There's a fun holiday surprise over on the Garry's Mod website called the 12 Days of Garry's Mod. The page displays some amazing Garry's Mod creations, like "Half-Life: Full Life Consequences"—a charmingly awful story written by a Fanfiction.net author named squirrelking and turned into a hilarious and unforgettable short film by YouTuber Djy1991.

You'll also see Ross Scott's comedy series Civil Protection, moody sci-fi drama Shelf-Life Part 1 and Part 2, the gorgeously atmospheric 40-minute long film Haven, and several other notable machinima highlights, all made with Garry's Mod, the physics sandbox created by Garry Newman and Facepunch Studios way back in 2004.

It must have been difficult narrowing the selection down to just a dozen features, considering Garry's Mod has been around for 15 years now. Along the way from free sandbox mod for Half-Life 2 to standalone game on Steam, it's sold millions of copies, it's been used to make thousands of videos and webcomics, and has hundreds of popular mods and gamemodes created by users, like Prop Hunt, Jailbreak, Trouble in Terrorist Town, and more.

The 15 year anniversary is the perfect time to chat about the strange legacy of Garry's Mod, so I fired over some questions via email both to Garry's Mod creator Garry Newman and Valve's Erik Johnson. Here's what they had to say.

Origin stories

PC Gamer: How did you come up with the name?

Garry Newman: You know, I think I kind of actually stole the name, it wasn’t my idea to name stuff after myself. At the time there was another mod called JBMod, made by a guy that went by "jb55." So it made sense that my take on that mod would be called Garry’s Mod—because I went by the name "garry". I probably wouldn’t have named it called Garry’s Mod if I knew where it would end up.

Garry's Mod has been in the top 10-20 games on Steam for as long as I can remember. Tens of thousands still play it every day, but how are sales nowadays?

GN: It sells about 1.5m copies a year, and it’s sold just over 15m copies total. Which is kind of pleasing since it’s also 15 years old. Plus you know, money.

Do you recall when Valve first became aware of Garry's Mod? What were your first thoughts about it?

Erik Johnson: The specific point in time is a little tricky to pin down. 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. 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. It felt like Garry’s Mod grew right out of that community after Half-Life 2 shipped.

Did 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?

EJ: A lot of the identity of the gameplay of Half-Life 2 centered around physics. Even in the early days of development, most of the experiments that people were running had the physics engine at its core. So, on one hand, it wasn’t surprising that Garry started in a similar place that we did. That said, it would have been pretty hard to predict the Garry’s Mod of 2019 back in 2004.

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. 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. Garry has always been about as good as it gets at picking the right direction to take his game.

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?

EJ: It’s pretty cool. 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. It will be fun to watch what people build with the editor we’re releasing along with Half-Life: Alyx next year.

Pay to play

Paid mods are (still) a great source of ire among (some) players. When did the idea to start selling GMod on Steam come along? Was it Valve's idea or Garry's?

EJ: It was the early days of getting Steam built, and it was pretty clear that Garry’s Mod had a big (and growing) audience. 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. 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.

Garry being able starting at building a product that he thought people would like, to where he is today, is the kind of story we’re always trying to make happen. Reducing the friction between the creator of interesting content and the consumer of it has a number of really positive side effects. It’s been cool to see it happen over the past 15 years for Garry and his team.

GN: It was about a year before we started selling it. I was emailing [Valve] to ask about something else and they mentioned that they think it’d sell well. I was like, yeah right, what a dumb idea, it’s already free—why would anyone pay for it? 

As time went by and it kept getting more popular, I thought about things I’d like to reprogram, stuff I’d like to improve and innovate on. I couldn’t justify spending a decent amount of time doing this stuff. Then it clicked that if we were going to sell the new version it could justify spending more time on it and justify people buying it rather than sticking with the free version. So then I had to get on my hands and knees and send an email to Valve where I explained that it wasn’t a dumb idea and can we do it please.

Was the negative reaction [to selling Garry's Mod] worse than you thought it might be, or not as bad?

GN: I can’t remember much of it—it was actually one of the most embarrassing things that has ever happened to me. We’d been working on it in secret for a few months and the community were getting quite worried. They had got used to weekly updates before that. So we decided to announce that we were going to be on Steam and everything was going to be okay. This wasn’t like announcing that you’re gonna be on Steam nowadays, this was when there were about 3 games on Steam. This was a big deal and blew up everywhere.

Then the next morning I woke up to an email from Valve, saying something like "It’s customary to wait until the agreements are signed before announcing." So I’m thinking, fuck, I’ve announced it’s going to be on Steam and now I’ve pissed off Valve—so it’s not going to be on Steam. It took me a couple of weeks to recover from that. I couldn’t enjoy any of the community happiness, I felt like a right knob head. 

How did you settle on the $10 price? After 15 years (sales aside) why is it still $10?

GN: I don’t think I ever contemplated charging more. It was free and now it’s not, the price had to be low enough to people that they’d just be like... yeah sure why not. It’s important to remember that before Steam pretty much no-one bought games on the PC. Everything was pirated. And while Garry’s Mod was a multiplayer game—which offered some protection from piracy—it could be played single player too. It had to be cheap and easy enough to stop people pirating it.

Apart from having money from sales, how did selling GMod change its development?

GN: I think Garry’s Mod would have died 15 years ago if we didn’t sell it. It gave us a reason to continue development. Besides that Steam obviously allowed us to update the game much easier. Previously when it was free you’d download a zip file from my website with the new version in. This would limit the frequency of the updates.

Back then, because Steam was in its infancy, they didn’t have an automated update system. I had to upload the new builds to an FTP and email Valve to make them live. Because of the time difference this could mean that a patch could go out at 4 am my time, while I was in bed. If there was a bug in it I’d be in a lot of trouble when I woke up. But again because of the time difference I wouldn’t be able to get a patch out until Valve were back at their desks the next day.

Strike a pose

What do most players do in Garry's Mod these days? Do you know what the most popular mode or mod for it is? When is the last time you played it yourself?

GN: The roleplay gamemodes are still a huge thing, but that in itself can encompass a thousand other sub gamemodes. Between Facepunch, Rust, two kids and trying to watch 10 hours of TV every day—I don’t have much time to play nowadays. I used to feel bad about that, like a great chair maker that doesn’t like to sit on chairs. But I think it’s just that I enjoy making them a whole lot more than playing them.

Being able to pose ragdolls made Garry's mod a great tool for comics, videos, and machinima. How did that function first come about?  

GN: A total accident. I was trying to pose ragdolls, but not by freezing their joints. I was trying to make it so they would move like the atmosphere was really thick, so they’d stay in place. The physics in Source back then weren’t as stable as they are now. You could really easily cause a crash by giving it numbers that it wasn’t expecting. I used the wrong values and it locked one of their bones in place. I made a quick pose—I think it was Kleiner giving birth. I was really excited—I immediately knew the fun everyone was going to have with this.

What's the biggest requested feature you get from Garry's Mod players?

GN: The biggest thing, by about a million miles is the "Played with Garry" achievement. It’s one of the hardest achievements to get on Steam—for obvious reasons.

Valve has hired a number of people who mod their games. Am I remembering correctly that you tried to get a job with Valve at one point?

GN: Yeah I applied for a job, I think it was before Garry’s Mod went on sale. Or might have been just after. Around that time anyway. I had a phone interview and I don’t think it took them long to realise that I didn’t know shit. I didn’t get offered a position. In retrospect it’s a good thing. Helk (Rust lead) had an interview with them too, he made it all the way to an in-office interview. They had him writing out code on a whiteboard. I can’t even code without Google—so I wouldn’t stand a chance at that.

Have you hired any people at Facepunch based on mods they've made in Garry's Mod?

GN: No, it wasn’t something we were prepared for, as a company, back then. It’s something we should have been doing. I see the stuff the Tower Unite guys have managed to do after their Gmod Tower gamemodes and kick myself. It’s a great thing for them, to go out and make their own game but in an ideal world we could have made it good for all of us.

Future tense

Garry's Mod is still being updated, but how often do you personally still work on Garry's Mod?

GN: I haven’t personally worked on it for about three years. Rubat and Willox have done a really good job of taking it off my plate. I found that it got to a place where anything I tried to change I got yelled at by the community for breaking something else. So I felt like it’s better to just maintain it, to keep it ticking over so the modders can do their thing. Or risk breaking 15 years worth of content.

What's the Garry's mod mod that hasn't happened yet, but you really wanted to happen?

GN: There’s actually a ton of things I want to do, but I don’t like to talk about it too much. If you talk about stuff you want to do you don’t end up doing it, because you feel like you already did it. You get all the positive feedback from it. Plus I don’t want to pull a Peter Molyneux and talk about a bunch of stuff that gets people excited, but let them all down when the idea eventually has to collide with reality.

What's the status of S&box, which sounds like a Garry's Mod for Unreal Engine 4. The last devblog was in 2018.

GN: We did a lot of experimentation with s&box on UE4. It’s actually quite far along but we decided to pause it for now. We’re hoping you’ll hear more about it next year—if not it’s probably dead forever.

Will Garry's Mod still be around in another 15 years? What will it look like then?

GN: In 15 years I’ll be 52. An old man. We’ll have the iPhone 35, Steam’s friend list will be its own operating system and my son will be the age I was when I first made GMod. It’s possible it might be renamed Alex’s Mod and is primarily used to watch exploited/spoilt american kids play with toys in their massive Youtube house. But who knows. We’ll keep updating as long as people keep playing. Maybe we’ll do a sequel.

Back in 2015, the announcement that Star Wars: Battlefront would launch with skill-based matchmaking instead of a server browser felt newsworthy. Today, a game releasing without custom server support is just business as usual. Gradually, over the last 10 years, the server browser has fallen out of fashion. Battlefield 5 is perhaps the only game I've played this year that offers one, and it's a shadow of what was once a major feature of of the series. With only limited configuration options, it exists simply as lip service to player expectations.

You just need to look at Team Fortress 2's menu to see how much things have changed. Where once the server browser was front-and-centre, now it's buried below a suite of matchmaking options.

Perhaps this sidelining of custom servers was inevitable. After all, it's harder to sell map packs when players can download an endless stream of player-made alternatives. And it's hard to make players care about your persistent progression system if player-run servers can offer decentralised leaderboards. The systems designed to keep players coming back into multiplayer—many of which were popularised in the early 2010s in response to the perceived threat of pre-owned sales of console games—don't work if players have all the control.

That's not to say matchmaking is bad. There are obvious benefits to matching players based on their level of skill. It's easier for new players to get to grips with a game, for one, but also gives those with more experience a more interesting challenge. Stomping newbies may be fun for a while, but it's destructive to the long term health of a game.

Matchmaking also lets developers tailor playlists based on the size of the playerbase. It's a relatively benign way to keep a game feeling populated, even after its initial popularity has waned.

The downside, for me at least, is that matchmaking misses out on a key component of what felt like such an important part of the PC gaming ecosystem throughout the '90s and '00s.

Mod squad

I took an unintended break from PC gaming in the early 2000s, during a period when I could only afford a laptop that threatened to go nuclear if I so much as looked at C&C Generals. When I returned around 2007, I had almost a decade of 3D gaming to catch up on. In doing so, I fell in love with the wild and chaotic world of first-person multiplayer shooters.

I arrived late, but it didn't matter—the party was still raging. The FPS scene was a hotbed of creativity, as modders and mappers filled the most popular games of the day with strange, delightful curios. As someone who'd spent the late-'90s sampling every Tiberian Sun mod I could get my hands on, it was beautiful to see, and it was all made easy thanks to PC gaming's support for custom servers.

The server browser became a shop window into an infinite number of candy stores, promising everything from the mundane—24/7 de_dust—to the sublime. Race maps. Prop hunt. Mario Kart. Instagib. Achievement farming. RP. Laser death cat. A new map, a new mode, a new chance to see something you'd never seen before, and, sometimes, would never see again. Just double-click on a map you'd never heard of before and you'd be transported into a brand new world.

I regularly dipped into a Half-Life 2: Deathmatch server that disabled everything but the Gravity Gun—forcing players to fling toilets, radiators and circular saws at each other. I spent more time than I care to admit playing TF2 in an instant respawn server that featured special power-ups, no time limit, and a set of rules that all-but-insured nobody would ever complete the objective. I once wasted an afternoon in GMod as a watermelon, rolling around a race course with other players. I never found that server again, but I didn't really need to. Ephemeral weirdness was part of the charm.

To be clear, PC gaming isn't any less weird or wonderful in 2019. The chaos is still here, and still just as glorious, but now it's found in Minecraft mini-game servers and through GTA5's FiveM mod. It's found on the front page of Itch.io, or as a standalone project from the makers of some beloved mod. In some respects there's less need than ever for custom servers, because—also this decade—game making tools became more widely available and easier to use. The fact that creators can more easily make their own game rather than relying on blockbuster releases as the base for their creativity is ultimately a net positive.

Curtains up

But if custom server mods where what tempted me into exploring a game, it was the personalities of my favourite servers that kept me coming back. It was the specific map selection, or the perfect combination of settings, or just the atmosphere created by the regulars. It was dropping into a favourite TF2 server and knowing that sometimes everybody in it would be duelling with the Heavy's finger emote—with bans immediately issued to anybody who dared shoot an actual gun.

Player-run servers are a hangout. You join—often mid-way through a match—and play around until you've had enough. The stakes can be as high or as low as the server's culture dictates. You have your regulars, but also a rolling procession of transient visitors that help keep the place feel active—like tourists stopping in at a local pub. And, yes, servers can be toxic or hostile or just generally not worth your time, but it always feels special to discover one that you want to come back to.

Matchmaking, meanwhile, is a performance. You queue up, load in and you're on—playing with unknown people to complete an objective and win the match. If something out of the ordinary happens—if a dance party breaks out in a Destiny 2 survival match—it's almost always because something has already gone wrong (usually half of your team deciding to peace out mid-round).

There are pros and cons to both methods, but I think it's a shame just how completely the pendulum has swung in favour of matchmaking. There are games that experiment with both; that separate out custom servers and matchmaking, much like the current version of Team Fortress 2—which, at its best, is still incredibly weird. And there are still games that fully embrace the spirit of '00s multiplayer shooters, like Warsow or Xonotic—both free and worth checking out. But these feel like the exception rather than the rule, and, inevitably, that's reflected in the number of players populating their servers.

Instead, the very idea of decentralised communities has migrated out of individual games and become broader and more freeform. Maybe I just need to find a good Discord server instead.

Garry's Mod turns 15 this month, marking a decade and a half of untrammelled Source Engine chaos. According to a press release issued by Facepunch Studios today, 233 million baddies have been killed, 124 million goodies have been killed, 88 million innocent bystanders have been killed, and 34 million balls have been eaten. That's a lot of things happening across a 15 year time span.

Initially released as a Half-Life 2 mod in 2004, the sandbox game released as its own title in late 2006. Since then the game has reportedly sold more than 15 million copies. To celebrate the milestone, Facepunch Studios has made the game free-to-try until tomorrow. At the time of writing, you've got around 19 hours left to give it a go.

Meanwhile, all of Facepunch Studios' games are 33 percent off on Steam. The best known among these is Rust, but you can also pick up Chippy and Clatter at a discount. 

If you own Rust, Gmod's Tool Gun hammer is now available to redeem within the month, allowing you to "repair and upgrade [your] structures with a sprinkling of nostalgia (and advanced science)". 

I used to reinstall Team Fortress 2 every year for Halloween, dressing up in seasonal cosmetics to fight giant enemies like the Horseless Headless Horsemann, Monoculus, and Merasmus, or to just drive around in karts. Those events continue, and Scream Fortress 11 is live right now. As is the case in recent years it's more of a showcase for player-made creations, with two community maps and a host of community-created cosmetics.

Those maps are a king of the hill map called Laughter, and a payload map called Precipice. The cosmetics are bundled in a collection called Spooky Spoils which includes a bird head for the Engineer, a shark head for the Pyro, and a two-piece velociraptor costume for the Scout. The Soul Gargoyle from previous years returns as well.

Scream Fortress 11 continues through November 7, and you can find Halloween matches to join under the Special Events category of the Casual section.

Team Fortress 2's in-game economy went haywire last week when a bug showered players with rare, Unusual quality hats. Valve fixed the bug the following day and trade-locked the affected hats, stopping anyone profiting from the glitch—but it's now relented, and says players can trade one of the hats they obtained via the bug.

The hats came from older item crates: for a short window, opening one such crate guaranteed you an Unusual hat, which are the most sought-after items in TF2. On investigation, Valve said that a "small number of accounts acquired these hats, and a smaller portion of those accounts acquired an exceedingly large number of them" in the aftermath.

It has ruled that players can trade the first bugged hat added to their account. The rest will be permanently trade-locked. If you have more than one, you can refund the cost of the hats, or the crates or keys you got them from. Refunds will go live in "about a week", Valve said yesterday. The number of hats made tradeable represents roughly a month's worth of Unusuals.

Some players actually deleted the hats because they were worried they'd done something wrong by opening a bugged crate, Valve said. "While we appreciate the concern, you didn't do anything wrong, so hats from bugged crates deleted before the tradable date will be restored to your accounts with the same restrictions described above.

"We apologize for the inconvenience of this incident, and we’ve added safeguards to prevent incidents like this in the future," it added.

An influx of rare items is playing havoc with Team Fortress 2's economy. Unusual quality items are appearing in a high number of crates and the marketplace is starting to be flooded with them, driving down their price. Today, a warning went up on the unofficial Team Fortress 2 subreddit telling players to stop trading items until the glitch is fixed. 

"There have been numerous reports, and sightings in the wild, of an apparent serious economy flaw that is resulting in the guaranteed uncratings of Unusual quality items," wickedplayer494 wrote. "As a result, demand for certain types of crates believed to be affected has soared, and supplies of Unusual quality items are flash flooding the market."

Wickedplayer warns that unsanctioned real-money trades taking place outside of Valve's official Community Market are especially high risk at the moment, though dabbling in any grey market comes with lots of risks.

While Valve is yet to confirm the glitch, its impact is already being felt by the 12-year-old game's still lively economy. A quick hop over to the Community Market shows the significant increase in Unusual items. Good news for people hoping to get a sweet hat they've never been able to afford, but probably less so for people who treat Steam trading like a second job.

Take a look at the Unusual Birdcage above. It's a level 10 hat that's exactly what it sounds like, a birdcage you can plonk over your head. Over the last month, it's sold for anything between $19 to $110. Sales are often all over the place as people who don't know the value of the item chuck them in the marketplace for a quick buck, but today saw it hit a new low, going below $4. So far, 89 of these hats have been sold just today, compared to 20 across the last month.

With players and presumably less scrupulous sorts getting wind of this exploitable glitch, Team Fortress 2 has seen an explosion in concurrent players. It's been teetering around 60,000 players or just below, but today saw that leap to more than 90,000. People love their hats. And a fat Steam balance. You can see the most recent numbers at SteamDB.

Even if Valve manages to fix things today, it's unlikely the Community Market will recover quickly, if at all, with all these additional and once incredibly rare items floating around. Perhaps more drastic measures will have to be taken, but I expect there will be a lot of pissed off people if their sales get reversed.

A knife is an embarassing backstab, located deep behind enemy lines, to demonstrate just how much better you are at a particular shooter than your helpless prey. A knife is an aesthetic signifier, letting the rest of the party in an RPG understand that you'll be the one skulking around in the shadows scoring crits with each ambush. A knife is a backup hail mary when the durability bar reaches zero. A knife is the moment a Street Fighter match against Cody gets serious. A knife is the weapon you only see in cutaway stealth-kill animations, as Ezio or Talion demonstrate the many ways to remove a brain from a body.

Point being, knives are perhaps the most dynamic armament in video games. Assault rifles and rocket launchers essentially work the exact same way in most games, but knives can either be a last resort or the scariest thing in the world depending on the universe you're playing in. That's more than enough justification to celebrate 10 of the best knives in gaming history.

Some quick housekeeping: Daggers are knives. Shivs are also knives. When in doubt on the sword/knife dichotomy, we generally aired on the side of the language in the name itself. (See: Monster Hunter World's fairly hefty "Hunter's Knife.") If you want to get into an ontological argument about what should and shouldn't be considered a knife, please meet me in the comments below, where we can hash things out or stage a dramatic switchblade fight on a bridge.

Dual Hidden Blades - Assassin's Creed 2

With the first Assassin's Creed, the big stunners were the crowd tech, the climbing system, and the undeniable cool factor of jumping off a ledge onto a guard with a wrist blade shiv to the neck. Assassin's Creed 2 flirted with edgelord territory by letting you wield not just one but two wrist blades, but in the end it just worked, perfecting the series' defining weapon. It's just such a simple pleasure, walking between two guards and giving them a simultaneous neck tickle. 

Butterfly Knife - Team Fortress 2 

This is the single reason your Team Fortress comps constantly get stuffed with too many Spies. Simply put, there are few better sensations in FPS than the disguise/backstab tandem. It's worth it, even if you only pull it off once every three billion tries. 

Twin Daggers - Dead Cells

The first time Dead Cells truly resonated with me was when I picked up my first set of Twin Daggers, which let me slice-and-dice through the Toxic Sewers with unbelievable ease, in a way that seemed natural with the rest of the game's incredible napalm-inked Blade Runner aesthetic. I can't be the only one, right? 

Hunter's Knife - Monster Hunter World

You could set off into the jungle with heavy bowguns, or arcane charge swords, or claymores big enough to make Cloud Strife himself blush. Or, you could be a real mensch, and take on the wilds with nothing more than a meaty knife and an iron shield. Monster Hunter is at its most rewarding when you fell a titanic-sized beastie with weaponry you'd expect from a shambling corpse in Dark Souls' Lower Undead Burg. 

Kitchen Knife - Dead By Daylight

Have you ever wanted to stalk a bunch of idiot high schoolers through a pitch-dark forest? Well, you should maybe talk to a professional about that. But in the meantime, get your kicks in Dead By Daylight, which lets you track down your friends as the unstoppable killing machine Michael Myers, armed with nothing more than his trademark kitchen knife. Dead By Daylight's horror multiplayer sure did cash in on some base cultural pleasures. 

Finkle's Skinner - World of Warcraft

Finkle's Skinner was a top-tier dagger in Vanilla World of Warcraft for rogues who hadn't quite cracked Molten Core or other 40-man raids yet. You pull it off The Beast in Upper Blackrock Spire, and you're a happy camper who can do serious damage to any unsuspecting Priest in Warsong Gulch. But that's only one part of the equation, because the Skinner also boosted your Skinning ability by 10 points, which could put you over the cap if you're already at a max 300/300. At that game-breaking 310/300 Skinning, you're officially one of the few people on the Warcraft server capable of harvesting the pelts of some of the nastiest beasties in the game, thereby allowing you to supply ingredients for some extremely demanding leather armor recipes. Killing efficiency, and good old-fashioned mercantilism. We love to see it. 

Throwing Knife - Destiny (series)

One of the stranger suspensions of disbelief necessary to enjoy video games is the tacit understanding that knives, in first-person shooters, are more dangerous than any ammunition you're pumping out. Nowhere is this more pronounced than Destiny, which outfits players with a whole universe of high-tech artillery, only for it to be outdone by the Gunslinger's Throwing Knife. Handcannons? Assault rifles? Who cares. Put this knife on someone's head, and you're in real business. 

Combat Knife - Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

Big ups to Call of Duty for pioneering one of the greatest advancements in knife key-binding and button-mapping. Swing around a corner, see your screen fill with the body of someone on the other team, and either click in the right stick or tap E for an instant kill. No degenerate mouse-wheel scrolling, no wasted nanoseconds trying to remember what number you put your sole melee weapon on—just an instant hyperlink to death. It's been 12 years, and we're still feeling the reverberations.

Cosmic Knife - Fallout: New Vegas

If you're brave enough to venture into the demented Sierra Madre Casino in Fallout: New Vegas, it seems only fair that you ought to be rewarded with a really mean kitchen knife. The player-character loots the Cosmic Knife off of the ghost people who stalk the former resort's villa, and it is said that they're so sharp they can cut your thumb clean off if you're not paying enough attention. Naturally, these bad boys offer a unique V.A.T.S. Back Slash attack, which will keep you efficiently farming the wasteland for years to come. 

Shadowflame Knife - Terraria

It's a knife that shoots other knives! Seriously! The Shadowflame Knife costs no mana, no ammunition, and it causes a mini hellstorm of purple, heat-seeking blades that will clear out any of Terraria's tricky 2D deathtraps in a hurry. All you gotta do is survive a Goblin Invasion and loot the knife off the enemies. Easy enough! ...Right? 

Data Knife - Titanfall 2

An absolutely ridiculous knife used for stabbing computers, not people. The Data Knife has to have the coolest hacking animation in games, and wins major points for originality. You could also use it in multiplayer in Titanfall 1 and 2, but there's something special about the absurdity of using this knife approximately three times in the entire campaign, when a computer needs hackin'.

Mehrune's Razor - The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion

It's the coveted blade of the Dark Brotherhood, and its Daedric Banishing magic gives you a small chance (based on your Luck) of instantly killing your target and sucking out their souls. It even tracks how many souls you've stolen as a grim reminder of what an unrepentant killer you are. Even when it doesn't banish it does good damage, has a disintegrate armor effect, and has a slightly longer reach than any other dagger in Oblivion. Plus, it's just a sweet-lookin' knife.

Mehrune's Razor shows up in Skyrim, too: here's a bonus video of someone's 120th attempt to one-hit kill Alduin using it. 

Knife - Counter-Strike (Series)

The ultimate disrespect. For a series that deserves its reputation as the premiere tactical shooter, there is simply nothing more euphoric than slipping behind an idiot with an AWP and putting a liquid-blue, weed leaf-stamped blade through their skull. (Skins have gotten weird, you can't blame me.) There are other, utility-minded uses for the knife in Counter-Strike—it lets you run faster, for one—but everyone who's ever been to a LAN Cafe knows that the game's primary melee weapon is reserved mostly for psychological warfare. Bonus points, also, for its iconic idle animation.

Update: The Steam page for XYK's Team Fortress 2008 mod has been pulled. As reported by Eurogamer, a screenshot from the project's Discord (also now shuttered) suggests Valve could not be convinced at this stage that the TF-2008 team has created a mod for the original game, and is "not just repurposing leaked code". 

As also reported by EG, it appears creator XYK left the project's Discord server with a distasteful parting comment. Our original story follows.  

Original story:Turn back time with XYK's Team Fortress 2008—a TF2 throwback mod that "reverts the game back to its 2008 version".

Due on Steam on January 11, 2019, its creator says the SourceMod is an alternative to Valve's esteemed Team Fortress 2 and is designed for "those who prefer the game before most of the later updates, and want the simpler old interface."

As reported by Eurogamer, Valve has given the TF-2008 team permission to list the mod on Steam—but did ask that the original idea be altered beforehand. It seems XYK et al happily complied. 

"We payed the Steam Direct fee, and are now working on an official Steam release," says XYK on this Facepunch forum. "The Steam team approved of me generating beta CD keys, but we're still waiting on Valve to approve the store page." 

XYK follows that with an update: "Valve has gotten back with us, and notified us of some things that needed to be changed. We have done as they recommended, and are now waiting again, on the store page review."

Here's a trailer: 

And here's some screens: 

Not much else is known about Team Fortress 2008, but you can follow its progress via its Steam page. Again, all going well, it's due January 11, 2019. 

If you have the time and hard drive space, you can squeeze a huge amount of free entertainment out of your Steam client. With that in mind we've organised the best free and free-to-play games together into one list. The free games section consists of games that contain no microtransactions. You might be able to buy extra episodes or DLC packs, but you'll get the full core experience for your download in this category.

The free-to-play section contains games that are supported by in-game microtransactions. We've considered the fairness of the in-game stores when selecting these games, and believe you can get a lot of fun out of them before you put in credit card details. We'll update the list over time as we discover more gems hidden away in the Steam store.

FREE GAMES

Alien Swarm

Link: Steam

Up to four players fight through space stations overrun with hordes of alien bugs. Beating missions earns you weapons and equipment that let you specialise your marine. Expect almost Starship Troopers scale hordes at points, as the AI director tries to push your team to the brink of death.

Alien Swarm is a forgotten Valve experiment, but it's perfectly good fun in co-op. The complete game code and mod tools are available, but the community never produced enough to sustain the game beyond its opening months. It's still worth downloading the game with some friends and enjoying what's there though.

A Raven Monologue

Link: Steam

A beautifully drawn experimental short story about a mute raven trying to interact with his townsfolk. The project is described as an attempt "to tell stories or to communicate an experience using a constrained work of interactive art." It's quick, simple to play, and full of room for interpretation.

Cry of Fear

Link: Steam

A quality Half-Life total conversion that's full of scares. The game twists the old GoldSrc engine to give you an inventory system and a big, dark city to explore. Prepare yourself for relentless tension across eight hours of exploration and combat with 24 different weapons. The download also includes a bunch of custom campaigns and an unlockable extra campaign once you beat the main story. That's good value for a free download.

House of Abandon

Steam: Link

This experiment eventually became the excellent short story compilation Stories Untold. You can still download it to your library by heading to the page linked above and clicking 'Download PC Demo'. The first part follows someone playing a text adventure as things start to get strange, and quite scary.

Doki Doki Literature Club!

Link: Steam

It may look like a cheerful classroom drama but don't be fooled, Doki Doki Literature Club! plays with that facade. Sedate chats with classmates create a languid impression for the first act or so, but dark twists await—there's a reason the game opens with a content warning. If you end up enjoying it then you might also like Pony Island and Undertale. 

Off-Peak

Link: Steam

It's the future, you're stuck in a train station, and everything is weird. Chat with the station's odd inhabitants and explore its twisted side passages to discover surreal little anecdotes and piece together meaning from the assembled scraps. It only takes about half an hour to complete and the music is sweet, so give it a download.

FREE-TO-PLAY GAMES

Dota 2

Link: Steam

Dota 2 is one of the biggest games on Steam. Described simply, two teams of five wizards battle to knock over towers and flatten the enemy base in battles that tend to last between 30 minutes and an hour. In practice it's one of the deepest and most complicated competitive games in the world. Every year the huge International tournament draws millions of viewers, and with 110+ heroes and a consistently shifting meta, this could be the only game you ever need in your Steam library.

The free-to-play implementation is mostly good. Most microtransactions are tied to cosmetics. In addition to individual item purchases you can also buy battle passes that grant access to modes, quests that you complete by playing games, and more cosmetic items.

Warframe

Link: Steam

This third person action RPG about futuristic ninjas can be completely baffling for new players, but if you persist with it you'll find a deep and rewarding game on the verge of some of its most ambitious updates to date. At launch it was a game about repeating short missions—and that's still part of it—but there are also open world zones and plans to add co-op space combat. Warframe has been getting better and better in the last few years, and now we reckon it's one of the best free to play games on PC. 

You can spend real money to speed up crafting time, and to buy items and frames outright. Everything is perfectly craftable using in-game currency however, and players seem more interested in using the real-money Platinum currency to unlock new colour schemes.

Card Hunter

Link: Steam

Card Hunter is a cute squad RPG based around digital collectible cards. You battle through dungeons under the guidance of a dungeon master, levelling up your squad of heroes, building your deck and enjoying some affectionate tongue in cheek digs at D&D along the way. There's loads to play before you ever see a payment screen and there are also co-op and competitive modes. If only more free-to-play games were like this.

Team Fortress 2

Link: Steam

This team shooter has been around since 2007, but the character designs are timeless and the class design is still magnificent. Few shooters can point to a class as innovative as The Spy, who can disguise himself as an opposing team to sabotage their gadgets and stab their heavies in the back. If you prefer long-range engagements, the sniper has you covered, or you can ambush enemies up close with the Pyro. Whatever your play style, there's a class to match, and with enough play you will be switching between classes frequently to help your team push the cart or take a tricky point.

Path of Exile

Link: Steam

Path of Exile is one of the deepest action RPGs on the market, and one of the most generous for being free-to-play. The basic structure ought to be familiar: pick a class and embark on Diablo-style killing sprees to earn loot and level up. There's a huge amount of class and item customisation to dig into as you start to move past the tutorial stages. Slot different patterns of gems into your armour sets to min-max your character and take them into even tougher dungeons. You only need to pay money for cosmetics that reskin your weapons and armour

EVE Online

Link: EVE Online

This space MMO is famous for producing incredible stories of war and betrayal. Its player-driven corporations are fraught political entities that can be very inaccessible to new players. Even if you don't persist long enough to break into the grand PvP game it's still a gorgeous universe full of beautiful spaceships and nebulae. Some ships and skills are locked off in the free-to-play version, but you can spend a huge amount of time in the game before you need to look at paying for premium access.

Star Trek Online

Link: Steam

Fly ships, gather a crew, and beam down to planets with an away team in this massive free-to-play MMO. It has aged quite a bit since launch and it's riddled with microtransactions, but you can still play through the story and see every side of the game without paying. If you do get drawn in to collecting high end ships and decking out your crew with signature Star Trek livery then expect to pay for it. You can grind for items using in-game currency, but for advance items that will take longer than seems reasonable. If you're looking for a free Star Trek experience, however, it's surprisingly fun.

Realm Royale

Link: Realm Royale

If you like the idea of Fortnite but can't stand building, then Realm Royale might be your next battle royale game. It's still in Early Access, but there are enough features to separate it from Fortnite (which isn't on Steam), and paid-for battle royale games like PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. Realm Royale has a fantasy element with five classes and different spells and abilities for each. Hunters can leave proximity mines, while mages can heal themselves with ice magic. It's perfectly playable at this stage in Early Access, but expect it to evolve a lot in the coming months.

Battlerite

Link: Steam

An arena-based top-down brawler with shooting, spells and a colourful art style. As we've observed before, it's basically a smartly designed clutch teamfight generator. If you're tired of the long lanes of Dota 2 or League of Legends then you might enjoy Battlerite's punchy, fast-paced encounters, and while it's competitive, it has a cleaner learning curve than the major lane-pushing games. A separate paid-for Battlerite Royale mode is heading to Early Access in September, which has annoyed the community, but you can still find a battle in the original 2v2 and 3v3 modes.

Deep down, I think we've all wanted to burn down a house.

Not out of vengeance, or a half-baked insurance scam, or to send a message to a crosstown mob boss. To me, pyromania is simply the most relatable form of gleeful mass destruction. Who isn't a little bit entranced by a towering inferno? Of course, in real life you can't work out your emotional baggage through incendiary therapy without getting the cops called on you, but videogames fill the void.

If we're being honest, games have only recently really helped us get in touch with our latent pyromaniac instincts. It was difficult to program inspiring flames on a Commodore 64, and the less said about Doom's pepperoni pizza take on lava the better. But that started to change in 2008, with the release of Far Cry 2 and its unprecedented wildfire mechanics.

"To me [Ubisoft] really nailed how fire should feel and I loved how it would burn the grass and environment, such a wonderful touch," says Bill Munk, creative director of Killing Floor 2, which itself is a game with an incredibly satisfying flamethrower. He's right. Open world sandboxes weren't exactly a rarity in the late-aughties, but Far Cry 2 was one of the first times our machines packed the processing power to handle the physics estimations necessary to set those open-worlds on fire. We haven't looked back since.

"I really think flame weapons are so fun because of the extreme destruction they cause to NPCs and to the environment," continues Munk, when I ask him why he thinks players enjoy a healthy bit of incineration every now and then. "It's such a fun power trip, not to mention fire-based weapons are generally more forgiving on how accurate you need to be with your aim." 

Today, we're seeing games that play with fire on a more granular, mechanical level, rather than the engine-porn stagecraft it's been used for in the past. The best example I can think of is probably Larian Studios' Divinity series, which has persistently injected an immersive suite of environmental effects into the relative solemnity of a turn-based RPG.

I've always found this screenshot, where a rustic wooden platform is scorched to the depths of hell, to be an effective shorthand for why people who don't necessarily play a ton of strategy games still fall in love with the absurdity of Original Sin's magic systems.

"We tried to tweak duration, area and availability of fire skills so that the player is frequently put into position where their battle plan is spinning out of control and they need to improvise and take risks," says Nick Pechenin, systems designer of Divinity Original Sin 2, when I ask him how fire has been a useful tool in Larian's game design. "It was also important to us that although the ways in which surfaces are created and interact with each other have almost no randomness, smallest deviations in how the player targets their skills and positions their characters lead to wildly divergent outcomes, essentially generating fresh combat experiences every time."

It was fun to hear someone speak so intelligently about the mechanical theories behind cauterizing your enemies. For me, fire effects in videogames aren't about all clever design. Fire taps into my baseline, brain-bypassing id—the caveman wants and needs of my idiot gamer brain. But I suppose that's how it should be. A good blaze should be emotionally and aesthetically resonant, and when done right, it serves a distinct gameplay functionality buried deep below our perception. To borrow a J-school aphorism; it is showing, not telling, to the highest degree. With that, here are some PC games that excel in the art of pyromania. 

Return to Castle Wolfenstein

The urtext of video game flamethrowers; a lot of people's first quintessential next-gen experience back in 2001 was torching bunkers in that gorgeous, liquid-orange id Tech 3 goodness. I remember this thing being a little bit overpowered, mostly because of its ridiculous range, but frankly any good flamethrower should be. The only good Nazis are the ones conflagerating to death at your feet. 

For bonus Nazis-on-fire action, check out this trailer for the 2009 Wolfenstein's Flammenwerfer.

Far Cry (series)

We talked about Far Cry 2 above, which will always and forever be the crown prince of video game fire effects. But we also must give a nod to the other games in the series, specifically Far Cry 3, which had its finger on the pulse of the nation when it included a level where your shit-for-brains protagonist burns down a marijuana growing operation while a Skrillex/Damian Marley collaboration blasts off in the background. (It was 2012, what did you expect?) Truly a magnificent moment in the history of gaming that will only continue to get more hilarious as time goes on. 

Terraria

Terraria does such a great job with its physics for a 2D platformer, and one of my favorite ways that manifests is when you're digging through the sediment and throwing down an endless bread crumb of torches to guide your way back to the surface. It can be a pain to farm gel and wood to make sure you never run out light, but there's something kinda dramatic about zooming out and seeing the vast network of dimly-lit mineshafts you've inadvertently created. Especially for someone like me, who's always been bad at the aesthetic parts of crafting games. 

Alien Isolation

Alien Isolation is a game about being completely screwed, but one of the very, very few times you feel like you have a chance in that awful, no-good, godforsaken spaceship is when you've got the flamethrower on your side. One big angry ball of flame is all it takes to put the xenomorph on its bony heels, and that respite can be downright euphoric. The flamethrower as the odds-evener, as it should be. 

Diablo (series)

Blizzard prefers a heavy touch when it comes to their aesthetic design, so it's no surprise that their darkest franchise lays it on pretty darn thick whenever we make a journey to the underworld. Diablo's hell is absolutely unreasonable; a giddy orgy of blood, lava, blackened gothic chapels, and belching geysers of flame. Personally, I'm partial to Azmodan Lord of Sin, best known for lobbing infernal orbs of molten rock at your hapless barbarian (a mechanic that was later beautifully integrated into Heroes of the Storm). Good on you, Blizzard. We can only hope that Diablo 4 brings an even heavier dose of hellishness. 

Shovel Knight

This is PC Gamer, which means we can't mention Super Mario 64, or Banjo Kazooie, or Sonic The Hedgehog on this list. That's a shame, because the mascot platformer is forever betrothed to lava levels—nothing quite ups the ante like the chance to singe the overalls right off of Mario's nubile body. Thankfully Yacht Club, who has dedicated its existence to bringing picture perfect 8-bit-esque adventures to Steam, picked up the slack. Of course Shovel Knight has a lava level, and of course it learns from the masters by bringing a candyflipped Bowser's Castle that's challenging, dramatic, and thoroughly retro. If we could bottle and administer the feeling you get when you use that indestructible shovel to traverse the lakes of Hell, everyone on earth would realize that videogames are a force for good. 

World of Warcraft

It's been a long, long time since I played a Fire Mage in World of Warcraft, but one of the most satisfying feelings that MMO ever produced was the Presence of Mind/Pyroblast combo back in vanilla. I'll break it down for you: Pyroblast was this ridiculous, deep talent-tree spell that let you hurl a massive fireball at an enemy after a six second casting time. That made it kinda useless, because the downtime was so heavy. That is, unless, you also specced into Arcane to pick up Presence of Mind, which, when activated, would make your next spell cast instantly. You see where I'm going now, right?

Presence of Mind/Pyro quickly became my favorite thing to do to people in Warsong Gulch. I'd reckon to guess that it led to more Alt-F4s than anything else in Warcraft's early years. Well, that's not true. Remember when Rogues could stunlock you for, like, half a minute? Man, maybe World of Warcraft Classic is a bad idea.

Team Fortress 2

It's pretty hard to balance a flamethrower in a multiplayer game. Usually they're either totally weak and watered-down, or an ultra-scarce pickup that you see once every 20 games. So hats off to Valve for not only building out the Pyro as a crucial part of the Team Fortress fabric, but also making him fun to play! Torching a crowded control point feels great, but every good Pyro knows the value of the secondary shotgun when you get locked down in a dual with a Scout or a Soldier or something. The variation between the loadout makes you feel useful and multi-dimensional, rather than the kid hogging the cool weapons and sandbagging the team.

BioShock (series)

I love the way Jack's hand looks when he's got the Incinerate plasmid equipped. All of the biological upgrades in Rapture are horrifying in their own visceral ways—I never ever need to see that Insect Swarm cutscene ever again—but something about walking around BioShock's dead corridors with a left hand that's smoldering from the inside out is awesome, and troubling, and could probably serve as a tentpole for some half-baked fan theory. In this Randian dystopia, the Left is on fire! I also think BioShock does perhaps the best job of letting us live our deepest, truest arson fantasies. Just snap your fingers and set anything on fire. Easy as that. Great for clearing out crazy people in a fallen kingdom, and also probably great for party tricks. 

Dark Souls

You have to think that From Software knew their take on pyromancy was awesome, considering how it's, by far, the easiest school of magic to use in a game that's famous for its abstruseness. No degenerate attunement system, no gatekeeping stat requirements, just throw on your fire glove and start roasting skeletons. Everyone who's spent some time in Lordran knows exactly where they were the first time you were invaded by some refined griefer who rained ungodly hellfire on your poor, PvE-tuned knight. We all rushed back, retrieved our souls, and vowed to get our revenge in New Game Plus. And probably started learning pyromancy.