A lot of these CDs were despised by content creators, since those who made them often did it without obtaining permission, thus profiting off of others' free work. Yet, by virtue of being on a disk rather than a webpage that went extinct 15+ years ago, the CDs frequently contain the only evidence something existed. So there's a certain irony.
@@sinisterz3r090 it's copyright violation. which is what piracy is. mod authors have copyright on their works. edit: because of all the follow up stuff,. i'll specify: mod authors only have copyright on their work if it is an approved derivative, with permission. valve is probably the only one who ever grants that for mods, and only for a select few. even without that, a mod's individual new raw art/audio assets , prior to inclusion in a mod (and possibly once included in a mod, but it gets really murky then) are copyright of the creator, as long as they are original works. my experience may be different from most because the only mod i worked on was one of the lucky ones that was up to valve's standards and recieved direct support. people keep bringing up monetary gain from mods in the latest replies, i never said anything about profiting from a mod. I don't know where that's coming from. even if you are granted permission to create a derivative, you might not be able to profit off the work. being granted permission may be dependent on signing certain rights away.
If Internet speeds had remained basically the same since 2000, that would absolutely have happened. There's a review of the Daikatana demo back then lamenting how it's over 100 MB: "Sure, it's getting more and more common for companies to release game demos which exceed 100 megs, but it doesn't help soften the review any for us gamers on 56k modems that have to wait half a day to get the file."
@@IsmailofeRegime What's unfortunate is that, thanks to the fall of physical media, fan content hosted on dedicated fan sites or other locations is now even more likely to be lost to the ages, due to the greater proclivity of censorship on the Internet due to overly litigious companies or losers with nothing better to do. Physical media really does need to make a comeback, or more specifically, a stronger archive culture that will do everything in its power to preserve any and all content that gets uploaded online.
Those audio skits are a hell of a throwback. These cd's were content theft but in a weird way they preserved them from the eventual shutdown of most Fan Sites. There's no telling how many more have been lost forever.
The audio bits remind me a lot of playing Sven Co-op. Thanks to the way some of Half Life's dialog is recorded it's extremely easy to sentence mix, and consequently doing so was a huge thing in Goldsrc modding.
The non-Adidas HEV needs a return to modern gaming. With the amount of tracksuits on display, we can only speculate what Eastern European country made them hahaa!
Wow. Those audio skits were very much ahead of their time. You can imagine them in a modern TH-cam video. By the way, 11:07 - 11:08 is from the ‘Donkey Rhubarb’ album. The track is ‘Pancake Lizard’ also by Aphex Twin. [EDIT: Swish, hopefully no one noticed hahaa!]
@@petrolhex7774 Oooh, yeah, that actually continued to have a long history as a method! Zone-Sama did it with her absolute classic Teen Titans stuff, the technique was put mainstream by L4D SFM stuff, and a massive number of 3DCG hentai animation creators working with existing franchises now use it. There was one Walking Dead/Wolf Among Us crossover lewd animation with absolutely stunning cinematography I saw that used it.
I always thought it was funny how HL and Aphex Twin's logos look familiar, the audio is perfect it's the first Aphex Twin meme from over 20 years ago and it makes me laugh like it was made yesterday.
And like any bygone era you can't really save the ephemera that show what it was actually like. There's just so much unspoken that will be lost to the ravages of time that isn't possible to preserve and so much modern baggage that you bring into it; you can't feel what people felt back then unless you already know because you experienced it. Take e.g. computers becoming 60% faster every year for over a decade. The expectation was that a 3 year old PC was basically scrap metal and only a PC made in the last year or so could run the latest 3D games even acceptably. The end of Dennard scaling was not expected, even by the people at Intel who were targeting 8 GHz by 2003 with the pentium 4 (the ALU was double pumped and would have run at 16 GHz). In the 90's the joke platform that was the IBM PC went from being a laughing stock to becoming *the* gaming platform. By 1992 the PC became so fast, CDs became so cheap, harddrives so necessary and proper sound hardware so ubiquitous that PC could do in software what other platforms could not even do in hardware. Without any BLIT, sprites or other hardware acceleration you could just make a 3D game. In 1992 in particular we had Wolfenstein 3D which really got the first person, speed and action aspect right and was the first popular first person shooter; followed by Doom a year later which at one point had more installations than Windows 95 thanks to this new thing called shareware. Ultima underworld also released in 1992 and it had textured ceilings, floors, walls, sloping floors, level over level geometry, swimming, jumping, diplomacy, rudimentary sneaking and so on. It was one of the first ever immersive games; you weren't controlling a party of players, you weren't moving the party in discrete 90 degree angles; you were playing you. There was nothing like it before and it seemingly just appeared one day as if aliens dropped a game from 10 years into the future for the 386. VR was a big thing for a little bit, until it died down again (not the first, nor the last time it did this). There was a hope for the future and a curiosity that is gone from the gaming industry today; things were evolving *very* quickly, nobody knew quite what a game could be. Ultima underworld and its followers (e.g. system shock) where an influence on half-life to try and bring shooters from this arcadey style of something like quake to a more immersive, scripted, movie-like adventure where you were just playing some guy who happened to be at the center of a shitty situation. Multiplayer over LAN was common. As were physically hauling your computer to a LAN-party to play with other people in a lag free environment. Gameplay over the internet did not have any good netcode, so you had to lead your shots by about as much as the other player had time to move before the message that you had fired at something reached the server. There was no latency correction. Microtransactions didn't exist. Skins were free and user made. There were no centralized servers, they were run by users who could be any random dude with a decent connection. Shortly after Half-life was released LAN-like play over the internet had just become a thing with some kind of half-assed netcode. Most people were still on 56k modems which tied up the phone while playing so you couldn't take or receive calls; and the phone was on the wall, not in your pocket. The mentality of gamers today is nothing remotely similar. You didn't unlock skins; you didn't get XP; you didn't grind for achievements. The gameplay was it's own reward. There was a mod for Half-life called Natural selection; an asymmetric FPS/RTS where players where RTS units and the commander was a player who ordered people around in top view like an RTS. It was common for games to last many hours in endless stalemates; partially just because players were bad and static defenses were a bit too effective in early versions. A 6 hour game that went on until the server crashed wasn't a terrible experience that made people mad; it was "epic". Today it would be regarded as "suboptimal XP" and people would beg for it to end after half an hour, any setback and they would concede the game to start a new one. When you look back on history and "what the Egyptians believed" or something similar; know that for sure you have no idea what they actually felt. Maybe it was just a useful lie or an amusing story they told; what they *actually* felt and believed is gone. It cannot be recreated.
It's weird. I am an 80's kid. I do collect old media because it makes me feel a semblance of normality and a better time. Call it nostalgia if you will. I miss the days of going to video shop to hire video games and movies and even music CDs from the library which was free. I would trade it for the internet if I could. The internet is information overload.
@@soylentgreenb Never tought a comment would get me emotional, that was a good read sir, well said, I was born in the late 90' so that experience was never close to me, but after swithcing to PC from console in 2015 and looking back, I empathize with you, be sure that I stay clear of any online multiplayer nonsense, it really has become a crazy world up there, nobody is really enjoying themself and it all slowly became a toxic cespool of tryhards and people that take on games like they're jobs, plus as you said add all the seasonal passes, DLCs, monetizations schemes, broken games at launch and you get the sad picture of modern gaming
If there were some way to save TH-cam comments, this would absolutely be in my archive. All I can really do is reply to it and hope I may one day look through my own history to revisit this. You speak about things very precious and dear to me in ways that I seldomly am able to articulate. Thank you for remembering that formative time of my life as lovingly as I try to.
its so cool seeing old pieces of history like this, from an era of online gaming i missed out on entirely. would love to see more videos on this kind of stuff, if you're interested!
it's rare seeing cave story pfps in the wild, also I agree, these are some really interesting little pieces of history, wonder if there's more of these
I remember the best network night i ever had back in 2002 with 8 of my old school friends playing Half Life multiplayer on the Rats levels. I was the alien from the Ridley Scott film, my now brother in law was homer and a few of my mates were Kermit, Lego man and Yoda. We played from 4pm till 8am without ever stopping. That was one of the best nights of my life and I remember it fondly to this day
On the topic of 90s shovelware CDs, there's an extremely underrated TH-cam series called "Shovelware Diggers", which premise is to dig through bizarre and forgotten DOS/Win3.1 games found on a shareware-harvested disc. It has hundreds of episodes at this point, so there's a lot of jank to binge on for people who enjoy this kind of stuff.
Patch Notes: *The glitching during the KTK mod footage is not a part of the maps, rather it is an error with my virtual machine. Using "Software" rendering should fix any issues. *The sound effects in the Half-Life Windows theme are actually from a prototype version of the game! This includes older versions of Barney and the VOX's voices, and a sound used by a "Boid" creature from the HL Alpha. Thank you for watching! I am amazed at the positive feedback on this video so soon, I appreciate it a ton.
I remember when my brother in law brought a copy of this back from Electronics Boutique where he worked. I remember every one of those goofy sound files to this day. I must have explored every file on that disk. I especially remember filling some of my earliest maps with the prefabs that came on this CD.
Wow. That hit me straight in the nostalgia. We used to do this all the time since only my one friend had internet so we made our own mixed CD's of mods, backgrounds, winamp skins and desktop themes. God I miss desktop themes and gaudy winamp skins
this reminds me of my days of soldier of fortune online where people had all kinds of crazy mods and you'd sometimes be stuck downloading custom files for 20 minutes before entering a match
Yeah, "stuck downloading custom files for 20 minutes before entering a match" was also something I experienced playing HL and its mods online. If it wasn't waiting for a custom map to download, it was waiting for custom sounds or textures.
I had a Pokémon one in 2000 with badly translated roms and a wierd fan game the characters looked like habbo hotel a bit and there was a maze, had a ton of crys from the anime and themes, the cds were being made by my step cousin, I also had one called Tiberian Sun Add Ons which I got at the computer fare
i wish i could get my hands on these. i LOVE going through random stuff, as if i was looking for the diamond in the rough, except the rough is good in its own little way. i miss these cds and i want more of them, random old stuff thrown together is truly a wonderous adventure all its own
Amazing find. I had this CD and this brought back a lot of memories. We used the custom models in our Sven co-op games. As we didn't have the Internet we would carry our PCs to each other's houses. I can still remember how heavy a CRT monitor would feel a mile in!
man 5:55 takes me back :') one of the first hldm servers i've played was a rocket crowbar 1.9 server back in like 2010/2011, it was one of the most fun experiences i've had in my older half-life days and it inspired me to host my own rocket crowbar server from roughly 2015-2019. i think that server is still up to this day, albeit pretty unpopular nowadays sadly as it's almost always empty it's great to have these legendary bits of history archived, i remember how hard it was to find a working download for rocket crowbar 1.9 around 10 years ago and it has only gotten harder since also, the map at 7:45 is !war! and it only has 2 spawn points iirc, i never expected i'd see it again out of the blue :0
I remember an early Web site which had 2 huge map packs and 2 huge model packs - the latter which had models such as kermit, toothpaste tube, skeleton, etc.
Im obsessed with obsure media from long ago, before i was born to have the chance to see it first had myself and knowing that some media I could have loved is gone forever due to lots of things like websites not being backed up, hardrives going bad, or people straight up forgetting them is saddending. I just love videos showing games that cant be ran through conventional means, as niche as that is, lots of abstract point and click adventure games, mods made my high schoolers, and flash games I cant experience but some people who have a deep connection to them showing them to the few people intrested.
I had a CD of this kind for half life 2. I bought it in a magazine, thinking it's the actual half-life 2 (I had a lot of full games from magazines back then). Sadly it was just mods and maps and stuff like this, but I had a look at it few months later when I got my hands on the actual game. That was in 2004-2005
I don't know what is all on this CD, but I am happy it exists. I doubt it, but I used to make levels and prefabs and I know some of my prefabricated brushes made it into maps, because most shovelware maps were just prefabs stuck into level architecture, so its possible in some of the hundreds of levels on this CD there might be something I made uncredited in 1998-2000, and it's out there.
This opened up a tidal wave of memories for me. Half life never really stopped being a part of my life at any point, it’s been consistent nostalgia cause I always kept playing it and every valve title and spin off and mod out there, but the obscure shareware discs I never really hung onto the memories of, but immediately got reminded by shit like the wallpapers and the grappling hook mod for DM, and the compressed aphex twin songs lmaoo, reminded me of David firth’s old stuff.
Great video! I think Half-Life is my favourite game/era for mods and add-ons, and I used to love getting some from demo discs. Also, the end segment with the audio skits gave me flashbacks of my bro and I making our own using the audio files, haha. I guess they were "TH-cam poops" before even TH-cam, lol.
That was...entertaining. I love those shovelware CDs from the 90s. Rediscovered a lot of my old stuff (artworks, renderings, maps, music), originally uploaded to different BBSes.
I'm so glad you made a video like this. CDs like these are my favorite. Nothing is more fun than downloading a shitton of shovelware CDs like this and binging the literal timecapsules of information, inside jokes, clan stuff, and so on. Just feels special.
These make me wonder if any of the maps on there would've been completely lost today had it not been for them being scalped to be throw onto these CD compilations. This was the days when there wasn't one convinient hub for game mods, and often these maps would be stored on some long defunct forum or webpage made by the creators.
That Kill The King hldm mod is completely and utterly forgotten, I tried looking it up and couldn't find _anything_ online about it, not even a mention of it. That's impressive.
The contents of this CD actually look very much like my own HL folder of stuff that I created for the game over the years. Maps, mods, prefabs, sounds, wallpapers, etc. All ranging from absolute amateur to semi-pro.
Thank you for this beautiful video. I didn't know shovelware was a thing, even though one of my first experiences with video games was with what you could call a homebrew shovelware CD. A friend of my dad threw together hundreds of DOS and Win9x games on a disk, and I played the crap out of them as a kid. Most of the stuff wouldn't even run, but a lot of those games I remember fondly. From the classics like Doom, Wolfenstein, Commander Keen, Duke Nukem, Dangerous Dave and SkiFree to more obscure titles like Microman, SkyRoads, Aldo's Adventure and Cold Dream. Heck, now I want to play them again ;)
I need to find my bootleg homebrew CD that somehow ported the SNES DBZ fighting games to PC without using emulation. I feel like that probably is something worth preserving, because while I didn't question it as a kid, now I'm very confused as to how that exists. That shouldn't have been a thing that existed, yet I had that thing.
What a blast from the past, I actually had this CD and remember using the green 3D lambda wallpaper for a while. There's even a chance I still have it somewhere, I know I still have my Half Life and Opposing Force CDs kicking about.
Quite the throwback. Those custom player models and skins remind me of a site back in the day called "Polycount" or something like that which hosted custom player models and skin uploads for many of the popular FPS games at the time like Quake and Unreal. Homer Simpson, Bender, your favorite superhero, someone's original creation, etc. There was also Fileplanet which had hosted a lot of custom maps, mods, player models, etc for many of the popular games. Was a good time.
something i know that seems to be a constant. Homer or anything Simpsons related will always appear in a game one way or another. might also include DC and Marvel characters
Honestly I'd like to see more views into these old collection CDs. They show a great view into what the world of game modding was like back then, since many of these things were lost when their respective fansites shut down. Makes me wonder if it's possible to archive Planet Half-Life before it fully closes down, it's a treasure-trove of this stuff. It's been stuck in a state of limbo ever since GameSpy was shut down back in 2012, and eventually IGN might shutter it entirely, considering all the other planets have been taken down as well...
Wait, is that the original CS Beta 1? Wasn't that considered "lost" at one point? If so, nice find. Interesting seeing this stuff from a bye-gone era. I wasn't even alive for it.
Awesome video!! looking back into this stuff is really fascinating history preservation. It's kind of like going to a niche virtual museum - you get to see things that will be interesting to SOMEBODY out there!
Back then I had a 20 hours limited 56k connection and couldn’t even think of downloading anything bigger than 2Mb. These CDs were concentrate of fun, and all the tools to make maps were incredible.
To be fair, a lot of these CDs were ripoffs unless you had no Internet whatsoever, e.g. if it promised 100 levels you'd often have to spend hours sifting through the vast majority which suck in order to find a few that don't. At that point you would have been better off just downloading those few levels online.
I like to imagine that the internet back in the days when Shovelware was common 15+ years ago was considered the wild west, and not many people used it a lot since you have to have a computer and a dialup modem at the time, games like Half-Life and such had players online but not that active, whereas in 2007, that ramped up with laptops, Wi-fi's, smartphones and such being affordable to the point where the internet is basically a utopia at the current events. It's like New York from the 70s/80s, to New York nowadays where everything has changed as a whole, and the only way to experience it is looking at relics of the past. The days of having a Pentium processor, Windows XP on a IDE HDD, clicking every time trying to load Half-Life Deathmatch, compared to nowadays where everything is silent as a mouse on a computer that has colorful lighting.
Oh my god, the audio skits. I used to make those when I was 7 or so. I don't think I still have the files anymore, but I used to spend hours stringing sounds together (linearly!) in Windows Sound Recorder.
I bet it's been bypassed by now but you can totally bypass the old trial Counter-Strike installer's expiration date by either changing your PC date, using a tool like UniExtract or worst case scenario hacking the installer
Could you do a video on the Kill the King game mode you mentioned in this video? I had done some light research and I am really interested in this fantasy TFC-like game mode.
Man what a throwback, I picked up some CDs like this but a lot of gaming magazines also made similar CDs to give away with their magazines, obviously more of a medley of games and often contained a bunch of demos and stuff but also containing stuff like the original RVB episodes and indie games as well as map collections. I learnt about Soldat and Toriibash through those cds. Under a similar vein I also had a disc of Halo 2 custom maps that you could only play on a hacked xbox and that thing was fascinating to me, it had a unique menu screen and crazy silly maps with hacked guns but also just a bunch of remixed vanilla maps and custom competitive ones. I always wondered how someone was able to make them and burn them onto a disc.
10:28 The Venn diagram of Aphex Twin fans and Half-Life fans really is a circle -Also, --11:08-- is Pancake Lizard, also by Aphex Twin, also from the Donkey Rhubarb EP- Someone already pointed that out...
So awesome, love to see inside the minds of people and their creations from the past, the jokes and memes are awesome. It's like deciphering hieroglyphics just for it to be some fart joke or something, lol. Thanks for sharing.
Man, this takes me back. I remember playing Half-Life Deathmatch on a modded map where the players were super tiny in a big house and the gravity was low. (This was about 1999). That was a super fun map. I also seem to remember an official Valve mod on the Counter-Strike C where G-Man sent Gordon on random missions like retrieving Xen moths in weird places like a Buddhist monastery and a carnival/circus. I feel like I fever dreamed this stuff.😂
![[TF2] Would Source 2 Even Help?](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/SYMZMEKr5nA/mqdefault.jpg)
A lot of these CDs were despised by content creators, since those who made them often did it without obtaining permission, thus profiting off of others' free work. Yet, by virtue of being on a disk rather than a webpage that went extinct 15+ years ago, the CDs frequently contain the only evidence something existed. So there's a certain irony.
Piracy often becomes the saving grace for preservation. Life is funny
@@winlover37 it isn't really piracy though
@@sinisterz3r090 Bootlegs, copies, you know what I mean. But yes you're right
@@sinisterz3r090 it's copyright violation. which is what piracy is. mod authors have copyright on their works. edit: because of all the follow up stuff,. i'll specify: mod authors only have copyright on their work if it is an approved derivative, with permission. valve is probably the only one who ever grants that for mods, and only for a select few. even without that, a mod's individual new raw art/audio assets , prior to inclusion in a mod (and possibly once included in a mod, but it gets really murky then) are copyright of the creator, as long as they are original works.
my experience may be different from most because the only mod i worked on was one of the lucky ones that was up to valve's standards and recieved direct support. people keep bringing up monetary gain from mods in the latest replies, i never said anything about profiting from a mod. I don't know where that's coming from. even if you are granted permission to create a derivative, you might not be able to profit off the work. being granted permission may be dependent on signing certain rights away.
@@dan_loeb lol wut? Who told you that?
Now imagine if this had kept going into the Blu-ray era. "✨ONE MILLION MODS PACK!!!✨"
If Internet speeds had remained basically the same since 2000, that would absolutely have happened.
There's a review of the Daikatana demo back then lamenting how it's over 100 MB: "Sure, it's getting more and more common for companies to release game demos which exceed 100 megs, but it doesn't help soften the review any for us gamers on 56k modems that have to wait half a day to get the file."
@@IsmailofeRegime LOL were did you read it?
@@IsmailofeRegime What's unfortunate is that, thanks to the fall of physical media, fan content hosted on dedicated fan sites or other locations is now even more likely to be lost to the ages, due to the greater proclivity of censorship on the Internet due to overly litigious companies or losers with nothing better to do.
Physical media really does need to make a comeback, or more specifically, a stronger archive culture that will do everything in its power to preserve any and all content that gets uploaded online.
@@IsmailofeRegime I remember trying to get the Descent 3 demo on a 28.8 modem in early ''99, 27MB of nail biting hoping it didn't disconnect.
i read the million mod pack sentence with the HECU voice and i'm not sure if it made it better or worse
Those audio skits are a hell of a throwback. These cd's were content theft but in a weird way they preserved them from the eventual shutdown of most Fan Sites. There's no telling how many more have been lost forever.
I'm convinced somewhere out there they're still all accounted for.
The audio bits remind me a lot of playing Sven Co-op. Thanks to the way some of Half Life's dialog is recorded it's extremely easy to sentence mix, and consequently doing so was a huge thing in Goldsrc modding.
And this is why "content theft" is good and whiny little babies with capitalist brain poisoning need to stfu.
sky
Like 2004EB mod by EblanHL.
I love this old "Digital Archeology" stuff. Makes me remember the early days of the internet.
good old "500 games" discs!
The non-Adidas HEV needs a return to modern gaming.
With the amount of tracksuits on display, we can only speculate what Eastern European country made them hahaa!
Gopnik Gordon - defined by fake adidas and a compulsion for common street crime
You’ve done a lot of cheeki in a very short breeki
Half-Life is *extremely* popular in that region actually iirc
@@jess648 NFKRZ mentions HL and GMOD in some of his older videos
Aphex Twin moment
Gotta keep those windows licked somehow
the two songs at 11:06 and 11:08 are Polygon Window - UT1-Dot and Pancake Lizard by Aphex Twin
Aphex twin fits in so much in half life.
I like how most Player Models in this pack are kinda consistent, and then there’s Homer.
Also Spawn ripped directly from Spawn: In the Demon's Hand.
Wow. Those audio skits were very much ahead of their time. You can imagine them in a modern TH-cam video.
By the way, 11:07 - 11:08 is from the ‘Donkey Rhubarb’ album. The track is ‘Pancake Lizard’ also by Aphex Twin.
[EDIT: Swish, hopefully no one noticed hahaa!]
My faves back in the day where Duke Nukem vs Gordon and other such nonsense. Duke ripped off some really grest one-liners.
@@petrolhex7774 Oooh, yeah, that actually continued to have a long history as a method! Zone-Sama did it with her absolute classic Teen Titans stuff, the technique was put mainstream by L4D SFM stuff, and a massive number of 3DCG hentai animation creators working with existing franchises now use it. There was one Walking Dead/Wolf Among Us crossover lewd animation with absolutely stunning cinematography I saw that used it.
And the tiny bit of music at 11:05 is "UT1-Dot" under Richard D. James's "Polygon Window" alias
I always thought it was funny how HL and Aphex Twin's logos look familiar, the audio is perfect it's the first Aphex Twin meme from over 20 years ago and it makes me laugh like it was made yesterday.
I like media archeology videos, it's like unearthing the digital remains of a bygone era
And like any bygone era you can't really save the ephemera that show what it was actually like. There's just so much unspoken that will be lost to the ravages of time that isn't possible to preserve and so much modern baggage that you bring into it; you can't feel what people felt back then unless you already know because you experienced it.
Take e.g. computers becoming 60% faster every year for over a decade. The expectation was that a 3 year old PC was basically scrap metal and only a PC made in the last year or so could run the latest 3D games even acceptably. The end of Dennard scaling was not expected, even by the people at Intel who were targeting 8 GHz by 2003 with the pentium 4 (the ALU was double pumped and would have run at 16 GHz).
In the 90's the joke platform that was the IBM PC went from being a laughing stock to becoming *the* gaming platform. By 1992 the PC became so fast, CDs became so cheap, harddrives so necessary and proper sound hardware so ubiquitous that PC could do in software what other platforms could not even do in hardware. Without any BLIT, sprites or other hardware acceleration you could just make a 3D game. In 1992 in particular we had Wolfenstein 3D which really got the first person, speed and action aspect right and was the first popular first person shooter; followed by Doom a year later which at one point had more installations than Windows 95 thanks to this new thing called shareware. Ultima underworld also released in 1992 and it had textured ceilings, floors, walls, sloping floors, level over level geometry, swimming, jumping, diplomacy, rudimentary sneaking and so on. It was one of the first ever immersive games; you weren't controlling a party of players, you weren't moving the party in discrete 90 degree angles; you were playing you. There was nothing like it before and it seemingly just appeared one day as if aliens dropped a game from 10 years into the future for the 386. VR was a big thing for a little bit, until it died down again (not the first, nor the last time it did this). There was a hope for the future and a curiosity that is gone from the gaming industry today; things were evolving *very* quickly, nobody knew quite what a game could be. Ultima underworld and its followers (e.g. system shock) where an influence on half-life to try and bring shooters from this arcadey style of something like quake to a more immersive, scripted, movie-like adventure where you were just playing some guy who happened to be at the center of a shitty situation.
Multiplayer over LAN was common. As were physically hauling your computer to a LAN-party to play with other people in a lag free environment. Gameplay over the internet did not have any good netcode, so you had to lead your shots by about as much as the other player had time to move before the message that you had fired at something reached the server. There was no latency correction.
Microtransactions didn't exist. Skins were free and user made. There were no centralized servers, they were run by users who could be any random dude with a decent connection.
Shortly after Half-life was released LAN-like play over the internet had just become a thing with some kind of half-assed netcode. Most people were still on 56k modems which tied up the phone while playing so you couldn't take or receive calls; and the phone was on the wall, not in your pocket.
The mentality of gamers today is nothing remotely similar. You didn't unlock skins; you didn't get XP; you didn't grind for achievements. The gameplay was it's own reward. There was a mod for Half-life called Natural selection; an asymmetric FPS/RTS where players where RTS units and the commander was a player who ordered people around in top view like an RTS. It was common for games to last many hours in endless stalemates; partially just because players were bad and static defenses were a bit too effective in early versions. A 6 hour game that went on until the server crashed wasn't a terrible experience that made people mad; it was "epic". Today it would be regarded as "suboptimal XP" and people would beg for it to end after half an hour, any setback and they would concede the game to start a new one.
When you look back on history and "what the Egyptians believed" or something similar; know that for sure you have no idea what they actually felt. Maybe it was just a useful lie or an amusing story they told; what they *actually* felt and believed is gone. It cannot be recreated.
It's weird. I am an 80's kid. I do collect old media because it makes me feel a semblance of normality and a better time. Call it nostalgia if you will. I miss the days of going to video shop to hire video games and movies and even music CDs from the library which was free. I would trade it for the internet if I could. The internet is information overload.
@@soylentgreenb Damn, beautifully said.
@@soylentgreenb Never tought a comment would get me emotional, that was a good read sir, well said, I was born in the late 90' so that experience was never close to me, but after swithcing to PC from console in 2015 and looking back, I empathize with you, be sure that I stay clear of any online multiplayer nonsense, it really has become a crazy world up there, nobody is really enjoying themself and it all slowly became a toxic cespool of tryhards and people that take on games like they're jobs, plus as you said add all the seasonal passes, DLCs, monetizations schemes, broken games at launch and you get the sad picture of modern gaming
If there were some way to save TH-cam comments, this would absolutely be in my archive. All I can really do is reply to it and hope I may one day look through my own history to revisit this. You speak about things very precious and dear to me in ways that I seldomly am able to articulate. Thank you for remembering that formative time of my life as lovingly as I try to.
its so cool seeing old pieces of history like this, from an era of online gaming i missed out on entirely. would love to see more videos on this kind of stuff, if you're interested!
Dude I love your Curly Brace pfp! I don't really know how many times I'd beat Cave Story.
it's rare seeing cave story pfps in the wild, also I agree, these are some really interesting little pieces of history, wonder if there's more of these
Super cute pfp! ^^ ♥
HUZZAH!
cave story pfp spotted!
I remember the best network night i ever had back in 2002 with 8 of my old school friends playing Half Life multiplayer on the Rats levels. I was the alien from the Ridley Scott film, my now brother in law was homer and a few of my mates were Kermit, Lego man and Yoda. We played from 4pm till 8am without ever stopping. That was one of the best nights of my life and I remember it fondly to this day
On the topic of 90s shovelware CDs, there's an extremely underrated TH-cam series called "Shovelware Diggers", which premise is to dig through bizarre and forgotten DOS/Win3.1 games found on a shareware-harvested disc. It has hundreds of episodes at this point, so there's a lot of jank to binge on for people who enjoy this kind of stuff.
Seems cool, thanks.
Patch Notes:
*The glitching during the KTK mod footage is not a part of the maps, rather it is an error with my virtual machine. Using "Software" rendering should fix any issues.
*The sound effects in the Half-Life Windows theme are actually from a prototype version of the game! This includes older versions of Barney and the VOX's voices, and a sound used by a "Boid" creature from the HL Alpha.
Thank you for watching! I am amazed at the positive feedback on this video so soon, I appreciate it a ton.
You should pin this comment :)
I remember when my brother in law brought a copy of this back from Electronics Boutique where he worked. I remember every one of those goofy sound files to this day. I must have explored every file on that disk. I especially remember filling some of my earliest maps with the prefabs that came on this CD.
All these old 90s fps shovelware compliation cds have so much value to me nowadays. I love little time capsules like these.
Frankly, you could even call those audio skits a sort of precursor to TH-cam Poops - they've even got that same cobbled-together charm.
Wow. That hit me straight in the nostalgia. We used to do this all the time since only my one friend had internet so we made our own mixed CD's of mods, backgrounds, winamp skins and desktop themes. God I miss desktop themes and gaudy winamp skins
this reminds me of my days of soldier of fortune online where people had all kinds of crazy mods and you'd sometimes be stuck downloading custom files for 20 minutes before entering a match
Yeah, "stuck downloading custom files for 20 minutes before entering a match" was also something I experienced playing HL and its mods online. If it wasn't waiting for a custom map to download, it was waiting for custom sounds or textures.
Same thing with CS 1.6 servers and Gmod servers
I had a Pokémon one in 2000 with badly translated roms and a wierd fan game the characters looked like habbo hotel a bit and there was a maze, had a ton of crys from the anime and themes, the cds were being made by my step cousin, I also had one called Tiberian Sun Add Ons which I got at the computer fare
it was funny cause in all of these they'd be full of readmes saying "not for commercial sale or to be sold as part of collections" or something.
i wish i could get my hands on these. i LOVE going through random stuff, as if i was looking for the diamond in the rough, except the rough is good in its own little way. i miss these cds and i want more of them, random old stuff thrown together is truly a wonderous adventure all its own
Amazing find. I had this CD and this brought back a lot of memories. We used the custom models in our Sven co-op games. As we didn't have the Internet we would carry our PCs to each other's houses. I can still remember how heavy a CRT monitor would feel a mile in!
I absolutely love that WinAmp skin. I wish music players were as fun nowadays.
Winamp still exists.
@@horacegentleman3296 WACUP exists
I wish technology were as fun nowadays.
man 5:55 takes me back :')
one of the first hldm servers i've played was a rocket crowbar 1.9 server back in like 2010/2011, it was one of the most fun experiences i've had in my older half-life days and it inspired me to host my own rocket crowbar server from roughly 2015-2019. i think that server is still up to this day, albeit pretty unpopular nowadays sadly as it's almost always empty
it's great to have these legendary bits of history archived, i remember how hard it was to find a working download for rocket crowbar 1.9 around 10 years ago and it has only gotten harder since
also, the map at 7:45 is !war! and it only has 2 spawn points iirc, i never expected i'd see it again out of the blue :0
Are you the singular Rocket Crowbar server up on Steam HL1's server browser? Good shit keeping it alive man.
@@whitedude877 nope, like i said i ran mine from roughly 2015 to 2019, maybe it's the old one I've talked about though
i love finding aphex in places id never expect
We have a great fanbase merge
I remember an early Web site which had 2 huge map packs and 2 huge model packs - the latter which had models such as kermit, toothpaste tube, skeleton, etc.
seems quite silly, wish i could dig through it myself
Im obsessed with obsure media from long ago, before i was born to have the chance to see it first had myself and knowing that some media I could have loved is gone forever due to lots of things like websites not being backed up, hardrives going bad, or people straight up forgetting them is saddending. I just love videos showing games that cant be ran through conventional means, as niche as that is, lots of abstract point and click adventure games, mods made my high schoolers, and flash games I cant experience but some people who have a deep connection to them showing them to the few people intrested.
7:18 we did it, we found the original vaporwave
I had a CD of this kind for half life 2. I bought it in a magazine, thinking it's the actual half-life 2 (I had a lot of full games from magazines back then). Sadly it was just mods and maps and stuff like this, but I had a look at it few months later when I got my hands on the actual game. That was in 2004-2005
do you still have the cd on hand? it would be interesting to look at the contents.
@@none-qs3sl i doubt it but i know where I could possibly find it online so I'll have a look
I really appreciate you taking the time to use this from within windows98/xp virtual machines! Great storytelling :)
I don't know what is all on this CD, but I am happy it exists. I doubt it, but I used to make levels and prefabs and I know some of my prefabricated brushes made it into maps, because most shovelware maps were just prefabs stuck into level architecture, so its possible in some of the hundreds of levels on this CD there might be something I made uncredited in 1998-2000, and it's out there.
This opened up a tidal wave of memories for me. Half life never really stopped being a part of my life at any point, it’s been consistent nostalgia cause I always kept playing it and every valve title and spin off and mod out there, but the obscure shareware discs I never really hung onto the memories of, but immediately got reminded by shit like the wallpapers and the grappling hook mod for DM, and the compressed aphex twin songs lmaoo, reminded me of David firth’s old stuff.
Those brushwork palmtrees look impressive for the time.
That whole map is pretty cool and honestly shows off HL's lighting better than I think the official maps do.
There used to be a website which hosted those Half-Life dialogue mixes called The Wav Pool
Great video! I think Half-Life is my favourite game/era for mods and add-ons, and I used to love getting some from demo discs. Also, the end segment with the audio skits gave me flashbacks of my bro and I making our own using the audio files, haha. I guess they were "TH-cam poops" before even TH-cam, lol.
hey man this was a really enjoyable video really brought me back to childhood, thank you 💖
That was...entertaining.
I love those shovelware CDs from the 90s. Rediscovered a lot of my old stuff (artworks, renderings, maps, music), originally uploaded to different BBSes.
I've been obsessed with shovel/shareware on internet archive, it's how I played most of the classic doom series.
Man, the algorithm hit the nail on the head with this recommendation. Great vid! Hope to see more like this. :)
funfact: at 3:12 the "unauthorized" is an actual beta VOX voiceline
I'm so glad you made a video like this. CDs like these are my favorite. Nothing is more fun than downloading a shitton of shovelware CDs like this and binging the literal timecapsules of information, inside jokes, clan stuff, and so on. Just feels special.
These make me wonder if any of the maps on there would've been completely lost today had it not been for them being scalped to be throw onto these CD compilations. This was the days when there wasn't one convinient hub for game mods, and often these maps would be stored on some long defunct forum or webpage made by the creators.
That Kill The King hldm mod is completely and utterly forgotten, I tried looking it up and couldn't find _anything_ online about it, not even a mention of it. That's impressive.
The contents of this CD actually look very much like my own HL folder of stuff that I created for the game over the years. Maps, mods, prefabs, sounds, wallpapers, etc. All ranging from absolute amateur to semi-pro.
Thank you for this beautiful video. I didn't know shovelware was a thing, even though one of my first experiences with video games was with what you could call a homebrew shovelware CD. A friend of my dad threw together hundreds of DOS and Win9x games on a disk, and I played the crap out of them as a kid. Most of the stuff wouldn't even run, but a lot of those games I remember fondly.
From the classics like Doom, Wolfenstein, Commander Keen, Duke Nukem, Dangerous Dave and SkiFree to more obscure titles like Microman, SkyRoads, Aldo's Adventure and Cold Dream. Heck, now I want to play them again ;)
I need to find my bootleg homebrew CD that somehow ported the SNES DBZ fighting games to PC without using emulation. I feel like that probably is something worth preserving, because while I didn't question it as a kid, now I'm very confused as to how that exists. That shouldn't have been a thing that existed, yet I had that thing.
New addon CDs may be something we may never see today, great find!
God It just brings backs all the quake and unreal addon cds
What a blast from the past, I actually had this CD and remember using the green 3D lambda wallpaper for a while. There's even a chance I still have it somewhere, I know I still have my Half Life and Opposing Force CDs kicking about.
I love the Jonathan Davis player model at 8:48 where they drew over Gordon Freeman.
11:05 Polgyon Window - UT1 - Dot
11:07 Aphex Twin - Pancake Lizard
Somehow I just _knew_ i recognised both of them!
Quite the throwback. Those custom player models and skins remind me of a site back in the day called "Polycount" or something like that which hosted custom player models and skin uploads for many of the popular FPS games at the time like Quake and Unreal. Homer Simpson, Bender, your favorite superhero, someone's original creation, etc. There was also Fileplanet which had hosted a lot of custom maps, mods, player models, etc for many of the popular games. Was a good time.
6:11 damn! I was playing in one server which had one bot and this oz deathmatch setup. Loved it!
Really cool find. I need to set aside some time to look at all of those player-models, I've always been so fascinated by those!
This is an awesome time capsule of such a niche community. I love this kind of stuff. Nice work!
something i know that seems to be a constant. Homer or anything Simpsons related will always appear in a game one way or another.
might also include DC and Marvel characters
Honestly I'd like to see more views into these old collection CDs. They show a great view into what the world of game modding was like back then, since many of these things were lost when their respective fansites shut down.
Makes me wonder if it's possible to archive Planet Half-Life before it fully closes down, it's a treasure-trove of this stuff. It's been stuck in a state of limbo ever since GameSpy was shut down back in 2012, and eventually IGN might shutter it entirely, considering all the other planets have been taken down as well...
Wait, is that the original CS Beta 1? Wasn't that considered "lost" at one point? If so, nice find.
Interesting seeing this stuff from a bye-gone era. I wasn't even alive for it.
Awesome video!! looking back into this stuff is really fascinating history preservation. It's kind of like going to a niche virtual museum - you get to see things that will be interesting to SOMEBODY out there!
Idk why but old Aphex Twin songs just generally remind me of GoldSrc so it felt so oddly satisfying to see that last audio skit.
Man the Winamp skin is amazing!
I love the grenade-launching sound effect in the Lambda Windows 98 theme
Jeeze this is memory lane for me. I had/used almost all of this.
Please please make more of these, these are really facnating
Back then I had a 20 hours limited 56k connection and couldn’t even think of downloading anything bigger than 2Mb.
These CDs were concentrate of fun, and all the tools to make maps were incredible.
I love how most people have forgotten this peice of history and i always wish i could bring it back
To be fair, a lot of these CDs were ripoffs unless you had no Internet whatsoever, e.g. if it promised 100 levels you'd often have to spend hours sifting through the vast majority which suck in order to find a few that don't. At that point you would have been better off just downloading those few levels online.
That's an odd thing to love.
Very interesting! I've had so many shareware CDs back in the day, sadly they're lost now...
when I saw the cover art for Maximum Death for Doom, my first sub-concious thought was "Noita?"
Ah, it wouldn't be an old FPS shovelware disc without some Simpsons content.
Whatever you found there, this is a HUGE FIND for the game's long and still going history.
Kudos!
Thanks for making this. What a throwback!
really wasn't expecting Aphex Twin on this video haha, thanks for archiving this!
I beg you to do tours of these maps.. It'd be so delightful.
The sound bit at 11:08 is Pancake Lizard by Aphex Twin
I like to imagine that the internet back in the days when Shovelware was common 15+ years ago was considered the wild west, and not many people used it a lot since you have to have a computer and a dialup modem at the time, games like Half-Life and such had players online but not that active, whereas in 2007, that ramped up with laptops, Wi-fi's, smartphones and such being affordable to the point where the internet is basically a utopia at the current events.
It's like New York from the 70s/80s, to New York nowadays where everything has changed as a whole, and the only way to experience it is looking at relics of the past.
The days of having a Pentium processor, Windows XP on a IDE HDD, clicking every time trying to load Half-Life Deathmatch, compared to nowadays where everything is silent as a mouse on a computer that has colorful lighting.
There's a lot here to take in.
Might take a look at these one day.
Left a sub 🤘🤘
i miss this era of random CDs for gaming
Oh my god, the audio skits. I used to make those when I was 7 or so. I don't think I still have the files anymore, but I used to spend hours stringing sounds together (linearly!) in Windows Sound Recorder.
How the hell did you manage to put out an interesting video on something as overdone as half life, amazing
10:00 i just project modern memes onto this so much. 20 years ahead of its time.
Pretty funny how a lot of the gamemodes and weapons on this CD wound up being resurrected 20 years later by Jabroni Brawl
Damn there is a lot of interesting history i did miss with HL
If only I could go back and find somewhere to play rocket crowbar again. Really one of my favorite mods for half life.
I bet it's been bypassed by now but you can totally bypass the old trial Counter-Strike installer's expiration date by either changing your PC date, using a tool like UniExtract or worst case scenario hacking the installer
Rock On Man! I loved every second of this Trip into Half-life history! Stay Awesome PatBytes! The nostalgia gets me high!
omg I had this disc back in the day :D loved the HL theme & that winamp skin introduced me to that great player
Could you do a video on the Kill the King game mode you mentioned in this video? I had done some light research and I am really interested in this fantasy TFC-like game mode.
Man what a throwback, I picked up some CDs like this but a lot of gaming magazines also made similar CDs to give away with their magazines, obviously more of a medley of games and often contained a bunch of demos and stuff but also containing stuff like the original RVB episodes and indie games as well as map collections. I learnt about Soldat and Toriibash through those cds.
Under a similar vein I also had a disc of Halo 2 custom maps that you could only play on a hacked xbox and that thing was fascinating to me, it had a unique menu screen and crazy silly maps with hacked guns but also just a bunch of remixed vanilla maps and custom competitive ones. I always wondered how someone was able to make them and burn them onto a disc.
10:28 The Venn diagram of Aphex Twin fans and Half-Life fans really is a circle
-Also, --11:08-- is Pancake Lizard, also by Aphex Twin, also from the Donkey Rhubarb EP- Someone already pointed that out...
So awesome, love to see inside the minds of people and their creations from the past, the jokes and memes are awesome. It's like deciphering hieroglyphics just for it to be some fart joke or something, lol. Thanks for sharing.
the extremely brief sample at 11:08 is pancake lizard, also by aphex twin
wow that was...quite fascinating
Nice pfp
OMFG this here is so nostalgic, I first played uplink in one of these disks.
7:22 This room has some nice aesthetics.
as unimportant as others might say this is, this is all very, very interesting. I wonder what other games like this had going?
I had that Half-Life Addons disk!! Wow, that's a blast from the past!!
I love these bootlegs filled with mods and add-ons
this is so ominous and cool
10:23 Even since day one, there has always been a semi-spiritual connection with Half-Life fans and Aphex Twin.
Man, this takes me back. I remember playing Half-Life Deathmatch on a modded map where the players were super tiny in a big house and the gravity was low. (This was about 1999). That was a super fun map.
I also seem to remember an official Valve mod on the Counter-Strike C where G-Man sent Gordon on random missions like retrieving Xen moths in weird places like a Buddhist monastery and a carnival/circus. I feel like I fever dreamed this stuff.😂
This video was lovely. Absolutely subscribing