It was clear that it was a perfect example of a product that would benefit from this, and so we reached out and asked him if he was interested. Our philosophy back then was the same as it is today, which is that we wanted a platform that connected the people who created valuable content with the people that consumed it. When did the idea to start selling GMod on Steam come along? Was it Valve's idea or Garry's?ĮJ: It was the early days of getting Steam built, and it was pretty clear that Garry’s Mod had a big (and growing) audience. Paid mods are (still) a great source of ire among (some) players. It will be fun to watch what people build with the editor we’re releasing along with Half-Life: Alyx next year. Part of the process for us in shipping any of our games, but especially the single player ones, is letting go of them once they are released, and letting the community take bits and pieces of them in whatever direction they want to. What's it like to see the beloved characters from Half-Life and other Valve games being used with Garry's Mod for machinima and comics and videos?ĮJ: It’s pretty cool. Garry has always been about as good as it gets at picking the right direction to take his game. It’s a more difficult process than it sounds, because it really comes down to navigating a constant stream of feedback, but being limited in the amount of time to get everything done.

We’ve always been impressed by Garry’s ability to iterate on the game and roll feedback from his community into the game so well. That said, it would have been pretty hard to predict the Garry’s Mod of 2019 back in 2004. So, on one hand, it wasn’t surprising that Garry started in a similar place that we did. Even in the early days of development, most of the experiments that people were running had the physics engine at its core. It felt like Garry’s Mod grew right out of that community after Half-Life 2 shipped.ĭid anyone at Valve have any idea the Source engine could be used the way it is in Garry's Mod? Are there any tools in GMod that surprised you to see?ĮJ: A lot of the identity of the gameplay of Half-Life 2 centered around physics. While having the code for Half-Life 2 out in the wild before the game was finished wasn’t a super positive experience for the team finishing the game, it's pretty cool to see what the mod community could get working with that unfinished codebase. I do remember there being a pretty significant, and somewhat underground, mod community that was working off of the Half-Life 2 source code leak from 2003. What's it like being a citizen under the oppressive thumb of the Combine on a Garry's Mod roleplaying server? We went undercover to find out.Įrik Johnson: The specific point in time is a little tricky to pin down.

Garrys mod free 2019