Garry’s Mod, a silly little mod for Half-Life 2, quietly shaped my life. It introduced me to programming, helped me earn my first money from code, and gave me lifelong friendships. But it also had a massive butterfly effect. I am where I am today because of what Garry’s Mod has gifted me over so many years.
In The Beginning
I was first introduced to Garry’s Mod through a YouTube series published by the Yogscast, where they were building spaceships. I was a big fan at the time, watching their Minecraft content religiously. So when they were playing a new sandbox game that seemed even more open-ended, I was glowing with excitement.
The barrier to entry for Garry’s Mod is low in every way. Not only is it cheap (a few dollars), runs on anything (given that it is based on Half-Life 2, a game from 2004), packed with hundreds of thousands of community-made mods, but it also has some of the best modding documentation I have ever used.
The first time I booted the game was on the family laptop, likely some Intel Pentium 4GB DDR3 snail 🐌. I jumped straight into the sandbox gamemode on gm_flatgrass and started making a spaceship of my own. I built it using thrusters and hover balls, 2 mind-blowing concepts for me at the age of 13. Never before had I had such freedom to build complex ideas so easily. The toolgun is intuitive and the props menu makes it so easy to hand-pick models to work with. I was immediately hooked.
The Workshop
I spent countless hours messing around in sandbox, building things. But what makes Garry’s Mod so special is the community. There is endless community content; it is basically the heart of the game. Once I realised that there were doors beyond gm_construct and gm_flatgrass, I really got into my element. The Steam workshop allows other players to upload custom content that can be downloaded directly from the game with a click of a button. It’s truly magical. So many amazingly talented people have put countless hours into hand-crafting cool and interesting mods in Garry’s Mod, and then given them to the community for free. Want to explore the Home Alone house while shooting Nyan Cats out of a machine gun dressed as Jon Snow? Install a couple of mods, restart your game and boom 💥, easy as that. In two minutes, with no technical knowledge, you could turn the game into anything you imagined. If you can think it, it’s out there on the workshop; you need only search for it.
This simple feature is what makes Garry’s Mod so special. Install a few mods, invite your friends to the game and then just mess around and have fun. See who can build the dumbest contraption to shoot a fridge across the map, have an all-out war equipped with nukes, or race around a city map in Ferraris. The workshop opens any door imaginable for friends to have unrestricted fun in a world they curate. There aren’t many other ways to unlock imagination like that.
Community Servers
While Garry’s Mod at its core is a sandbox game, the majority of the playerbase is found on community servers. Primarily role-play servers. These are often servers built around a specific theme with complex roleplay structures, jobs and hierarchy, and advanced systems and mechanics. The most popular amongst these is DarkRP. While having evolved a lot since its creation, it is essentially a cops vs robbers roleplay. You can either choose to be a criminal, typically doing heists, producing illegal narcotics, raiding other players, and just getting up to general mischief. Or you can play as a police officer, catching criminals in the act and applying preventative measures.
People have created systems to enhance gameplay. Some of these systems are extremely complex. One that immediately comes to mind is Zero’s Methlab 2. This implements an entire drug cooking process into the game, closely mirroring the real-world process, topped off with custom models. The love and care put into this system show on every level. The immense attention to detail for the 3D models, beautifully designed interface, and incredible feedback to user actions all show that this wasn’t just a cash grab, but rather someone having deep love for what they create. And would you believe that this was made by a single person?
Hands-On Creation
Garry’s Mod uses Lua as a programming language; it’s basically like writing English. If you can read and write English, you can program in Lua. The documentation for Garry’s Mod is incredibly detailed, almost always having a code example. And once again, it is mainly community-managed. The community makes Garry’s Mod what it is.
This is where I got my first taste of proper programming. Taking an idea in my head and then turning it into something that was in the game I could use. I think the first thing I ever made was a screen you could spawn that would tell you your account info. Completely useless, to be honest. But it was both simple enough for me to actually build the whole thing and also complex enough for me to learn from. From that point onwards, I was hooked. Things snowballed from there. I went on to make several of my own community servers as well as premium mods. I was making really good money for a 16 year old and when I finished school at 18, I went all in on this silly little sandbox game. From 2016-2018 I had put a lot of time into making premium addons and, as a result, had made a bit of a name for myself. People would reach out to me asking if I was open to doing freelance work for them. Even now, I have a lot of pride in the work I did back then and the things I achieved. I had such a deep understanding of the game’s architecture, the most optimised ways to write code and how to squeeze every inch of performance out of a game that was 12 years old at the time. I look back at those days fondly. Being in touch with the community, understanding their wants and building systems to meet them.
Some of the things I built have been used by hundreds of thousands of players, which is quite mind-blowing to write. Building a reputable brand identity that people trusted they would get a well-polished premium product in exchange for their money. Doing market research, spending weeks or months building out a system (pre-AI days), testing it, building marketing material, dealing with post-launch bugs and support. All of these things gave me hands-on commercial experience and skills without me even realising. What felt like building systems for a silly game in my bedroom was actually laying the foundation for my career.
But it’s even more than that. It’s me defining for myself who I want to be as a person. I specifically remember the first time someone complained about one of my products. 16 years old and being confronted with a disappointed paying customer, how was I going to handle that? I refunded them and let them keep the product. I felt like I had failed myself because not everyone loved this mod I had put my heart into, but I soon learned that not everyone can be pleased. I tried so hard to be an honest and ethical person. I always priced my products below market and refunded everyone unhappy with their purchase. It was my main source of income, but I was focused on not being greedy. Every day, I reminded myself of the privilege of people wanting to use my addons, and I was careful not to forget that.
Outgrowing My Beginnings
I was in the Garry’s Mod ecosystem as a developer from around 2015-2022. I would argue that 2017-2020 was the golden age of Garry’s Mod. In that period, the standards jumped massively. Outdated UIs and clunky systems didn’t fly anymore; people expected high-quality, polished systems. It was a good thing for the community, I think. Even now, I would consider some of the things made in that era ahead of its time. Across the board, my peers and I levelled up.
It was at this point that I decided to make a slight pivot in my goals. I wanted to give back to the community that I had benefited so much from. I wanted to start building things and giving them out for free as open-source. I have a passion for building purpose-driven utility tools, cutting out all of the bloat. So I started making free utility tools aimed specifically at pain points I had experienced firsthand in server management. These are, admittedly, rather niche tools that maybe wouldn’t be appreciated as much as if I were to build some complex roleplay system, but my passion lay there, and I found the most joy in it. A majority of this work has gone mostly unnoticed over the years, but if even a handful of people have found these tools useful, then I think I have succeeded in my goal.
I don’t develop for Garry’s Mod anymore, nor do I play it. But I still keep in touch with some of the key community members. The game has aged, and the community isn’t what it once was - but I still look back on it fondly.
Summary
I have never seen anything match Garry’s Mod regarding community and their desire to contribute. Garry’s Mod would not exist without the community, and that is what makes it so special. People making things simply because they love to. I am so proud of what I contributed to the community, and so should so many others like me. We left it better than how we found it, and that is something to always be proud of.
Most people build the foundations of their career at university. I built mine on gm_flatgrass.
