years.

That is the part this guide is about. Listings collect on the Medal of Honor hub.

Which Medal of Honor, exactly

This needs sorting out first, because the name covers a lot of ground and buying the wrong one is easy.

Medal of Honor started on PlayStation in 1999. It came to PC in 2002 as Allied Assault, which is the game most people mean when they say the name, and Allied Assault is the entry that built the PC multiplayer scene. It got two expansions — Spearhead and Breakthrough — and each of those brought its own maps, its own changes and, in practice, its own server population.

Later the series moved on entirely. There was a modern-setting reboot at the end of the 2000s and a sequel to it, both of which are different games with different multiplayer models and nothing in common with the WWII entries beyond a logo.

So: if you have read about Medal of Honor servers and want to know what to install, you are looking for the 2002 PC game or one of its two expansions. Allied Assault has its own listings and so does Spearhead. The later reboot era is a separate thing again.

Which of them to buy depends entirely on which one the group you want to play with is running. That is not a cop-out; it is the actual answer, because these populations do not overlap.

What the multiplayer actually is

It runs on the Quake III engine, which tells you most of what you need to know about how it feels. Fast movement, no weight to the player model, an engine that had already been proven for two years by the time this game used it.

What sits on top of it is much slower than Quake. Weapons are period rifles and submachine guns with real damage, so exchanges end quickly. There is no health regeneration, no loadout screen full of attachments and no progression system. You spawn with a weapon, you find health where the map put it, and you fight.

The modes are the ones you would expect from that era. Free-for-all deathmatch. Team matches. Round-based play where death means sitting out until the round ends, which changes the game completely — people stop pushing and start listening. And objective modes, where one team is planting or destroying something and the other is stopping them.

The round-based modes are where the game's reputation comes from. Losing a life costs you the rest of the round, so the whole thing plays like a slow, tense argument about who is going to look around the corner first. Modern shooters have rediscovered this structure several times since.

What a round feels like

Worth setting expectations, because two decades of shooters have moved a long way from this.

The rifles do most of the killing. A bolt-action landing where it should ends the exchange immediately, and the semi-automatic American rifle rewards a steady hand and gives away your position when the clip ejects with a noise everybody on the map can hear. Submachine guns win indoors and lose everywhere else. There are heavier weapons on the maps and there is anti-armour equipment on the ones that need it.

Movement is fast and there is no stamina system limiting you, which is the Quake III engine showing through. Combined with weapons that kill in one or two hits, that produces something quite unlike a modern military shooter: you are moving quickly, you die instantly, and the skill is in positioning and sound rather than in tracking a target across a screen.

There is no minimap telling you where anybody is. There is no outline on an enemy you have spotted. What you get is footsteps, the direction a rifle fired from and whatever your team tells you. Play with sound turned up and headphones on, and a surprising amount of the game's apparent unfairness turns out to have been information you were not listening to.

Maps are small by modern standards and most rounds are decided in a handful of contested spaces. Learning three maps properly beats knowing twelve badly, and the regulars on any given server will have known theirs for two decades.

The problem every game of this age has

Multiplayer PC games from the early 2000s found servers through a central master server, and for an enormous number of them that service belonged to GameSpy. GameSpy shut down in 2014. Every in-game internet browser that depended on it stopped returning results.

Nothing official replaced it. What replaced it was communities — replacement server lists, launchers, patches maintained by volunteers. Which of those are alive for a given title, and which are working this month, changes.

So this guide will not send you to a specific piece of third-party software that might be abandoned by the time you read this. What it will tell you is the shape: if you install the game, open the internet tab and see an empty list, that is expected. Your install is fine. The route in is a community and an address and a favourites list.

Our communities directory is a reasonable starting point, and the piece on how Discord changed the way these groups organise explains why the information you need is now in a chat server rather than on a forum that has been offline since 2011.

Getting connected once you have an address

The Quake III lineage means there is a console, and the console takes the command every game descended from that engine takes:

connect 203.0.113.19:12203

Two things about that. The console is not always bound to the plain tilde key in games built on this engine, and there is generally a setting that can be passed at launch to enable it — check the game's own configuration rather than assuming a key. And the port is part of the address. These games have never used the 27015 that Source games default to, hosts run many servers on one machine, and half an address connects to nothing.

The in-game browser also has a favourites list, and for a game at this stage of life the favourites list is the single most valuable thing you own. Populations are scheduled rather than continuous. A server that looks dead on a Sunday afternoon has forty people on it at nine in the evening in whatever country it is hosted in, every week, reliably. Finding two of those solves the game permanently.

Servers are not all running the same game

This is the thing that surprises people returning after twenty years.

Long-running communities for games of this era accumulate server-side modifications, and the ones still going have twenty years of accumulation. Custom admin systems. Altered weapon behaviour. Rules about which weapons are permitted. Map rotations built entirely from community maps that were not in any version of the game you bought.

Some servers are close to the retail experience. Others have house rules that regulars enforce socially rather than through code, and turning up and playing in a way that violates them is a fast route to being kicked by somebody who is not going to explain first.

Read a server's own description before deciding it is broken or that everyone on it is unreasonable. The information is generally there, and where it is not, the community's chat server has it.

Hosting one yourself

The dedicated server software for games of this generation is small and undemanding, and it still works. A machine that would struggle to open a modern web page will run one of these comfortably.

The decisions that matter are not about hardware. They are about where the machine sits relative to the people playing on it, and about whether anybody will ever find it. Where to host a game server covers the first, and it matters more for an old shooter than for almost anything else, because these games have no lag compensation worth the name and a hundred milliseconds is visible in every exchange.

The second problem is harder and it is not technical. A new server for a twenty-year-old game with no players on it stays empty, because nobody joins an empty server. Why nobody joins your server is about exactly that trap and what actually breaks it, and the short version is that you need a group of people who have agreed to be there at the same time before you need a machine.

Problems

The server browser is empty. Expected. See above.

The game will not run on modern Windows. Try administrator rights and a compatibility mode on the executable. Games of this age predate several changes to how Windows handles display and permissions.

Stretched or letterboxed image. A 4:3 game on a widescreen monitor. Set the resolution explicitly in the video options.

You connect and are immediately dropped. Version mismatch is the usual reason. Base game and expansions are different products, and community patches add another dimension. Everybody on a server needs the same build.

Mouse feels slippery or accelerated. Turn acceleration off at the operating system level as well as in the game. Nothing about input handling was standardised in 2002.

You get kicked without explanation. House rules. Read the server's description, and if you cannot find one, ask in chat rather than reconnecting repeatedly.

Where to go next

The obvious successor is the game a team of Allied Assault's own developers left to make: Call of Duty took the same era and much of the same design philosophy and turned it into a much bigger series. Call of Duty 2 is the entry most people from this scene moved to, and Call of Duty 4 is where that lineage peaked before the series abandoned dedicated servers entirely.

On the same engine family, Return to Castle Wolfenstein and its free multiplayer offshoot Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory have outlasted almost everything of their generation, and Enemy Territory in particular has a class-and-objective structure that a lot of people prefer to anything here. Soldier of Fortune II sits in the same technical family with a very different tone.

And if you want the engine at its purest, Quake III Arena is the thing all of this was built on top of.

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JoinGG is a live directory of community game servers. Every listing is queried directly every fifteen minutes, so the player count you see was measured rather than reported by its owner, and each one carries a copyable connect address. Medal of Honor servers are listed here, and every game on the site has its own hub. Player counts across every game are on the statistics page.