How to Install Medal of Honor: Spearhead and Join a Server

Expansion packs are supposed to be a bag of extra maps that everybody plays for a fortnight. Spearhead is one of the small number that ended up replacing the game it was attached to.

Twenty years on, if you find a Medal of Honor community still running servers, there is a good chance it is running this rather than the original. That is unusual and it is the reason this guide exists separately. Listings collect on the Spearhead hub.

What it is

Spearhead is the first expansion to Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, released the year after it. New campaign, new maps, new weapons, and — the part that mattered — changes to the multiplayer side that the people who played it every night noticed immediately.

It has a reputation among that group for having sorted out things the base game never quite did. Whether every individual claim about it is technically accurate matters less than the outcome, which is straightforward: the community moved, and it stayed moved.

The base game still has its own listings, and there was a second expansion after this one. The three of them have never shared a population, so before you buy anything, find out which one the people you want to play with are actually on. That sentence is the single most useful thing in this article.

Buying it, and the thing to check

Expansions to games of this age are sold in odd configurations. Sometimes as a standalone product. Sometimes bundled with the base game and the other expansion. Sometimes as part of a collection with a name that does not obviously map to any of them.

Two things to establish from a store listing before you pay:

Does it need the base game installed? This has varied across releases and bundles. Read what the listing says rather than assuming either way.

Which build does it end up as? Community servers frequently run a specific patch level, and installing something that lands on a different one leaves you unable to connect to the very servers you bought the game for. If you are buying this in order to join a particular group, ask that group what they run.

Installation is unremarkable. It is a small game from 2002 and it goes wherever you put it. On a current version of Windows you may need to run the installer with administrator rights and set a compatibility mode on the executable afterwards, which is normal for software of this age rather than a sign of anything wrong.

Getting in, in four steps

The process is short. It is only unfamiliar.

1. Install and launch once. Let it do its first-run setup and write its configuration before you try to join anything. Set your resolution while you are there, because a 4:3 game on a widescreen monitor will letterbox or stretch until you tell it what you want.

2. Find the console. This is a Quake III engine game, so it has one. Everything else in this guide depends on it. The plain tilde key does not always open the console in games from this family; there is generally a setting that can be passed at launch to enable it. Check the game's own configuration rather than guessing at a key.

3. Get an address. Not from the in-game internet browser, which is covered below. From a listing, or from the community you are joining.

4. Connect.

connect 203.0.113.44:12203

Address and port together, always. These games have never used the 27015 that Source games default to, hosts run several servers on one machine, and an address without a port connects to nothing at all.

Then favourite it. That step is not optional advice for a game of this age — it is the mechanism by which you will ever find the server again.

Why the internet browser is empty

Because the master server it asks is gone.

Games from this period found servers through a central service, and for most PC titles that service was GameSpy, which shut down in 2014. The in-game internet tab of every game that depended on it stopped working that day and nothing official replaced it.

Communities built their own replacements. Which of those are alive right now, and for which games, changes over time, which is why this guide points you at the shape of the problem rather than at a specific tool that might be abandoned by the time you read this.

The practical version: an empty internet tab is the expected result and not a fault on your machine. The route in is a group of people and an address and a favourites entry. Our communities directory is a starting point, and the piece on how Discord reshaped these groups explains why the information you need lives in a chat server now rather than on a forum that went offline a decade ago.

Round-based play is the thing to understand

There are respawn modes here and there are round-based modes, and they are barely the same game.

In a respawn mode you die, you wait a moment, you come back. Play is continuous and aggression is cheap, and the tempo is what you would expect from any deathmatch.

In a round-based mode, death removes you until the round ends. That changes everything about how people behave. Nobody rushes a corner. Everybody listens. A single player alive on one side against three can win by being patient, because the other three have to come and find them and every one of those approaches is a risk. Rounds go quiet, and then they go loud, and then they are over.

That structure is why this game held a community for two decades. It is also why turning up and playing it like a modern shooter results in you spending most of the evening watching.

Check which mode a server is on before you judge it. A listing that says a server is round-based is telling you something meaningful about the next hour of your life.

Servers are not running the stock game

Long-lived communities accumulate server-side modification, and twenty years is a lot of accumulation.

Expect custom administration systems, altered weapon behaviour, rules about which weapons are allowed, and map rotations built largely from community-made maps that never shipped with anything you bought. Some servers are close to the retail experience. Others have been tuned by the same three people since 2004 and are effectively their own game.

The rules are enforced socially as much as by code. Sniping from a spot the regulars consider unsporting will get you told off, and doing it twice will get you removed, and nobody is going to write you an explanation. Read the server's own description first. Where there is not one, ask in chat. People will answer, because a new player turning up to a twenty-year-old game is a welcome event rather than an intrusion.

The things that will actually kill you

Sound is your primary sensor. Footsteps and reloads and the direction a rifle fired from are the whole of the information the game gives you, and there is no minimap or spotting system substituting for it. Headphones, music off.

Weapons kill fast and there is no health regeneration. A fight is decided in under a second and the person who saw the other first almost always wins it. Positioning and patience beat aim here more than in nearly anything modern.

Movement is fast, because the engine underneath is Quake III. Combined with lethal weapons, that produces a specific rhythm: sprinting between pieces of cover, then complete stillness, then a very short and decisive exchange.

And leaning around cover is a real mechanic that new players never use. Find the keys for it in the controls menu and use them, because exposing a shoulder is a much better idea than exposing all of you.

When people are actually on

The most common way somebody decides a game is dead is by checking at the wrong time.

Populations at this stage of a game's life are scheduled rather than continuous. A server with nobody on it at three in the afternoon has thirty people on it at nine in the evening, in whatever country it is hosted in, and it has been doing that every week for years. The regulars know each other's names and half of them know each other's actual names.

So look twice, at two different hours, before concluding anything. And when you find the hour, write it down, because it will not change.

This also tells you how to behave when you get there. You are joining a group that has been playing together since before some of the people reading this were born. Being new is fine. Being new and loud is less fine.

The campaign, since you are buying it anyway

The expansion brings its own single-player content, and it is worth an evening on its own terms even if multiplayer is the reason you are here.

It moves through more of the war than the base game did, and it does the thing this series did better than anything else of its time — putting you inside a set piece as a participant rather than a spectator. Modern shooters have refined the technique and lost some of the impact along the way.

Play it before you go online. It teaches you the weapon handling and the sound design in an environment where being killed by somebody who has played the map for twenty years is not a factor.

Problems

Empty internet server tab. Expected. See above.

Connection refused or immediate disconnect. Version mismatch. Base game, this expansion, the other expansion and various community patches are all separate things, and everybody on a server needs the same one.

The game will not start on modern Windows. Administrator rights and a compatibility mode on the executable resolve most of it.

Mouse feels slippery. Turn acceleration off in Windows as well as in the game. Nothing about input handling was standardised when this shipped.

High ping on every server you find. These games have essentially no lag compensation by modern standards, and the difference between fifty and a hundred and fifty milliseconds is visible in every exchange. Filter for servers near you and mean it — tick rate explained covers why this matters more in old shooters than in new ones.

You get kicked and nobody says why. House rules. Read the description, ask in chat.

Where to go next

The rest of the family first: Allied Assault is the base game, and the later reboot era is an entirely different proposition that shares nothing with this beyond a name. The wider Medal of Honor listings collect what else is around.

Sideways, the people who made Allied Assault went on to make Call of Duty, which took this design somewhere much larger — Call of Duty 2 is where most of this scene ended up, and Call of Duty 4 is the last entry in that series built around dedicated servers and a browser full of community machines.

On the same engine family, Return to Castle Wolfenstein and the free Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory have outlived nearly everything from their generation, and Enemy Territory's class-and-objective structure is the best argument in the genre for playing something other than deathmatch.

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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: Spearhead servers are listed here, and every game on the site has its own hub. Player counts across every game are on the statistics page.