Flattery will get you everwhere!
Here's some reference:
http://action.telefragged.com/oldnews.htm
The timelines are not available at the moment. I need to get off my butt and see if aq2world would like to host the old AQDT site for reference and downloading.
Anyway, minchiano has it mostly right.
ATeam made some Q2 mod named AQ2, many betas, teamplay added LATER, lotta bugs.
Around version 1.0c or so, HL came out and they wanted to move to HL and make AHL. They didn't like how strafejumping started making the game not how they envisioned it. So it kind of got abandoned. They had someone working on a 1.1 version that never got released. At the same time, people from clan [GENO] got tired of the bugs and reverse-engineered AQ2. They called it Axshun Quake 2.
They also started dinking with the weapon balance a bit, too, since it was the only actively maintained bit of AQ2. A-Team and GENO had a bit of a schism in the community, then worked things out. GENO's code became AQ2 1.5, 1.51, 1.52, and the unreleased 1.53. GENO did the work under the direction of the A-Team members, and also released the code. That's why there are so many variants of AQ2.
The first real variant was AQ:PG BUND's Edition. I think he was a German and added those damned .WAV playback commands for players. This is the most-used branch where AQ:TNG came from, basically. AQ:ETE, on the other hand, came from the "pure" 1.52 branch.
By that time GENO moved on and A-Team was working on AHL so the community did whatever. Once Q2 was GPL'ed people wanted a standalone AQ2 version. I guess some people made them. Always the problem was that all the AQ2 maps used baseq2 media so you could never have a true "standalone" AQ2 unless someone replaced all the baseq2 textures. There used to be some projects (Q2 Evolution?) with texture replacement as part of the project, but I am not aware they ever came to fruition.
The main guy who did CS worked on AQ2 for a bit and before that did Navy Seals Quake 1, probably the first "realism" mod. AQ2 was the first realism mod that was massively popular as a genre. One of the guys who ran the old Action Quake Map Depot, CLIFFE, also worked on CS with that guy. I forget his name. Minh something.
The only remaining active member of the A-Team is Ace12GA over on the
www.aq2zone.com forums. Suislide is still around but he is adamant about never developing or improving AQ2 or updating the website, so he's pretty much worthless. A-Team went on to release Action Unreal Tournament and AUT2K4 as well. Almost had a deal with Epic to make a game, but it fell through. Ah well.
I can go into more detail, certainly, but that's just a random rundown for you. AQ2 morphed into something most of the original creators did not like due to the bunnyhopping strafejumpers. However, it's that aspect, the speed of the game, that actually made it massively popular. Ironic.
