A post on the Team Fortress 2 blog from Robin Walker tells us how to get how to get hold of the new TF2 Skyrim, Brink, Rage and Fallout items we mentioned yesterday. If you buy or pre-order the relevant game from Steam during Quakecon, they'll unlock automatically in Team Fortress 2.

Pre-order Skyrim to get the Heavy Nord helmet, pre-order Rage to get the Wingstick for the Engineer and buy Quake IV to get the Quake launcher for the Soldier. Owners of Fallout: New Vegas will get a Pip Boy for the Engineer and owners of Brink will pick up a hood and mask for the Sniper.

The deal ends with Quakecon, so you'll be sure to buy or pre-order the games you want before 10:00 PDT / 18:00 BST on August 8

In the same blog post, Robin Walker also talks about Team Fortress' debt to id Software and Quake in particular. Team Fortress started out as a Quake mod in 1996.

"At the time it only had five playable classes, no maps, and--believe it or not--no hats, writes Robin. "There wasn't even a concept of teams yet."

"That's right, we didn't actually get teams into a game called Team Fortress until a couple of releases after the initial launch. (The next time someone says their game isn't ready to release yet because they're missing a core feature, you can helpfully point this out to them.)"

"When Quake celebrated its 15th birthday this past June 22nd, we realized just how damn many of us at Valve are here because of id software. Some of us were inspired by their games' technical prowess, and others by getting their first taste of game development thanks to Doom and Quake's revolutionary approach to user-generated content."

Quakecon is happening right now in Dallas, Texas. To celebrate, you can play Brink for free this weekend and loads of id's game are on sale on Steam where you can also download and play Team Fortress 2 for free.