Garry's Mod

Garry's Mod (often abbreviated as GMod) is a sandbox game developed by Facepunch Studios and published by Valve. The game was created by Garry Newman as a mod for Valve's Source game engine and released in December 2004, before being expanded into a standalone release and published by Valve in November 2006. Ports of the original Microsoft Windows version for Mac OS X and Linux followed in September 2010 and June 2013, respectively. The base game mode of Garry's Mod has no set objectives and provides the player with a world to freely manipulate. Other game modes, notably Trouble in Terrorist Town, are created by other developers as mods and are installed separately, by means such as the Steam Workshop. As of January 2016, Garry's Mod has sold 10 million copies. Garry's Mod was created by the video game programmer Garry Newman. He started developing games under the studio name Facepunch Studios after dropping out of college, at the time out of a room in his parents' house. He did this as a hobby, simultaneous to his occupation as a PHP programmer for a dating website, from which he was later fired when he launched his own such website. His first game was Facewound, described as "Mario with guns", while Garry's Mod later came about as a side-project in the form of a mod for the Source game engine and principally the game Half-Life 2. Newman soon found more enjoyment in developing Garry's Mod than in developing Facewound, so development on Facewound was mostly halted (and put on indefinite hiatus in 2004) to focus on Garry's Mod.  The first iteration of the mod, version 1, was released on 24 December 2004. Initial feedback was polarised, with some criticising the mod for its similarity to an existing mod, JBMod.  However, the increasing positive reception led Newman to continue development.  Through 2004 and 2005, Newman released several updated versions of Garry's Mod, adding new features along the way and culminating in version 9.0.4 on 27 November 2005.  Out of Newman's one-man operation grew a team of multiple people for a remake of the mod as a standalone game. Valve, the makers of Source, contacted Newman to suggest a commercial, standalone release of the mod through their digital distribution service Steam, which Newman initially rejected.  Valve and Facepunch later struck a publishing agreement wherein Valve would release Garry's Mod onto Steam at a price of US$10, while the two companies would equally share profits.  The last free version of Garry's Mod remained available for download, rechristened as the demo to the retail game.  The standalone game was released on 29 November 2006. Despite the game no longer being a mod, Valve and Facepunch stuck with the "Garry's Mod" name, which Newman later cited as a mistake, stating that he should have called it "Sandbox" instead. Because Garry's Mod still required a separate Source-based game to function properly, a bundle including Garry's Mod and Valve's Counter-Strike: Source was also released. A port of the Microsoft Windows version for Mac OS X was released on 23 September 2010.  Support for Kinect, a full-body motion tracking peripheral, was added to the Windows version in December 2012. When Garry's Mod was moved over to Valve's SteamPipe content delivery system, with the move completed on 5 June 2013, an experimental Linux client was also introduced.