When The Gary Module came out in 2004, it was just a Mod for Half-Life 2 using Valve's Source engine. In the beginning, it was just a simple sandbox, and after the player character refreshed on the spawn point, he could fiddle with the materials called up in the game file at will. Later, Valve launched a standalone version of The Gary Mod, turning a Valve game mod into a Valve-released game, and later, it had its own mod.
▲ "Gary Module" is named after the producer Garry Newman, generally referred to as GMod
The "Morbus" of the survival fear class, the hide-and-seek mode "Prop Hunt", the "Bandit Town Spy Movie" referred to as "TTT" and many other "Gary Mods" mods have allowed many players to be exposed to the now common game types for the first time, including asymmetric multiplayer games and social reasoning games. Today, there have been many successful titles in these genres, such as Among Us and Propnight, which are good examples, but without The Gary Mod, they probably wouldn't have existed.
Bandit Town Spy Movie
Bandit Town Spy Movie (TTT) is one of the most popular mods in Gary Mod. It first appeared in 2009 and is set in a spoof version of the counter-Strike world, where a group of terrorists has a few traitors in the middle, and the terrorists must find the traitors and eliminate them, while the traitors quietly kill the other terrorists to win.
Each player is assigned a different identity: traitor, ordinary terrorist or detective. Detectives have to find traitors, while ordinary terrorists just need to live until the end of the game. This setting is not entirely original, and apparently borrows from the party game "Mafia" (also called "Werewolf") designed by Professor Dimitry Davidoff, in which the player has to deduce the identity of the killer before it is too late.
Bandits isn't even the first game of its kind on Steam. Murder Ship, with a similar setting, predates it three years, and like Gary's Mod, it's made with the Source engine. Since "Bandit Town Spy Movie" is not an original concept, why is it on fire? Why did it inspire so many subsequent works? To some extent, this is a story about "the time and place to be favorable".
In the early 2010s, live game videos became popular on YouTube. In part, this is because mcNs such as Machinima and Fullscreen appeared, and these institutions that manage (and often mismanage) a large number of creators have become a major thrust of this type of video. Tobuscus was still one of the most popular game channels, Smosh Games had just been established, Teeth's Rooster LetsPlay channel had just started, Twitch had been open for almost a year, and it was still focusing on video games, not as it is now.
▲ SeaNanners' first "Bandit Town Spy Movie" video
After seeing the popularity of the videos related to "Gary Module", some anchors and Up owners began to make videos of "Bandit Town Spy Movies", which gave this Mod unprecedented attention. Mod author Bad King Urgrain noticed at the time that the Mod "suddenly spiked in traffic." In the case of SeaNanners, the uprun owner of the very popular "Gehry Module", his "Bandit Town Spy" video has more than 1 million views, and his first related video uploaded in August 2012 has been played 3.36 million times.
Bandit Spy wasn't the pioneer of social reasoning games, but it definitely paved the way for those who came after. Among Us is one of the beneficiaries. In Among Us, players complete various missions on the space station and try to find impostors. Like Bandit Spy, Among Us started with only a handful of fans, and it wasn't until 2020, when game streamers took a fancy to the game, that a large audience became a player.
During that year, many prominent Twitch streamers and politicians played the game; Among Us videos were played 13 billion times on Tik Tok; Twitch Rivals, a Twitch streamer, also had a project for the game.
Prop Hunt
▲ This is an ordinary box... Do you?
But "Bandit Town" isn't the first Mod in Gary Mod to be a source of inspiration for other games — an honor that belongs to Prop Hunt. In this mod, one team of players disguises themselves as inanimate objects, and the other team of players seeks them out. This model first appeared in Counter-Strike: Origins, and only entered the Gary Mod in 2012. Just like "Bandit Town Spy Movie", the popularity of this Mod soared due to the videos of Up lords such as SeaNnaners.
Several games were inspired by Prop Hunt, and many games have had similar modes or mods on them. On PC, Midnight Ghost Hunt and Propnight combine "Prop Hunt" with survival horror. Console players may be more familiar with Call of Duty's hide-and-seek mode, which in English is called "Prop Hunt." Every Call of Duty has had a hide-and-seek mode since 2017, and while Call of Duty: Vanguard is an exception for the time being, there are already signs that hide-and-seek will return in the future.
Disease
Another Mod that has influenced the multiplayer landscape is Morbus. It was originally released in 2012, like "Prop Hunt" and "Bandit Spy Movie", and it also gained a large number of fans because of the promotion of the game's anchor and Up owner. Morbus is an asymmetric multiplayer game set in a simple setting: there is an alien among a group of humans, and humans have to find it and kill it before they kill everyone. This is very similar to the mechanics of "Bandit Town Spy Movie", the main difference is that aliens can turn other human players into aliens.
Since the release of Morbus, the number of asymmetric multiplayer horror games has exploded, including Black Friday, Last Year, and White Noise 2, among others. However, the hottest of these games is "Dawn Kill", which has been running from 2016 to the present, and this game also has a number of DLC characters in horror movies, such as ghostfaces in "Scream" and human skin faces in "Texas Chainsaw Killer". In addition, an asymmetric multiplayer game based on Texas Chainsaw Killer is also in development.
The Gary Module proves that with the right tools, amateur developers can create trendsetting works. "Gangster Spy", "Morbus" and "Prop Hunt" are all created by enthusiastic players who want to make something new, and their enthusiasm is also passed on to players who play Mod, as well as viewers who watch videos on YouTube.
Many of the games inspired by these Mods have become inspiration for many more. For example, due to the popularity of Among Us, a slew of social reasoning games set in space has emerged on Steam.
But if it weren't for a little Mod, none of these dark horses in the gaming world would have appeared, don't you think it's funny?
Translation 丨 Night Cat
Edited by 丨 Tony
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