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.

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)". 

This feature originally ran in issue 310 of PC Gamer UK. You can currently subscribe to both US and UK versions of the magazine for less than their usual price thanks to a holiday promotion.  

My name is Pritus Jenkins, Citizen #00670. I know this number by heart because in the last few hours I've had to recite it around five times. Such is life as a citizen in City 17, where the alien Combine which patrol the streets love nothing more than to stop and harass me. I'm playing on a multiplayer Garry's Mod server, roleplaying Half-Life 2. But the role I play isn’t that of a hero. I am no Gordon Freeman. I am Pritus Jenkins, a 55-year-old man with a limp. And I’m hungry.

If Half-Life 2’s roleplaying community were a food, it’d be the bland, mushy packet of rations I receive hourly from the dispensary located just off the central square of the dystopian city. This isn’t a place for grand adventures and bravery, but a community of hundreds dedicated to experiencing the hopeless oppression of a society crushed under authoritarian alien rule.

Half-Life 2 roleplayers are a hardcore bunch. Even the Combine soldiers, toting weapons and bureaucratic power, are hopelessly chained by their dedication to believable roleplay. When it’s my turn to receive my rations, which are handed out by Combine players every hour, I’m asked to 'apply'—to state my name and Citizen ID. The Combine soldier uses emotes to inform me that they're looking up my file in the tablet they’re holding. I stand there, silent, for an uncomfortably long number of seconds. Then the Combine soldier turns around, grabs a unit of rations, and shoves them into my character's hands. That player will do this countless times as other citizens, like me, stop by to get their food.

As I walk around and explore the ruined alleys and dilapidated streets of this City 17 district, I can see the other citizens looking at me. Some talk amongst one another in whispers, while others lean against walls using in-game emotes to smoke imaginary cigarettes. It's an almost perfect recreation of the mood of Half-Life 2's opening hour, only with real players instead of computer actors playing out the mundane minutes of their pointless lives.

After a few minutes, one player approaches me but just as he's about to say something, a Combine soldier comes around the corner. He turns away. When the Combine soldier passes, the man immediately turns back and heads back my way.

"Ugly," he says.

"What did you just call me?" I type back. There is no voice chat, so every exchange is written in a text box on the lower left of my screen.

The man turns and walks away. Hesitant about what I should do, I decide to pursue him at a distance. I don't know these streets, I don't know these people. But maybe if I follow this man to his destination, he'll do something suspicious and I can report him to a Combine soldier and get him arrested.

After a few minutes of stalking him, the man stands before a locked gate. I crouch behind a piece of corrugated steel, watching and hoping he'll do something dumb.

"Citizen, apply!"

I turn around to find a Combine soldier right behind me. Without complaint, I tell him my name and Citizen ID.

"Face the wall," the soldier commands, and I wonder if the few minutes I spent on this server are about to come to a depressing end. "What were you doing?"

"N-nothing, sir," I say. "I thought I dropped something."

Without another question, the Combine places a zip tie around my hands, binding them so that I can't attack him—not that I'd be able put up a fight anyway. Out of the corner of my eye I see the citizen I was following scoff at me.

"I've been watching you for a while," the Combine soldier tells me. "You’re acting pretty suspicious. I'm going to take you in for questioning. Follow me."

Not sure what to do—or even what I could do—I turn around and begin to follow the soldier.

"Ugly."

I turn around and see the other citizen staring at me. His character wears a blank expression, but there's a smugness about it too. I've been roleplaying in Garry's Mod for maybe 20 minutes now, and already I've come face to face with the cruelty of its world. Somewhere, far from here, Gordon Freeman and the Resistance might be fighting to liberate the people of City 17, I imagine. But as the Combine soldier leads me to the ebony black doors of the Combine headquarters in this area, I fear I won’t be one of them. 

Yesterday, Garry's Mod creator Facepunch Studios unveiled S&box—a prototype that aims to "take a powerful game engine (UE4 right now) and build a hotloading C# layer on top of it". 

In turn, so reckons the developer, this will allow users to sidestep using C++, waiting for things to compile, and closing games while developing. Overnight, a handful of Reddit threads reckon S&box is Facepunch's way of announcing Garry's Mod 2.    

We reached out Facepunch's head honcho Garry Newman to ask what exactly S&box is, if it is in fact Garry's Mod 2, and when we might expect to learn more about it.  

"So this might be a bit complicated," Newman tells us via email. "There's a lot of "is this Garry's Mod 2", the honest answer is "maybe"—but nowhere near that yet. We've basically built our own game engine on top of UE4. We're really using UE4 for its core features, rendering, networking, physics. It's all done in an engine agnostic way. We can lift our system off and put it on the source engine (it actually started on the source engine).

"It's too early to say whether this will turn into a spiritual successor of Garry's Mod, or whether it will even be released as a moddable platform (we might use it internally to make our own games on). But at the moment we're enjoying playing around with it and that's enough right now."

Newman also links to this—something he describes as "one of the many prototypes [he and his team] are working on."

There's been a lot of Half-Life 2 talk lately, what with Marc Laidlaw creatively writing some gender-swapped fan fiction that revealed his vision for the missing Episode 3 and Lever Softworks speeding up the release schedule of its Half-Life 2: Aftermath mod. In fact, it feels like there there's pretty much always a bit of Half-Life 2 chatter drifting around because it's a celebrated hunk of first-person shootery and we're still wondering (well, maybe not so much now) if we'll ever see Half-Life 3.

It wasn't this most recent surge of Half-Life 2 nostalgia that led me to play through the final chapter of Half-Life 2 a total of 15 times in 2 days. I love Half-Life 2, and I'll still play certain chapters of it every now and then. But when I play it, I never play the last chapter, and I didn't want to this week, and I certainly didn't want to play it 15 times in two days. Also: I'll never play it again.

Why I played it this week: I was working on some Half-Life 2 stuff for an upcoming issue of our magazine, and my contribution involved using Garry's Mod, which I have not used in a very, very long time. I had a specific goal in mind: to reach the end of the game, where (spoiler) there's an explosion on top of the (spoiler) citadel, Alyx (spoiler) is there and shields her face, G-Man walks out of the explosion and says (spoiler) some things before stuffing Gordon Freeman back into the interdimensional broom (spoiler) closet.

Seemed easy enough. I wait for the explosion, then disable the game's AI using the console, which will freeze everyone in their tracks. Then I'll spawn a G-Man ragdoll, pose him next to Alyx, and I'm done. Five minutes, tops.

Except it's wasn't, because when you load that final map (d3_breen_01), it loads at the beginning of the chapter, where Freeman has stupidly and willingly climbed into a locking metal coffin like an idiot, allowing himself to be captured. So you take a coffin ride, there's a ton of moustache-twirling from Dr. Breen and a lot of chit-chat from everyone else before Breen, being almost as stupid as Freeman, sets you free.

Cool, I'm free. I noclip up through the map to the top of the citadel, but then realize, oh yeah, I need Alyx (I don't think I can pose her as well as she poses herself) and the explosion. I'll need to actually play through the entire chapter to reach the climactic end. So, I noclip back down into Breen's office but apparently I've passed through a trigger or something and the sequence won't continue.

I start the chapter over, ride the coffin, listen to the chats, Breen frees me, we pursue, he gets distracted while Skyping with a large alien cyber-maggot, I get my gravity gun back, I fight the Combine and remember how to get to the top of the citadel without using noclip to fly, I shoot orbs at the thingie, the thingie breaks, and Alyx hops out of a window I probably could have used to avoid that entire fight. There's an explosion, Alyx throws her hands up, I disable the AI, and everything pauses. Perfect! I open the Garry's Mod menu, spawn a G-Man ragdoll, and take out the posing tool. Only the posing tool doesn't come out. Nothing comes out. The only tool I can use is the regular old gravity gun.

Hum. That won't do. I reload the map to start again. Coffin, Breen, Combine, orbs, explosion. Same thing. Either the game or the mod isn't letting me use the tools I need at the end of the game.

I begin again. Maybe I'm being denied the tools because at the start of the chapter all of Gordon's weapons are confiscated by the weapon confiscating machine Breen has installed outside his office, probably due to all the other weapon-bearing scientists constantly riding inescapable metal coffins to the top of his office building to kill him. When Breen frees me, I use a console code to give me all the weapons, which I wrongly assume will give me all the tools as well. I fight through the Combine again (using the rocket launcher, because why not) to trigger the final scene, but once again I can't use the posing tool.

I begin again. It's been a couple hours at this point -- this is like a 15 minute sequence -- and I'm not sure I'll be able to get this pose to work at all. After Breen frees me, I start noclipping around the map because I can't think of anything else to do. At one point I apparently pass through a kill-trigger, presumably the one that ends the game if you fall off the catwalk while fighting on the roof, and I die. Since this is G-Mod and not Half-Life 2, it doesn't reload the chapter but just respawns me back at the start of the level with the chapter still in progress—this time with all my Garry's Mod tools working. A-ha!

So I just need to play through the chapter and die at some point. I start again, Breen frees me, I disable the AI, and everyone freezes. I give myself all the weapons, then walk into the corner, drop a grenade, and squat on it. I die, respawn at the bottom with my tools, noclip back to the office, and enable the AI. Everyone wakes up and continues as if Gordon Freeman didn't just blow up his own ass and then rise through the floor a minute later with a buncha weird-ass physics tools.

I continue through the sequence, get to the top of the Citadel, blow it up, and pause. My tools are gone again. Dang! (I don't actually say dang.) I don't know what happened, but it's been like three hours of this and all I've done is watch people talk and have a grenade go off three inches from my testicles. I'm done for the night.

I wake up the next morning and sit glumly through the beginning of the chapter again. This time I wait until later in the chapter, pause, die, and return with my tools. I fight through the Combine and make it to the top. Explosion, pause. Spawn a ragdoll.

My tools. They're sort of working but not really. There's no beam extending from the poser, but I can pick up the ragdoll. I can't turn turn the ragdoll, though, no matter how I try. I can move it, but I can't rotate it to face me. This won't do.

Maybe I'll forget the ragdoll altogether. I mean, G-Man walks out of the explosion anyway and stands next to Alyx, maybe I'll just use the faceposer to give him a different expression while he's standing there. I seem to remember being able to pose faces on 'living' NPCs. I play through the entire chapter, again, making sure to sit on a grenade and die at one point, then reach the ending. G-Man walks out, I pause, then shoot him with the face-poser, only I don't because the game won't let me use it.

Okay, new plan. I'll go up and pose the ragdoll before the explosion. Well, first I'll take a break to scream into a pillow, and then I'll go up and pose the ragdoll before the explosion. Then I'll go back downstairs, fight my way back upstairs, then when the roof explodes and I disable the AI, I should be all set with the posed G-Man in place. I pause, I pose, I go back down. I've done something wrong, though, because Breen won't wake up. He won't rise up through the citadel in his force-field while mocking me, so the ending of the game won't trigger properly.

I start over. Again. After the coffin ride and family meeting, I make sure Breen starts rising through the citadel before I start messing with console codes. I disable the AI, kill myself, respawn and fly upstairs, spawn a floppy G-Man, use the poser and face-poser, and everything is all set. Then the game ends and the screen goes dark, because Breen, even with no AI functioning, has risen all the way to the top of the citadel and escaped, thus causing me to fail my mission.

After a break to put my face in my hands and moan for a bit, I start again. By carefully noclipping I manage to avoid messing with the chapter's routine. I die, I fly, I pose, I return and run through the sequence again. At the top of the citiadel, Alyx hops through the window and runs smack into the G-Man I've posed. I've placed him right in her path.

I shriek in horror.

But Alyx is smart. She doesn't miss a beat and sidesteps the obstruction, bless her. The explosion explodes for the umpteenth time. I pick up the frozen Alyx and reposition her a bit. Weirdly, I notice the explosion has actually undone some of my ragdoll posing.

Even though I've locked all of G-Man's joints, his leg is swinging away and his briefcase is askew. Thankfully, my tool is still working properly. I wedge his bits back into place, noting how his limbs are a bit floaty in the timeless portion of the chapter. I take a hundred screenshots for safety, check the folder to see that the pictures are actually there, then take a hundred more. I never want to have to come back here again.

So that's why I had to play Half-Life 2's final chapter 15 times in 2 days. I have no doubt there was a much easier way to get this done, and I'm sure there will be plenty of helpful comments below to point them out, and they will probably make me weep at my lost hours.

On the plus side, I've got some closure with Half-Life 2 and if we never get a sequel, at least the ending to this one will be forever burned in my brain.

Achievement hunting on Steam is serious business. While Valve's storefront might not have Xbox's Gamerscore or PlayStation's Trophies, there are still plenty of PC gamers who appreciate the way Steam achievements challenge them to play games in new and interesting ways. Then there's the satisfaction of knowing you're one of just a small percentage of players who've explored every nook and cranny, maxed out every stat, or earned every gold medal a game has to offer. 

The thing is, a lot of Steam achievements are kind of boring. Kill 10,000 enemies, hit level 99 in every class, finish the game on Ultra Nightmare Hardcore difficulty—most of the objectives feel like they've fallen straight out of a free-to-play MMO's quest log. Even the rarest achievements are often little more than tedious grind fests, requiring you to play 500 online matches in a multiplayer game with no active player base, or fight alongside a game's developer when that developer has long ago moved onto their next project. 

These achievements aren't particularly fun to earn, let alone read about. But buried in Steam's massive catalog of games are some truly obscure, brutally difficult achievements that less than 0.1 percent of players have managed to accomplish. These are achievements worthy of the name. Most of us will never earn them, but we can dream.

Note: Total owners approximated from SteamSpy. Verified achievement stats through AStats.

Devil Daggers

Devil Dagger - Survive 500 secondsTotal Owners: 236,000 Completion Percentage: 0.1

For something you could complete in the downtime between Dota matches, frantic FPS Devil Dagger's one and only achievement has managed to defy 99.9 percent of players for well over a year now. That might seem odd given how simple its requirement sounds: all you have to do is survive for 500 seconds. I mean, I do that all the time. See. That last 500 seconds? I just survived that. 

But yeah. Surviving Devil Daggers is a wee bit tougher than running out the clock in real life. Despite the game selling for a mere fiver, just 0.1 percent of players have managed to avoid croaking for the 8 minutes and 20 seconds necessary to snag the 'Devil Dagger' achievement. Watching replays of those runs is equal parts mesmerizing and depressing, making it painfully clear just how amateur my own skills are. I could probably spend the next year playing nothing but Devil Daggers and still not come close to the graceful death-dealing of players like the world-record-smashing bowsr. When the apocalypse hits and the whole world goes to hell, I'll be the redshirt incinerated in the first ten seconds.

Crusader Kings 2

Not so Bad - Survive the End Times Total Owners: 1.4 million Completion Percentage: 0.1

Crusader Kings 2, champion of the grand strategy genre, is full of intricate, multi-layered achievements few players have managed to unlock. From installing a female ruler in the five baronies of the Orthodox Pentarchy, to trampling the Pope with a horde of elephants, over a dozen eclectic achievements are currently sitting at a completion rate of less than 0.1 percent.  

The one I want to shout out, though, is the 'Not so Bad' achievement awarded for surviving the End Times. Ostensibly, you unlock this achievement by surviving the rise of the Prophet of Doom and the Black Death he's convinced will destroy humanity. A Crusader Kings player going by the username Xolotl123 on Reddit, however, inadvertently earned themselves the achievement due to their investment in high-quality hospital care and their imprisonment of the Prophet for disturbing the peace. The Prophet then hanged himself, but not before sending the player a letter that read: 'If you are reading this letter, I am with God, or with Lucifer..., if so, then you were right. If not, then I was right.' 

I've not had the time to play Crusader Kings 2, but after reading this story, I think I'm going to have to clear my schedule. Any game where you can avert the End Times through hygiene is a winner in my book. 

Rising Storm / Red Orchestra 2

Bringing a sword to a sword fight – As an American soldier kill an Axis soldier wielding a Katana, with a Katana. Stick it to Tojo – As an Allied soldier, kill 100 Axis soldiers with a bayonet. Total Owners: 2.7 million (unreliable due to free weekend) Completion percentage: 0.1 - 0.2

Rising Storm's focus on historically authentic, asymmetrical WWII combat means that, naturally, American soldiers do not spawn into the battlefield with katanas. In order to get one, you have to defeat a Japanese soldier who's carrying one. And in order to get the "Bringing a sword..." achievement, you then have to pick up their katana, find another Japanese soldier with a katana, and then defeat them with the weapon of their ancestors. It's a hard scenario to concoct in an FPS where rifles and grenades are the preferred way to fight.

Bit.Trip Beat

MEAT.BOY SMELLS - Get a perfect in 1-1 using only a game pad.Total Owners: 311,00Achievement percentage: 1.6

Heresy! An achievement that requires ditching the holy mouse and keyboard for a filthy gamepad? What does BIT.TRIP BEAT take us for, console players? Everyone knows a good M+K combo is the only way to play. Sure, it makes driving games a bit twitchy, and performing combos in third-person action games can be tricky without analogue sticks, and fighting games don't always work so great, and stealth sequences tend to be a little wonky with WASD…

Okay. So maybe gamepads aren't that bad. Still, locking an achievement to a specific piece of hardware is a surefire way to tick off achievement hunters. The BIT.TRIP devs found that out the hard way with the game's 'SIXTH.SENSE' achievement, which required players to beat a level using Razer's short-lived Sixense motion controller. The backlash to 'SIXTH.SENSE' drove the devs to delete the achievement from Steam completely, which technically makes it one of the rarest achievements out there. Not quite as rare as a game with motion controls that don't feel like total garbage, but still…

The Stanley Parable

Go outside - Don't play The Stanley Parable for five years Total Owners: 2.1 million Number of achievers: 2 verified through AStats (6.9 percent on Steam) 

Games are meant to be played—we usually take that much for granted. It's a little odd, then, when a game actively encourages you not to play it. Odd, however, is what The Stanley Parable's all about. I mean, one of the game's endings involves running back and forth between two buttons for four hours. And that's not to mention the pointed commentary on the nature of free will and the human tendency towards obeisance. Like I said, odd. 

The Stanley Parable's weirdest elements, however, are definitely its achievements. In addition to an achievement simply entitled 'Unachievable' (paradoxically earned by 3.9 percent of players), there's the 'Go outside' achievement that tasks players with not playing the game for five years straight. Since The Stanley Parable released in October 2013, no one can legitimately earn this achievement until October next year. Of course, that hasn't stopped some unscrupulous Steam users from setting their computer clocks forward to unlock the achievement early.  

Cheating to not play a game? I guess some people will do anything for their sweet cheevos. 

Garry's Mod

Addict - You have wasted a year of your life playing GMod! Total Owners: 13.2 million Number of achievers: 9 verified on AStats (1.8 percent on Steam) 

You can do a lot of things in the 8760 hours that make up a single year. You could play 105,120 matches of Rocket League. You could marathon the entire current run of The Simpsons—all 617 episodes—38 times over. You could hitch a ride on a rocket and fly to Mars, with enough time left over to plant the seeds of an interplanetary rebellion. 

You could also spend every one of those 8760 hours playing Garry's Mod in order to unlock the 'Addict' achievement. And when I say playing, I don't just mean booting up the game and letting it idle in the menu. You have to be connected to an active server for your time to count. Unsurprisingly, the hefty investment involved has kept the achievement's completion percentage at just 1.8 percent, even with achievement hunters over at AStats devising strategies for minimizing the resources used by Garry's Mod so you can leave it running in the background while you tend to other tasks. 

I have to wonder, though, how many people left their computers on while they were working or sleeping solely to unlock this achievement? At a modest estimate, 8760 hours' worth of electricity would cost roughly $210 USD, which is a whole lot of money for a single achievement. Kind of puts all those pesky microtransactions to shame, doesn't it? 

Train Simulator

DLC scenarios Total Owners: 995,000 Completion percentage: 0

Speaking of money, Train Simulator boasts some of the rarest achievements on Steam, but that's not because they're brutally difficult or stubbornly obscure. Heck, the achievement descriptions make it pretty obvious what you've got to do: the 'It Works For Dogs!' achievement reads 'Awarded for completing scenario [RailfanMode] Barking. It's not like the game's unpopular either, with nearly a million owners on Steam and a median playtime of a respectable 7.5 hours. 

No, what makes Train Simulator's achievements so rare is that fiendish friend of ours: DLC. Train Simulator is notorious for having the most expensive DLC on Steam, with its total value currently sitting at $6254.43 USD. Worse, Train Simulator ties many of its achievements to its DLC, leading to a wealth of 0 percent and 0.1 percent completion rates across the board.  

But that $6254.43? I'd want a real honest-to-god train if I was forking over that much cash. If it was anything like Train Simulator, though, it'd probably lock out the train whistle as premium DLC. Steam whistle: only $0.99 per toot! 

Ark: Survival Evolved

Artifact Archaeologist – You personally retrieved all Eight Artifacts! Total Owners: 4.7 million Completion Percentage: 0.2

A whole lot of people play ARK: Survival Evolved, and yet even the most common of its seven achievements has been earned by less than 5 percent of players. But while 95 percent of ARK players haven't defeated the game's first Ultimate Life Form, 99.8 percent remain vexed by its toughest achievement: 'Artifact Archaeologist', rewarded for retrieving every Artifact in the game. It sounds simple enough, but this is where ARK's nature as an Early Access game comes back to bite it on the rump.  

According to the achievement description, there are only eight artifacts in ARK: Survival Evolved. This isn't true. There are 14 artifacts in total, 10 of which can be obtained through normal play, 3 which are locked to the Scorched Earth DLC, and one which can only be spawned through a console command. For a game that has already seen its fair share of controversy, ARK has left quite a few achievement hunters pretty disappointed. Still, at least they can take solace in the giant bees that have just been added to the game. That's something, right?  

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

Dragonrider - Tame and ride 5 dragons Total Owners: 11 million (unreliable due to free weekend) Completion percentage: 0.8

I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume you've played Skyrim, or at least heard enough about it to understand the game's premise. You're the dragonborn, you need to save the world from an evil dragon, yada yada yada. In short, the game basically revolves around dragons. 

How, then, is the achievement for riding dragons so rare? Only 0.8 percent of the millions of Skyrim players have tamed five or more of the mythical creatures and taken to the skies, which makes exactly zero sense to me. Who wouldn't want a dragon as their personal chauffeur? It's not like you'd have to worry about anyone jacking your scaly pal; any thief foolish enough to try would be charred to a crisp before they could shout Fus Ro Dah. I guess Skyrim players are just too busy getting busy and fighting Macho Man Randy Savage to spend their time becoming certified dragon pilots. 

Black Mesa

Rare Specimen – Send the Hidden Hat to Xen. Total Owners: 500,000 Completion percentage: 2.1 percent 

Hats are all the rage these days. I have it on good authority from my stock broker that the hat economy is only going to go up—and that's coming from a man who wears a top hat, so you know it's legit. My wardrobe is already full of baseball caps, bowler hats, fezes, and beanies, just waiting for the day when my fabric fortune will be ready to claim. The only thing I don't quite understand is why my broker keeps mentioning Dota. Eh, never mind. I'm sure it's nothing. 

Video games, it turns out, are just as keen to cash in on the hat craze. Black Mesa, the fan-made recreation of the original Half-Life, adds in the 'Rare Specimen' achievement that tasks good old Gordon Freeman with locating a hidden purple top hat and lugging it all the way from the Black Mesa Research Facility on Earth to the alien dimension of Xen. It might not sound that tricky, but apparently Gordon's more interested in trivial things like saving the world instead of securing his future in the hat economy--only 2.1 percent of players have carried the top hat all the way to its new interdimensional marketplace. 

Wait, that gives me an idea. What if I started selling digital hats instead of physical ones? Ooh, I think I'm onto something here. I better stop typing before someone beats me to the punch… 

PC gaming has a long and storied history of menu and customization sliders. So long and storied, in fact, that I can't be bothered to research it. Instead, I'm just going to post gifs of some of my favorite game sliders, be they sliders that adjust a character's facial features, body parts, or accessories, or ones that let you tweak some element of a game from zero to 100, and beyond!

Okay, not beyond. Typically, they just go to 100.

Here are PC gaming's best sliders. If I missed one of your favorites, just slide into the comments and let me know.

Foot Size: Reign of Kings

Open world survival game Reign of Kings has a lot going for it—including the ability to kill yourself by bashing your face with a rock you can store in your own butt—and that includes a surprisingly robust character creation utility, which allows you to adjust nearly every aspect of your avatar.

Of all the sliders you can use to lovingly or comically sculpt your character, my favorite is the foot size slider. It's notable, I feel, that when maxed out it actually and appreciably changes the height of your character by about six in-game inches. More games should allow this: just imagine Geralt sitting in that tub dangling a pair of size 75 feet over the side.

Sex Appeal: Saints Row The Third

Saint's Row The Third's character creation menu is refreshingly unrestricted, allowing you to create any sort of character you like. This isn't one of the standard "You're a dude, so you have a dude voice and can't wear makeup" type of utilities: you can pretty much do whatever the hell you like. It's wonderful and inclusive and literally every game should follow its example.

The best of all its many sliders, however, is the Sex Appeal slider, which lets you embiggen your boobs or your junk, as seen above. Feast your bulging eyes on some bulges.

Flex Scale: Garry's Mod

Memes, comics, machinima—there are all sorts of wonders (and horrors) Garry's Mod can be used for. The Face Poser tool is just one of many useful gadgets, but it comes with an amazing slider called Flex Scale. Amazing, that is, when applied to a model it wasn't meant for.

As any comic creator can tell you, the TF2 models, while compatible with Garry's Mod, don't quite work the same way as the HL2 models when using the Face Poser. Still, the results are bizarre and disturbing and certainly entertaining. And if you're looking to create actual, usable facial expressions on TF2 characters, there's one or two mods for Garry's Mod that make it much easier.

Brightness: Every Horror Game Ever

As a huge scaredy-pants who doesn't like being scared in his pants, I'm always appreciative of the brightness slider that comes with Every Horror Game Ever. While its intentions are to make sure you can't see the dark and spooky places very well, and thus heighten the scares, I use it for the opposite reason. To make things as bright as possible. So the scares aren't so scary.

So no, Every Horror Game Ever, I will not fall into your trap by adjusting the brightness so the mark in the center is barely visible. I will use it so all of the marks are as visible as humanly possible. Thanks for the warning, though.

Eyelashes: Black Desert Online

I've never personally played Black Desert Online, and after tinkering with its character creation menu for a bit, I probably never will. That's no diss, it's a compliment: there are so many options in BDO's character creation menu I can't imagine ever completing the process of building my avatar. It's amazing.

Among the umpteen various sliders, however, I'm picking the eyelash length slider as my favorite. I'm used to selecting eyebrows for my character, but never lashes, and not only are there several type to choose from, you can dictate how long they are. That's customization.

Body Oil Intensity: WWE 2K17

Why yes, I did just buy a $50 game simply so I could use a slider to coat a beefy hairless man with oil. The character customization is pretty great in WWE 2K17, and even includes sliders for enhancing veins in your wrestler's chest and stomach, if you're looking to create a wrestler suffering from acute thrombophlebitis. But, I'm going with Body Oil Intensity slider as my favorite, probably due to the word 'Intensity.' I think it's a great word to describe the amount of oil one has smeared on their body.

Body Oil Assistant: "So, Bob The Wrestler, how much oil should I slather on your veiny, hairless body before the Very Important Wrestling Fight?"*

Bob The Wrestler: "An intense amount. The most intense amount there is."

*Sorry if that's not convincing dialogue. I don't watch wrestling.

Endowment: Conan Exiles

Well. I guess won't post an animated gif on this one, though if you want to see a naked man's dong getting rapidly bigger and smaller you can check it out in this post or contact me on Skype very late in the evenings (if anyone but me answers, hang up immediately). Conan's Endowment Slider is so great it's even been set to music!

I suspect players either opt for setting the endowment slider either all the way to the right, or all the way to the left. There's simply no middle-ground when it comes to video game wieners. Though, with modding tools now available, I suspect we'll see more options for genital sculpting sometime soon.

Dialog Volume: Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel

When I'm asked about my feelings on Borderland's Claptrap—note that I've never once been asked—I'd have to gently say I'm not a fan. The bot's got gusto, but when it comes to the mathematics of humor, the equation volume + quantity = comedy simply doesn't add up. To put it bluntly, Claptrap talks too much, too loudly, and I hate him.

While Borderlands 2 didn't have a separate slider for dialogue volume, Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel did. I can only assume the reason for it is fan feedback. Shush, little robot. You're trying too hard.

This article was originally published in PC Gamer issue 298. For more quality articles about all things PC gaming, you can subscribe now in the UK and the US.

There s never been anything quite like Garry s Mod, and I d hazard a guess at there never being anything like it ever again. It s a mod of the Source engine, made to enable just about anyone to build, pose or simply mess around with its tools and tricks. It s a freeform sandbox designed to let you do whatever you want.

At least, that s it at the base level. On top of making it easy for players to toy around, it also gives modders a framework to work on new, often absurd ideas. Entirely original game modes have been created in Garry s Mod, short films have been made with it using players as actors, or utilising complex stop-motion techniques. And it s one of the most popular games on Steam. It celebrates its 10th birthday this month, and, as of January this year, has sold 10 million copies.

Since its release in 2006, Garry s Mod has grown into a hub for a host of other games and weird concepts, primarily developed by fans and small teams. There s one, though, that really took the cake in its size and ambition: GMod Tower. First publicly available in July 2009, GMod Tower had one primary aim: to create a large social space within Garry s Mod where people could chat, play together, and generally create a community that would accommodate and welcome anyone. A hotel-style lobby for people to meet and chat, with the capability for the infinite rooms of an endless hotel tower.

It was developed by PixelTail Games, a group based in Washington, but brought together contributors from around the globe.

A team of four, working under the names MacDGuy, Mr Sunabouzu, Nican, and AzuiSleet, were the ones that worked on the first public release of GMod Tower, after some years of people dropping in and out of the project. It was one of the most ambitious things ever made in Garry s Mod, and was greeted with the success that sort of ambition often warrants. Mere hours after release, GMod Tower s website hit two million views. It was far too popular so much so that Garry s Mod s server limit was upped by its developers just to cope.

Featuring at launch a couple of minigames, a mode akin to Half-Life Deathmatch: Source and another not dissimilar to Super Monkey Ball, the mod was already fleshed out. There were even movie nights: players could get together and watch streamed videos while hanging out in the tower s lobby.

Its popularity was perhaps one of GMod Tower s many downfalls: it was a mod of a mod, made by a few fans that wanted to create something new. It didn t have the support of a regular income through sales, nor the power of a massive development team. As 2011 rolled into 2012, GMod Tower shut down, closing its doors without any clear intention to return.

As with any social space that is shut down, closed, or built over, those who had enjoyed inhabiting it were left disappointed. In the Steam group for GMod Tower, users asked where it had gone. The development team were pretty quiet. One Steam user summed up the prevailing mood, saying simply, I want to play again in gmod tower :( .

Then, in April 2012, GMod Tower returned almost out of nowhere, with a host of updates. Almost like a version 2.0, it arrived to a fanfare from those who missed their hub, their place to talk. It did come with a caveat, however: it had not been profitable or sustainable for some months. Hosting the servers was costly, and the team didn t want to rely upon microtransactions or adverts to fund it.

And yet, GMod Tower came back with a bang. New features, a new and improved lobby map, and more. Over time, the game grew to having seven individual modes wrapped inside the tower. From minigolf to a game inspired by Mother 3, PixelTail Games remained committed, and the players recognised that, rewarding it with their love and support.

With its re-release, the initial core ethos was reinforced: this was to be a social hub. Be nice, friendly, and kind, and you were welcomed with open arms into GMod Tower.

What distinguished GMod Tower from many other projects with similar ambitions to be welcoming to all, regardless of who they were, was that it worked, and it worked tremendously. The vast majority of stories from players are of a positive community.

For the game s fifth anniversary, in 2014, the developers held a small raffle. There was one requirement for entering: you had to tell a story of your experience in GMod Tower. Some of these stories were short and over in just a couple of sentences, but many were filled with emotion and love. Over a hundred people told lengthy stories of their experiences, archived on the game s forums.

People were naming the many friends they had made, even partners they met through it. GhostDj told of how an admin changed everyone s player models to dogs for an evening, and they ran around barking like one big pack. Boltaction17 said they managed to get over 20 people to dance to The Safety Dance by Men Without Hats, and it just made them happy to see everyone coming together for something so fun and silly. One user, Davem322, simply ended their story with We are a group. We are brothers and sisters. We are the Gmod Tower.

Over the years, PixelTail Games finished off a couple other projects in Garry s Mod, from a horror map called Gm_Apartment to Elevator: Source, the one true elevator simulator. But behind the scenes, they were working on something new. Something beyond GMod Tower: Tower Unite.

A standalone release, Tower Unite would move the concept on from Garry s Mod, and onto its own two feet, the idea being to create an entire game that encapsulated the ideals upon which GMod Tower had been built.

Once Tower Unite was released on Steam in Early Access, however, GMod Tower had to go down. PixelTail Games couldn t host both games, and Tower Unite was now their sole project. There were no official tools ever released for hosting your own tower the only way to play was through the official server. That meant that once PixelTail Games took their server down, that was it for the original GMod Tower.

I spoke to Macklin Guy, the founder of PixelTail Games, about GMod Tower, and moving on. As for why the company had to do so, the Source engine and Garry s Mod itself limited us our creations and ideas, Guy told me.

It was a constant battle for us. We knew we had to expand past being a mod when we had to take advantage of undocumented features of Source s level format just to get it running. A good chunk of the things we have done (and continue to do) in Tower Unite would never have been possible in Garry s Mod.

On top of being a force for good in the community, GMod Tower meant a lot to the development team working on it, too.

The project fostered countless connections made by the community across the world. This had a massive effect on the lives of all of us. People would log on daily just to hang out with their friends.

Guy even met his wife on GMod Tower. They ve been happily married for a year and a half.

Tower brought a lot of people together. Just being a small part of that has had a huge impact on all of us and is one of the catalysts that drives Tower Unite forward.

The tower closed down in April 2016, after just under seven years serving as Garry s Mod s largest social space. The PixelTails Games team said their goodbyes too, through a video reminiscing about everything that had gone on in the tower. There is no longer a way to play GMod Tower. While all the relevant files are available on the Steam Workshop, without the server it s impossible to play as intended. The customisation systems are gone, game modes no longer function, and, most importantly, there s no one around.

Every map is now a ghost town, a set of what once was in GMod Tower, a relic of the stories told by those who were there. Without the chatter of people having conversations around the place, the lounge is eerily quiet.

Many people who played GMod Tower have moved on to Tower Unite it picked up over $73,000 in an Indiegogo campaign, and has received regular updates since entering Early Access. It s distinctly similar to its predecessor, but Tower Unite also has its differences: it s not a part of Garry s Mod, and so lacks that infinitely wide variety of players to join in on the fun.

Because of that, those previous stories are being left behind, but that s so that others can create their own so that a social space like this can flourish on its own. GMod Tower, like Garry s Mod itself, might well be a flashpoint in games, never to be recreated in the same way again. While other social games have found success, the broad and absurd appeal of Garry s Mod meant millions of players could be introduced to a hub that would welcome them.

It s still fun to walk around that ghost town, and find the places where those stories took place. The roof where someone was going on a wild goose chase for an item, the cinema where people gathered to watch funny videos, or the fountain where players waved goodbye to the tower.

I don t think anyone will ever recreate GMod Tower; the stars aligned to make it such a welcoming place. But it s heartwarming to look around the place that made so many people of all creeds, cultures, and types happy. You can t call GMod Tower abandoned: it simply moved on. But the patch of virtual ground it was built on will remain special.

Garry's Mod was originally released as a Half-Life 2 mod in 2004, before being re-launched as a standalone sandbox physics games in 2006. Over the next eight years, it rang up a cool six million copies—an impressive achievement by any measure. But in the year and four months since then, it's sold another four million copies.

Jesus christ. GMod sold its ten millionth copy over new years.

— Garry Newman (@garrynewman) January 2, 2016

With all due respect, I share Newman's apparent surprise and confusion. Four million unit sales of any indie PC game in a single year is remarkable, but to do it in the ninth year of standalone release is unexpected, to put it mildly. Strange, even. Garry's Mod is clearly very good at what it does, but it's been doing it for almost a decade now. So the obvious question is, Why?

Newman attributed much of the surge to YouTube, Twitch, and Steam sales, which he said have been having a snowball effect on sales over the past few years. The more players, the more videos and streams, the more people watching, the more people buying and playing and streaming, he said. The steam sales really boost that effect. On a pretty average day it sells about 3000 copies. On Christmas Day [this year] it sold just over 75,000 copies.

He also pointed out that the age of Garry's Mod, which is built on the Source Engine, can actually work to its advantage. Most Source Engine games run on anything, from the shittiest ten-year-old windows XP laptop to the latest Alienware monstrosity. And it doesn't just run on the shitty laptop, it runs really well. I think that's something we overlook as game developers—awesome performance should be considered a feature, with higher priority than graphics, he continued.

There was a lot of outrage and negativity when we announced that we were going to charge for it so I wanted to show people that this was a good thing. That the money would be used to develop the mod further and allow me to concentrate on it full time. People are amazed that a ten-year-old game is still selling really well—but I guess Windows is over 30 years old, and it's still selling. The only real difference is that I didn't bundle up and re-charge people for the updates we made. Hopefully people don't see it as such a bad thing now, in retrospect.

I'd say it's sure looking that way.

Thanks, GamesIndustry.

The sandbox physics game Garry's Mod has been around for just about forever—since late 2004, to be precise, first as a mod for Half-Life 2 and then as a standalone release. It's sold more than six million copies since then, and after all this time remains one of the most popular games on Steam, currently holding 11th place on the top 100 concurrent players list. And now, more than ten years later, there's finally talk of a follow-up.

The word came during a PCGamesN interview with Garry's Mod creator Garry Newman, when the site asked if he'd ever consider increasing the game's longstanding $10/ 7 price tag. "We wouldn't raise the price now, I mean we re kind of working on a sequel, so it d be stupid to the raise the price, really," Newman replied. "It s early days. We re looking at having more VR stuff in it—that s the big point of it. And it won t be called Garry s Mod 2."

That's a long way from an announcement, and given the way that Newman and Facepunch Studios work—"at their own pace," you might say—anything more official may well be a long way off. The future of virtual reality may be a factor as well: If Oculus Rift, Vive, or whatever else comes along goes over big, Newman ought to have a lot more incentive to push a VR-centric sequel than he will if they tank.