We're digging into the PC Gamer magazine archives to publish pieces from years gone by. This article was originally published in 2005. For more quality articles about all things PC gaming, you can subscribe now in the UK and the US.   

When Tim was on his super-secret Seattle mission to trick Valve into spilling on Aftermath (PCG 148), the most exciting thing he sent back to Gamer HQ—for me—wasn’t about that. It was a photo of a T-shirt, with no text and a simple white icon. A man, getting hit in the back of the head by a toilet. We are a cult, we Gravity Gunners, and this is our sign.

The smart money wasn’t on Half-Life 2 Deathmatch as the ‘surprise for the community’ Valve teasingly announced a week before its release. It was bound to be a CS:S map or a new terrorist skin. Then, on the day, everyone restarted their Steam clients and got a picture. It was of a woman, firing a toilet at a Combine guard with the Gravity Gun. We grinned.

Our previously private Gravity Gunning habits were suddenly revealed  to each other. There were sink fanatics. Filing cabinets were popular. The CRT monitor has a particular resonance with some gamers. The gamblers liked the explosive barrels—suicide if the enemy shoots it, but the splash damage means you barely need to aim. Me, I was a radiator man. It’s the biggest thing that’ll fit through a door, making it the ultimate compromise between mobility and power. It even serves as a bullet-shield one way round, and allows excellent visibility the other. And it’s heavy. Really, really heavy. The radiator doesn’t care if you’ve got full health and 200 armour—no bone goes unbroken, no victim survives.

Soon I had become a Gravity Gun connoisseur. The Zero Point Energy Field Manipulator is an elegant weapon for a more civilised age—not as clumsy or as random as the SMGs the unrefined masses favour. Most of my scores came from sweeping these crude gunmen up with large tables, fences and trolleys—killing three or four at a  time, deflecting their slugs with a door or catching their grenades and Combine Energy Balls with ease and tossing them back with distaste. But now and then, I’d run into a fellow Gravity Gunner. Our eyes would meet over our filing cabinets, and there would be a moment’s respectful pause as we took note of the crushed corpses we’d each created, perhaps recognising each other’s names from the scoreboard. Then, we’d fire.

There are three gravity duel situations: both combatants armed, one armed, or neither armed. The best battles start with the first and degenerate through each stage, and the best of these I ever had was with a fellow radiator man. Our identical projectiles collided in mid-air with sparks and a clang, both perfect first-shots, both spinning off at right angles. We switched—I grabbed his central heating unit, he mine—and flung again. One radiator ricocheted up and  landed on a balcony above, and we both turned to the other, lying on the ground between us.

We dived for it, both holding the grab trigger of our weapons. It jumped into the air and hovered between us. Our eyes locked over its grill, neither of us sure who had it. He suddenly jumped back—he thought it was me, and wanted room to catch it. But the radiator went back with him, and after a moment’s confusion he fired. I caught it, of course—he’d given me the room for that himself. I aimed low and fired. He strafe-jumped, twisted and caught it as it bounced past. It came back at me at head-height, but I was ready for it. With each fling, though, I could feel the catch getting harder, the shots more cunning.

This is the move we use to put down Gravity Gun tourists—machinegun deathmatchers who fancy a dip into the world of object-flinging for a break. We scoff at their obvious shots, seemingly aimed into the very jaws of our own weapon. Their poor choice of object is immediately rejected and returned violently to sender, catching them off-guard and probably putting them off Gravity Gunning for some time. To return a return—playing object tennis—is like the secret handshake of the serious Gravity Gunners.

But a practised throw is harder to stop—if it comes too low or too high, it’ll end up travelling laterally across your view as you track it, requiring extraordinary reactions to pinpoint and grab it. Some shots I just had to dodge, spinning one-eighty and catching it on the rebound—and leaving my back momentarily open to anything else he might find to fling. But my shots were causing him problems too, and soon I had him in a corner, just a few metres away, and used a low shot. It was too close to catch, but incredibly he jumped and landed on it as it rattled to a stop beneath him. I went to snatch it back for another throw, but it wouldn’t budge. I looked up at him. He looked back at me, then jumped. Seizing my chance, I tried to grab the radiator. It flew towards me, but stopped further away than I expected. As I looked up, I realised what had happened. He didn’t pause this time—those toasty-warm ridges slammed into me and crushed me against the wall. I gaped appreciatively. This man was an artist.

Half-Life 2 Deathmatch is the only one of the three games you get when you buy Half-Life 2 that doesn’t gleam with polish. On a bad connection, or a bad server, the lag becomes a nightmare rather than a mere handicap—objects stutter, hover, go through things, disappear. But really, given the amount of network traffic involved in synchronising that many complex physics reactions for 20 odd players, it’s a miracle it works at all. And perfect though Counter-Strike: Source feels, when a bullet from a better player cracks my head and kills me, my reaction is frustration, outrage and expletives. When a better player kills me in HL2DM, I’m left with only breathless admiration.

If you want to imagine the future of deathmatch, imagine a toilet, hitting a human head, forever.

Half-Life, released at the end of 1998, did not have cooperative gameplay. That was unacceptable to Sven Viking, who on January 19th, 1999 released beta 0.8 of his mod Sven Co-op, a proof of concept multiplayer modification consisting of a single level of the campaign. Today, 20 years later, Build 3482406 of Sven Co-op is available. That’s exciting, unless, like me, it makes you feel the inevitable march of time and the looming of the grave all the more keenly.

The lovely update squashes a healthy multitude of bugs and rejiggers some of the various checkpoints, along with the campaign from They Hunger. It also adds a glorious thing: varied sounds for NPCs firing the MP5 submachine gun, one of the most grating repeated noises in all of video games history. The patch drops support for Windows XP and Windows Vista, operating systems which weren’t even in development when Half-Life and Sven Co-op were first released.

The mod’s developers suggest going online and booting up svencoop1 with everyone else today. You should probably play dial-up modem screeches in the background while you do it for the full, authentic experience.

Sven Co-op has its own page on Steam. You can read the Sven Co-op team’s full post on their forums. 

Half-Payne is, as the name suggests, a mash-up of two classic PC shooters: Half-Life and Max Payne. Basically, it gives Gordon Freeman the same skills that Max has, including bullet time, a dive move, and painkiller healing. Creator suXin has now released what they call its "last major update", which adds a random mod feature, Twitch integration, and a new nightmare dream sequence.

If you turn random mods on, you'll periodically activate one of the many tweaks that suXin has added during development. For example, you might be granted infinite ammo—and then, when that wears off, you might get a wobbly camera that makes aiming hard, followed by a modification that pushes you back every time you take damage. It means that no two play sessions will be the same.

One of those random mods is the rather disturbing 'Payned', added in this update. It transforms all enemies and NPCs into Max Payne, but doesn't alter their body shape or head size, which leads to some twisted character models. Barnacles (the tongue things), just become Max's glorious face. You can see it in action in the trailer, above. 

Twitch integration revolves around those random mods: you can let viewers mess with you by voting on the next modification, which sounds like fun.

The new nightmare sequence is another tribute to Max Payne, adding a dream sequence into the Apprehension section of Half-Life. The update also adds a Gungame mode that forces you to use random weapons.

The whole thing is a great excuse to play Half-Life all over again, and both bullet time and Max Payne's trademark dives look like they transfer surprisingly well to Valve's shooter. You can download the mod from its ModDB page. 

A wide-ranging Half-Life 2 mod called MMod, which has been in the works for nine years, is out now, and it reworks Valve shooter's visuals, gunplay and enemy AI.

Combat is the focus, and the mod adds new weapons, changes weapon handling, and introduces new animations. I'm a big fan of the new idle weapon animations that you can see in the trailer above: when stood still, Gordon Freeman will wipe the scope of his crossbow to clean smudges, or lovingly stroke his trusty rocket launcher.

As for new weapons, the video above shows that you can grab a turret and haul it around, spraying down enemies. You'll also be able to aim down sights on some weapons, such as the basic pistol. 

The mod redesigns both the audio and visual effects, and tweaks the graphics in general. It certainly looks prettier than what I remember of the original—I like the new glowy eyes for the Combine soldiers—and particle effects are far flashier. 

MMod also "hardens" the AI and gives the Combine new actions to perform, such as firing underslung grenade launchers. 

It's already garnering praise over on its ModDB page, where you can download it. Make sure you have a clean install of Half-Life 2 and both Episodes 1 and 2, as well as the free community-made Half-Life 2: update, which the mod runs off. 

Thanks, Dark Side of Gaming.

This feature was originally published in PC Gamer magazine back in October. If you enjoy this feature, you can subscribe across print and digital.

Has any videogame story been told from more perspectives than Half-Life’s Black Mesa incident? 

Including expansions, the vanilla game offers three points of view alone, while countless mods have added to the Black Mesa lore, introducing new playable stories centring on lawyers, black ops assassins and even alien slaves. 

Half-Life: Echoes is the latest in this tradition of framing the Black Mesa disaster from a new angle, and it’s easily the best singleplayer mod for Half-Life in years, offering incredible level design, thrilling survival horror and blistering action. It also weaves itself into the broader Half-Life fiction in some clever ways. 

Created by first-time modder James Cockburn, Half-Life: Echoes puts players in the shoes of Candidate Twelve, another Black Mesa employee who arrives for a normal day at work when the resonance cascade transforms the facility into the world’s most technologically advanced abattoir. Like Freeman, Shepard and the rest, you must navigate and survive Black Mesa’s labyrinth, battering zombies and blasting marines while the G-Man observes it all. 

Familiar ground

What make Half-Life: Echoes stand out from other Black Mesa retellings is the sheer level of craft and ambition that has gone into it. To begin with, the mod’s 20-odd maps are enormous and stunningly detailed. Even the very first area you spawn in, an underground car park, impresses with its cavernous scale and moody lighting. 

As with the original Half-Life, Echoes commences with a peaceful tour of its own segment of the Black Mesa facility, though smartly it lets you explore on foot rather than confining you inside a train. When the cascade occurs, it does so at a distance, unfolding as a gradual infrastructural collapse rather than an instant demolition. Lights flicker and tremors shudder through the earth, while the scientists and security guards speculate on what’s going on. One of my favourite aspects of the mod is how smoothly it repurposes dialogue from the old games to assemble its own conversations and narratives. Even when the seams are visible, it’s beautifully done. 

Broadly, Echoes mimics the arc of Half-Life, but distils its key elements into more potent forms. The arrival of the marines, which in the original game is barely touched upon, is here given the kind of treatment you’d expect from a Call of Duty game, featuring a jet flyover and an almost parade-like column of solders, tanks, and twin-rotor helicopters. 

The first half of Echoes is almost pure survival horror, limiting your arsenal to just a few weapons and making clever use of scripted scenarios to surprise the player. In a splendid Alien-esque sequence, a strange sluglike monster hunts you through a tight cluster of corridors and vents as you desperately try to find a way out. Meanwhile, your personal resonance cascade comes in the form of a gargantuan monster, which traps you inside a train carriage alongside a bunch of other scientists before destroying everything in sight. That same monster hunts you throughout the mod’s running time, appearing at various points just to make your day that little bit more terrifying. 

Once Echoes starts doling out the heavier weapons, the mod ups the ante rapidly. Perhaps a little too rapidly, as the difficulty spikes with the intensity, resulting in several transitional combat encounters that are much tougher than anything either before or afterward. 

Fortunately, the last hour of Echoes moderates its tsunami of opponents with plentiful weapons and ammunition. The climactic battle happens on a scale that outclasses Half-Life’s infamous Surface Tension chapter, a fight that repeatedly escalates like a microcosm of the mod as a whole. Two decades on, Half-Life’s combat holds up, and Echoes makes fantastic use of its weapons and enemies. 

As the work of a single person, Echoes is a remarkable feat of design, while its detailed environment design and sharp pacing more than make up for the outdated visuals. That said, there are a few minor flaws. Although Echoes is vast in scope, in running time it is short, easily completable in a couple of hours. It also concludes in an abrupt sequence which, while an interesting addition to the overall Half-Life plot, feels artificially bolted onto the tail of the game.     

Lastly, and this isn’t really a flaw, but anyone coming to the mod hoping to see new features, such as weapons or enemies, will come away disappointed. Ultimately, these are tiny issues in what is essentially a fourth Half-Life expansion, playable for free. Echoes is that well made. 

While Crowbar Collective has been remastering Half-Life 1 with Black Mesa and even expanding it with Black Mesa: Xen, another team of modders have been diligently downgrading Valve’s sequel, remaking it with the original Half-Life’s engine. We reported on Half-Life 2 Classic last year, but since then there have been some big changes and, most recently, the release of a new demo. 

The goal for the Half-Life 2 Classic team was to recreate all of Half-Life 2 with the original Half-Life engine, GoldSrc, but last year they were still figuring some things out. For instance, did they want to try and match Half-Life 2’s style and fidelity, or did they want to downgrade everything, making the models look more like the first game’s? This year, they settled on the latter. 

In June, the team unveiled some of the new models. “The demo we released last year had models ported directly from Half-Life 2,” They wrote. “Since then, we’ve gotten a lot of feedback and decided to remake character models to fit with the style of Half-Life.”

Coast levels are also being made from scratch. The team discovered that they were simply too big for GoldSrc and, not having the engine code, they couldn’t increase the maximum limit. All the coast levels are being remade, with coast_05 being the first. 

Demakes like this aren’t just a way for people with ancient rigs to play newer games. Not many people, after all, are going to struggle to run Half-Life 2. In this case, it’s fascinating to see how the original engine can handle a much more ambitious game, and it’s an interesting ‘what if’, imagining a timeline where Valve didn’t make the Source Engine. 

The new demo appeared earlier this week and shows off Ravenholm, featuring new models, NPCs and the gravity gun. You can download it from ModDB.

While we’re reminiscing about Half-Life for its 20th anniversary, let’s take a moment to celebrate its iconic protagonist. You all know him, of course. His unkempt beard, those wild eyes, that flattop haircut that just screamed, “I was in the military but they kicked me out because I was too awesome”. Yes, Ivan the Space Biker had a timeless look that served him well for the five minutes he was Half-Life’s hero. Then wee Gordon Freeman nicked his job. 

The first time I saw Half-Life in 1998, Gordie had already made himself comfortable in the role, but only a year before, it was Ivan the Space Biker’s job to show off Valve’s fancy FPS (thanks for the reminder, Combine Overwiki). He sported a bulky space suit, some glorious facial topiary and generally looked like he had seen some shit. And then smoked it. 

Ivan was used in early tests and promotional material before Valve had really settled on a protagonist. The original concept for Ivan was a beardy computer programmer in a bulky environmental suit, but when it came to actually designing him, the concept was tossed aside and he became this burly lumberjack-looking dude. 

Big macho Ivan turned out to be a bit too conventional of a video game protagonist for Valve, which wanted a more cerebral hero. Sadly, after all the work he did promoting the game, Ivan was thrown in the bin and the gig was given to Gordo instead. He had glasses and a little beard, so you knew he was pretty smart.  

Bring Ivan back for Half-Life 3. 

This article was originally published in PC Gamer UK 262, back in January 2014. It's reproduced here, for Half-Life's 20th anniversary, with author Robert Yang's permission. 

20 years ago, Half-Life was released to a rapturous commercial and critical reception. It is a game about... well, it depends on who you ask. For some people it’s about Gordon Freeman, an everyman physicist who struggles to survive the inter-dimensional alien invasion of a secret government research facility. For others it’s about a mute sociopath who murders anything that moves, as he bunnyhops (always hopping) with bloodlust. More cynically, Half-Life is just another game about jumping on things and shooting things in the face to get to the next level.

But as a longtime Half-Life modder and game developer, I also know Half-Life in a very different way: in its map logic scripting, SDK source code, 3D models and animation events, 2D skins and texture flats—I’ve even studied the way Valve named the individual game files and folders. Game developers must make millions of small decisions all the time, and each decision is in conversation with a million other decisions. How big can a Half-Life level be, how many colours and shapes can it have, what can it look like? Well, it depends on how much texture memory and 3D map geometry memory you’re allocating in the engine. Half-Life’s guts influence what Half-Life can show you and what Half-Life can do.

And what Half-Life’s guts say is that everyone else is wrong. Half-Life is not a game about Black Mesa, Gordon Freeman, headshots or puzzles. Half-Life is fundamentally a game about... trains.

Black Mesa inbound

Half-Life begins with a seven-minute work commute. The Black Mesa facility swirls to life around your monorail: co-workers run late to work, forklifts rush through maintenance tunnels, an idling helicopter waits for passengers. It is an iconic and oft-imitated stretch of scene-setting.

The chapter was pitched initially as more of a tech demo than a bit of subtle atmosphere. According to former Valve writer Marc Laidlaw, it began when a programmer implemented a new type of game object called a ‘func_tracktrain’. Unlike its simpler ancestor func_train, inherited with the Quake-derived codebase, func_ tracktrain could run on a long stretch of path_track, branch onto different tracks, and bank and pivot into turns. To show off the new functionality, the programmer asked Laidlaw to write some use of func_tracktrain somewhere in the game. Laidlaw interpreted the request more literally and asked himself, what were the possibilities afforded by using a train?

1. Level crossingHalf-Life’s first chapter is made of six different map files that load as you cross certain thresholds along the track route. At the time, Half-Life pioneered an innovative ‘seamless’ loading technology between map files without separate loading screens. The player could backtrack between maps and NPCs could even follow the player across level transitions. Today, many games implement some form of ‘level streaming’ where the engine begins slowly preloading new map data in the background as soon as the player is close enough to a transition point, thus drastically shrinking level load times. Half-Life didn’t have that, but it still used the technique to its advantage.

2. Parenting issuesThe monorail tram ‘door’ is a fake door that is part of the tram wall and cannot open. The Half-Life engine did not support ‘entity parenting’, so designers could not glue or ‘parent’ a functioning door to the func_tracktrain of the tram. They couldn’t glue glass windows, other passengers, or even pieces of rubbish to it either. One workaround: start the player inside the tram already, so a functional door is not necessary.

3. TrackingTo tell the func_tracktrain where it can go, the level designers placed a series of ‘path_track’ points. Each point had a unique name and the name of the next path_track in the sequence. When the func_tracktrain runs, it travels along these points in order and connects all the dots. If the train suddenly flew off the track, that meant there was probably a typo in configuring one of a hundred path_track points. It was tedious work.

4. TwinsTo give the illusion of a ‘seamless’ level transition, two map files must share the same room. If a map ends with a dark section of concrete tunnel, then the next map must start with an identical copy of the concrete tunnel. However, it means that if the designers ever change that tunnel later, then they must also update the twin copy in the other map file, which can get messy and time consuming. Thus, transition areas in Half-Life are often featureless narrow hallways with few details.

5. MemoriesHow many megabytes of memory does your graphics card have? A few gigabytes? Back in 1998, game developers counted every megabyte: each map file in Half-Life was limited to two megabytes of texture memory. These days, a single shrubbery in the new Call of Duty probably uses two megabytes of texture memory, an entire Half-Life level’s worth by itself. Perhaps we’re too wasteful these days.

6. Vis-a-VisS-shaped bends and hallway-room-hallway structures were great line-of-sight blockers for ‘visibility culling’, where a game engine avoids wastefully drawing hidden scenery. Why spend precious cycles rendering something behind a wall? Valve designers had to pre-calculate a ‘potentially visible set’ (PVS) of which rooms can see into which rooms. If any walls got destroyed, it would become obsolete, which is one of the reasons few games have deformable worlds.

7. End of the LineSo the tram door was a fake door that couldn’t open, but at the end of the chapter, the security guard miraculously opens it. How? Valve’s hack was ingenious: when the train first arrives, the game seamlessly loads a new map file of the same exact room (see ‘Twins’) except it swaps out the old tram for a new func_tracktrain with a door-shaped hole in the side, and the moving door is actually another func_tracktrain. Who said trains always have to be train-shaped? This trick is legendary among Half-Life modders: how the Valve developers used one unrelated system to fix a different system.

The Shark Cage

In the summer of 1997, Half-Life was essentially just a pile of random moments and encounters. Marc Laidlaw was hired as writer to sort through that pile of game content and bring some semblance of coherence to it, but by then much of the action had already been prototyped. Half-Life’s development history suggests that Valve were concerned less with story as a goal in itself and more with ferrying the player linearly from setpiece to setpiece, to sustain the thrill of constant movement and progression. Half-Life, itself, is a train.

The chapter ‘Apprehension’ is halfway through the Half-Life rollercoaster. In the middle of this dimly-lit ‘water level’ is a shark cage sequence ripped out of a monster movie. When the player enters the cage to pick up the crossbow, it plunges into a pool with an ‘ichthyosaur’ creature that circles menacingly before biting its prey in the face. Trains are surprisingly relevant here because, remember, trains do not necessarily look like trains.

1. RunwayWhen the player first enters the room, they set off a trigger_once that makes the monster_ichthyosaur perform a scripted_sequence to jump out of the water and devour a screaming monster_scientist. The jumping movement of the animation draws the player’s eyes upward, toward the suspended shark cage and balcony. To continue, the player must walk along a platform all the way around the cage, thus viewing it from all sides and likely noticing the crossbow weapon inside.

2. Node graphNPCs in Half-Life are a lot like trains, they mostly go where the track leads them. But instead of a path_track, a designer must place info_node points that automatically link with nearby nodes into a web-like ‘node graph’. To pathfind somewhere, the AI will look at all the different links between nodes to assemble its route. Here, Valve put many of the ichy’s waypoints underneath the cover of the catwalk, to discourage the player from freely sniping at the monster from above water. Good node graphs are often the difference between AI looking dumb or clever in any game.

3. Pickup baitThe crossbow comes with only five bolts. Killing the ichthyosaur on easy or medium mode requires four, and on hard mode it is eight. That means the player can only miss one shot with a weapon they’ve never used, against a monster they’ve never fought. To make it easier, the player solves a slightly earlier simple puzzle for some valuable MP5 alt-fire grenades—which are useless against the ichy, but act as bait to trick the player into picking up 20 extra bolts for a weapon they don’t even possess yet.

4. The cageThe centrepiece of this room is a shark cage containing a crossbow, suspended from the balcony. When the player walks along the beam and drops down into the cage, it breaks and falls into the water. The cage is actually a func_tracktrain, running on a series of path_track points that guide the ‘cage train’ downward at roughly 6.5 metres a second.

5. The GateOnce in the water, the player’s ultimate goal is to open this rusty gate to get to the next room. However, the rusty wheel turns very slowly and the player must hold down the ‘use’ key the entire time or else the gate will close by itself. It takes 12 seconds to completely open the gate—the exact same length of time that Gordon Freeman can hold his breath. All this is probably too difficult to do while fending off the ichthyosaur; thus, indirectly, the game forces you to kill it first.

...or at least that was the intent. Playtesters probably managed to open the door for only 6-8 seconds and then quickly slip through the gap, despite the roving shark monsters trying to kill them. To prevent that from happening, Valve added an invisible trigger in front of the gate wheel, which instantly alerts the ichthyosaur to the player’s presence and slams it into combat mode. This is technically cheating on the developers’ part, but it’s only cheating if you get caught.

6. Flying sharkThe code for the monster_ichthyosaur is actually based on the same code used for flying monsters. After all, what is swimming but flying underwater? So if NPCs are actually trains (see ‘Node Graph’), then we can think of the ichy as simply a mindless homicidal flying shark-train.

7. Bubble funGiven the superb drownability of water in Half-Life, every second spent beneath its surface counts. To help the player navigate, even in foggy and murky waters, Valve used columns of bright bubble particles flowing up, because the human eye is typically drawn to movement. They used these bubbles frequently in underwater sections to highlight tunnels, passages, or pockets where the player could surface for air.

Year of the Dragon, a Half-Life mod that replaces Gordan Freeman with Spyro the Dragon, has finally entered early access. You can download and play the Office Complex demo over on ModDB and glide, charge, and breath fire all over the early-game Half-Life level as a talking cartoon dragon instead of a boring MIT graduate.

While modder Magic_Nipples (nice) isn't necessarily going to recreate the entirety of Half-Life to work with Spyro's original moveset, they're at least making it possible for others, bringing the former PlayStation icon to the GoldSrc and Xash3D engines for modders to play around with. 

You'll need Half-Life to give it a go, of course, and not all controllers are compatible quite yet, but what's there looks like a near perfect recreation of the original Spyro. Give it a go and let us know how it feels to finally play Half-Life as it was always meant to be. 

I was convinced They Hunger would hold together about as well as a skeleton in a hurricane. Not only is it a 20-year-old Half-Life mod. It’s a 20-year-old zombie Half-Life mod. Given how gaming scraped the bottom of that brain cavity seven or eight years ago, I struggled to see how They Hunger could shine through two decades’ worth of derivative undead-fests. 

Less than two hours in, They Hunger had proved me wrong. I realised this after it tried to crush me between two zombie-driven trains, then let me drive one of those trains through a sequence of tunnels filled with walking corpses. I’m not sure what the best way to rekindle an old friendship is, but I think shouting “Choo-choo motherfuckers!” as you splatter a shambling horde with your cowcatcher is pretty hard to beat. 

Released in three parts between 1999 and 2001, They Hunger is a singleplayer, story-focussed total conversion for Half-Life. Created by a team of modders led by Neil Menke, it charts a zombie outbreak in the fictional town of Rockwell, which you’re thrown right into the middle of after your car falls into a lake after being struck by lightning. 

Unlike mods such as Counter- Strike, which used Half-Life’s tech to create a very different experience, They Hunger follows the design ideas of Valve’s seminal shooter closely. It tells a linear story using environmental storytelling and scripted setpieces, with levels built to convey a coherent, believable world. Even most of its weapons and enemies are reskins of those used in Half-Life. The crowbar, for example, becomes a lethal umbrella. John Steed would be proud.

Dead good

What made They Hunger stand out, and what makes it stand out today, is how the quality of its level and setpiece design rivals that of the game it’s based upon. The mod starts out with an indulgent cutscene that includes a radio report discussing “atmospheric disturbances”, followed by long shots of your car’s fateful journey into a ravine. Once you escape the water, you must cut through a churchyard where zombies burst out of coffins, before navigating a pumping station and an unstable volcanic crater as you attempt to reach the site of that broadcast. 

Chapters two and three are more ambitious still. The second episode has you escape from an infested police station, before making your way to a sprawling mental asylum where the source of the outbreak is located. Inside, you descend into a secret underground laboratory, before escaping in a lengthy scripted sequence wherein the asylum slowly and brilliantly burns to the ground. 

As you’d expect given its heritage, They Hunger is a whip-smart shooter. But it also stands up as a horror game. Like Looking Glass’ Thief, the dark and cloying atmosphere is aided by its lumpen lo-fi graphics, while the sound design is suitably eerie. The way its scuttling skeletons (which are reskinned vortigaunts) whisper “flesh creature” before they attack is profoundly unsettling.

While creepy, they Hunger knows how to balance its horror with more lighthearted moments. The third chapter commences with a tense sequence in a hospital, followed by a more tongue-in-cheek section in which you battle through a farmyard populated by zombie animals. 

As I said, They Hunger works fine visually, but if you struggle with its default presentation, help is at hand. The mod is so old now that it has its own suite of mods, most of which are dedicated to improving the visuals. The two main mods of interest are They Hunger-Remod by Zikshadow, which makes updates to most of the game’s character models, and My Weapons Pack, which improves the models on weapons and your character’s hands. Together they help fend off some of the ravages of time.

It lives

Getting They Hunger up and running today isn’t too challenging. There are several versions on ModDB which are compatible with Steam. Completing it is a little trickier. I encountered several points where the mod would crash to menu or crash to desktop. Some of these appeared to be caused by certain enemy sound effects and could be bypassed with a little luck. Others were linked to broken script triggers, and could only be avoided by noclipping through the map to the end of that area. 

Having to resort to workarounds is not ideal, but it’s worth it to experience a brilliant zombie adventure. They Hunger crams more inventiveness into its campaign than most bona fide zombie games, while balancing silliness with tension well. It may look a little desiccated and moan when it gets up, but there’s life in They Hunger yet.