There were even more single player mods that made worthwhile contributions. Pirates, Vikings & Knights had a launchable parrot attack. There were dozens that made them sillier, sometimes with simple ideas like the Snark Mod's array of weapons based on the small, carnivorous roaches. Half-Life Rally never felt complete and was following in the tire tracks of what Quake Rally accomplished years earlier, but its eye for detail and the scale of its tracks opened up Goldsource in ways that previously seemed impossible.Īction Half-Life, The Opera and The Specialists all found ways to make multiplayer fights more stylish. Sven Co-Op was a bawdy mess, but its conversion of singleplayer maps to co-op multiplayer felt in some ways miraculous. There were so many mods doing interesting things. But there was a lot more to it, and that vibrant Half-Life community kept me entertained for years. When we talk about Half-Life and its mods today, we tend to condense the story down to a few better remembered releases like Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat and Natural Selection. So why have I kept the CD these past 14 years, while throwing out the majority of my physical game collection? It's a little like stumbling upon someone's fanart Tumblr that discomforting feeling when someone's enthusiasm outstrips their talent. What does work are the maps, which are mostly mediocre examples of the creativity that made the Half-Life community so vibrant. The CD still works, though many of its contents wouldn't be compatible with the Steam version of the game. But there's also a stranger set of materials, including a WinAmp skin, some screensavers, and editing tools for, er, Unreal games. There are mods, including beta 1 of Counter-Strike. There's a selection of maps, both single and multiplayer. There are the character models bragged about on the back, including Homer Simpson and Alian (from the movie Alian).
The text on the back of the jewel case begins, "A complete collection of addons for half life including single player levels, Death match levels, Team fortress classic levels, new config files, a superb collection of new skins/models, editors and much, much, more." After a long list of file names, it ends, "A must for any Half Life fan unleash the Power of Half Life!." In retrospect there are some pretty clear signs that it wasn't an official release. I bought it anyway (and it turns out you can now download the whole collection from ModDB). I'd spent enough time buying pirated Amiga 500 games from the Glasgow Barras to recognise a knockoff. A collection of Half-Life add-ons for sale in the most ordinary place.Įven then, with my limited understanding of game development and zero understanding of intellectual property, I knew something was off about it. Imagine my surprise when I walked into a gift ship while on holiday in an English seaside town and found the CD pictured above. It felt like I was crawling through obscure corners of the internet, at a time when the internet seemed to inhabit a strange corner of the real world. I hung out in IRC rooms, read map review sites and slowly downloaded files from Fileplanet. So in between rounds of laggy, 56k deathmatch with a friend, I turned to mods, custom maps, and anything else I could find which would allow me to wring more from my investment in Black Mesa. The problem I had - familiar to many today - was that Half-Life was finite and I had no idea if more would ever be made.
Hooked in the way only 14-year-olds can, with a pure, uncritical love. Total Converts is a new weekly column about mods, maps, models, and anything player-created which you can use to amend or append your games.īack in 1999, I became hooked on Half-Life.
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