 Good evening, zombies. Gay skeletons. Women. Are you frightened yet? I was not alive in the 1990s, but you know what was? Half-Life modding. In fact, even to this day, some of the most popular games on the market have roots as old 90s Half-Life mods. Thanks to Valve putting the game's development tools out to the public for free right after its release, Half-Life was one of the first FPS games to cultivate a truly lively modding scene, one that still lives on to this day as a matter of fact, for better and for worse. What the f**k is that? Yet amidst all the groundbreaking mods that paved the way for countless games and projects that followed, there's one that today remains conspicuously underappreciated, and in fact has been just about completely forgotten by the majority of the internet. So much so that simple details about the game, like when exactly it released or what happened to the guys who made it, are still kind of up in the air. The mod I'm talking about is They Hunger. Spearheaded by a Canadian guy named Neil Mankey, They Hunger was the second Half-Life project that the amateur mod devs at Black Widow Games took on after releasing USS Dark Star in July 1999. Up until this point, Black Widow had made a name for themselves in the industry by taking commissions from magazine and TV companies to make promotional campaigns for the original Quake games, but it was on the tail end of 1999 going into 2000 that they struck gold with this spine chilling Half-Life mod sponsored by the PC Gamer magazine. Inspired by Night of the Living Dead, They Hunger was a Half-Life horror campaign uniquely set in the 1950s, and then immediately became the talk of the town after its release because of its exceptionally high-quality level design and spooky appeal. This game was genuinely giving young gamers nightmares back in the day, and on top of that, it basically set the gold standard for single-player Half-Life mods going into the new millennia. Thanks to its roaring popularity, two follow-up campaigns were back then released in the following two years, being They Hunger 2 Rest in Pieces and They Hunger 3 Root Awakening. These each continued the same storyline and were also received pretty well for the time. In the modern age though, if you look around online, you really won't find a whole lot of good documentation on any of these games. Almost all of the official websites pertaining to Black Widow games and They Hunger have disappeared, there's surprisingly few videos or reviews talking about the game on YouTube, and there's especially little known about its cancelled source engine remake that Black Widow were once working with Valve to push on Steam. And to me, for something once so famous in the community of one of the most popular games of all time, to suddenly become so obscure and hard to find details on is a bit fascinating, especially something with a name as foreboding as They Hunger. So I guess you could say Curiosity bit the cat, as just in time for the Halloween season I found myself picking up the They Hunger trilogy off ModDB, which also hosts plenty of mod packs and fan remakes for anyone who can't handle some of the rougher and more dated graphics in this thing, and clamoring to see just what this game I'd been hearing whispers of for probably like 10 years now was all about. The full campaign features around 3 hours of gameplay with a surprising amount of variety, and it even comes with a lesser known multiplayer mode so there's plenty of content to sink our teeth into. There's also a few short They Hunger custom campaigns and remakes that have been floating around online for years now, and that's not even getting into the bizarre mystery behind what ultimately came of the studio that made it. So with all that ahead of us, I think it's time we get this show on the road. The story of They Hunger begins in a small American valley town called Rockwell sometime in the 1950s, with the game opening on a cutscene of a radio broadcast or explaining that there's been reports of unknown atmospheric phenomena causing strange electrical displays throughout the city. Then we cut away and spot our main character, or at least his car. He's never actually seen or given a name, but he's said to be a successful author who's been sent by his publishing company on a trip to the countryside so that he can rest and try to find inspiration for his next book. Unfortunately, however, resting is just about the last thing he'll be doing throughout the rest of this game. As one of those electrical displays we just heard mentioned on the radio directly strikes his car, causing him to swerve and crash into a ravine. From here you take control of this character as he abandons his vehicle and swims up to get help, but instead finds himself navigating a dimly lit crypt filled with skeletons that sets quite the tone for the rest of the campaign. Once you finally reach the surface you'll make your way through a graveyard path toward a church, and when you find your way in you'll hear radio reports that these atmospheric phenomena are getting worse and that everyone in the city is being ordered to stay indoors. Hearing screams and gunshots in the distance you quickly grab an umbrella and a pistol and head back outside just in time to see the dead rising from their graves. The rest of the episode is spent fighting through the eerie countryside, trying to figure out just what's happened to these townspeople and make your escape. And it's actually got some earnestly creepy moments, like hearing a scared female cop calling out for help on the radio of an abandoned police cruiser and then seeing what's come of her colleagues just a few moments later. Or how about getting lulled into a false sense of security when you spot an NPC that's clearly a Barney reskin just to see him turn around revealing his zombified state and then promptly opening fire on you. It's moments like these that make me easily see how Half-Life fans back then found this to be so startling. The game is not without its sense of humor though. The first human you come across gets so excited at the prospect of rescue that he completely lets his guard down at the first side of a vehicle and just gets pulverized as we quickly realize that the car was being manned by a zombie the entire time. They hunger definitely carries some of the same comic mischief of the original Half-Life, which I think is great. The weapons arsenal is about the same as the original games too, though they've been lightly reskinned. For example, your MP5s become some weird looking battle rifle thing. There's a shotgun and sniper rifle lifted directly from Team Fortress Classic. And your Glock's had an image of some other handgun lazily stretched over it that makes it look pretty God awful. It's actually the only gun I modded in a replacement for in my playthrough. Anywho, the game actually has a pretty great atmosphere for how primitive its visuals are. The levels are all dimly lit and moody, and even early on the quiet ambience of the crickets really communicates to you this nauseating feeling that something's gone dreadfully wrong. You'll find yourself in a swamp destroying rescue helicopters that have been overtaken by the undead, and even fight your way through a dingy volcanic ridge called Devil's Rift. The campaign wraps up with you manning a train and running over a railway packed with zombies, then crashing a cop car into a gas station and stumbling into the town's police headquarters. The last cutscene however shows that instead of finding any help from the authorities, our character was instead ambushed and kidnapped by a zombie sheriff named Chester Rockwood, who at a glance appears to be the mastermind leading the undead horde. A group of humans burst in just in the nick of time to help set you free, and the game ends on a fade to black with your character's fate left somewhat ambiguous. Now, despite the zany cliffhanger, this first episode is a fun romp that paces itself well and carries a lot of action and memorable moments, and even as someone who has no nostalgia for Day Hunger and picked it up for the first time for this video, I found that it held up surprisingly well for its age. It's creepy, flows just about as nicely as the original game's campaign does, and does a good job of setting up the next episode that came out a little under a year later in September 2000. Day Hunger 2 Rest in Pieces picks up right where the last episode left off, directly into an explosion of action. A friendly human cop blows a giant hole in your cell that you escape through him, but Sheriff Rockwell unfortunately slips away just before you can enact your revenge against him. From here you slip your way out of the city through its canals, fighting zombie hounds and reskin bull squids along the way, eventually making your way up through a tunnel into some kind of massive facility. Here you start spotting soldiers out and about, and also get your hands on a cool new Tek 9 that's got both a full auto and burst fire mode. It's pretty useful. Funnily enough, I reached out on Twitter and was able to confirm that this gun was actually modeled by Min Lee, the original co-creator of Counter Strike. Small world. Anyway, you'll eventually find your way to a parking garage where you'll spot Sheriff Rockwood talking with a mad scientist named Dr. Franklin, who he's apparently been in cahoots with this whole time. They both spot you and skedaddle away in fear, as this revealed that this facility you've been exploring since you left the canals is actually all part of Dr. Franklin's enormous Rivendale Asylum compound. We break into the asylum in pursuit of the two, and this is where we start getting more exposition on how the apocalypse started. Through various audio logs that the asylum staff left behind, as well as this friendly but timid lab assistant named Alfred. Thank God you're normal. Everybody else here seems to be out of their mind. We slowly piece together that basically the mad doctor and the sheriff were longtime friends who found something in the city water. Whether it was something related to those electrical displays in the sky is kind of left ambiguous, but whatever it was, it drove the sheriff and the doctor so mad that they began experimenting on their patients and trying to raise the dead. We head underground directly into their lab to finally confront them on all this, and this is where shit gets really kooky. First we see the extent of their cruelty, that they've hooked people on meat hooks and kept their living heads in jars filled with water just to watch them beg for help. These are actually the faces of all the people who worked on the game by the way, which is a neat little Easter egg. Then we catch up to the doctor and the sheriff, who give a speech declaring their desire for world domination before unleashing these freaky Frankenstein monsters named Zorks after us. These things are actually pretty spooky and I found them to be a pretty fun enemy. They're no match for a protagonist however, who blows their lab to smithereens as the doctor and sheriff make yet another narrow escape. From here we make our way through a morgue and a lounge, accidentally invent gay skeletons, and even catch a glimpse of the mad scientist running away from his own monsters that he's now become unable to control. Rest in pieces finally concludes with us making our way through the asylum's therapeutic facilities and freeing all of its prisoners, then crashing a truck and causing an oil blowout that blows up the entire asylum, knocking our player character out and hopefully putting an end to our two antagonist scheme. Overall I'd say this episode is also pretty dang solid. It's a little bit longer than the original, has more weapons and enemies, and overall gives the player more to sink their teeth into, but it also kind of sacrifices some of the subtle creepiness of the original episode with its more involved story. I kind of like how much it leans into the 1950s science fiction horror theme though with this elaborate asylum and lab you explore. Despite how well this episode wraps things up however, it turned out not to be the series' conclusion, as a year later in June 2001 came the third and final episode, which seems to be widely considered to be the weakest, so let's have a look see why don't we. They Hunger 3, A Root Awakening opens with an abstract dream sequence set in a graveyard, where we see a specter of Dr. Franklin once again reciting a pledge to rule the world with his undead creatures. Then we begin hearing the disembodied voice of a woman who tells us that we need to wake up and that we're having a nightmare. Our character finally comes to his senses in a dark hospital, where we hear the sounds of babies crying and come across the now zombified nurse that was apparently taking care of us after we got knocked out and then massive oil explosion. It's a bit of a contrived and confusing opener, but this cool new high-tech pistol thing makes up for it in my eyes. As we head out of the hospital, we can actually catch a funny broadcast revealing that the zombies have now taken over the radio station from the first game's opening. From here the game basically follows a kind of return to form, where we head back out to the countryside of Rockwell and watch more train crashes, then venture out to some farm grounds and even get our hands on a motherfucking flamethrower. Out here we get faced with new zombie chickens and even zombie cattle, which actually startled the hell out of me the first time I ran into them. The gay skeletons from the last episode are back and even seem to have had babies, and there's also this bizarre part with an absolutely enormous oversized bull squid hiding underneath some water. At first I thought this was some kind of an Easter egg, but it's damn near impossible to miss, so I have no idea what it's here for. Anyway, we eventually return back to the asylum we blew up at the end of the last episode, which is now completely torched and carries quite the desolate atmosphere. And after rehashing a few of the same levels from rest in pieces, we make it out to a train yard and climb into a box to get some ammo for our flamethrower, just to get trapped inside and once again kidnapped by the zombie sheriff. We're loaded onto a carriage headed by zombie cattle and hauled off to this area that seems to be based on Stonehenge for some reason, where the zombies are lynching a woman as the sheriff gives a motivational speech to his undead army. Then out of nowhere, the military abruptly sweep in and blow this whole meeting up, indirectly saving you. Though in true half-life fashion, they then immediately open fire on you indiscriminately. Heading back to the valley, we face off against a few zombified soldiers and then even take down a helicopter in a pretty cool boss fight. And as we see more and more of the military deploying in, it's clearly demonstrated that even they are no match for this enormous undead horde, which really puts into question just what the hell kind of training this random author has to have survived this long. We board a railcar back to the asylum train yard and then come across this new character, a friendly deputy named Jerry Hoobs. He talks to us through some thick glass that muffles his voice and makes him incredibly hard to understand, but basically asks us to open a hangar door elsewhere in the asylum for him so that he can get in a helicopter and airlift us both away from this massive clusterfuck and leave Rockwell for good. We oblige and get our hands on a chain gun just in time to be a third party in an all-out tactical conflict between the normal military and their growing number of rogue zombified troops. Then catch back up with the zombie sheriff and the scientist, who apparently both somehow miraculously survived the explosion at the end of the last episode, though Dr. Franklin seems to have been injured badly enough that he's had to rebuild himself as a cyborg. But fuck it, we've got our ticket out of here, so once we catch up with the deputy at the helicopter he mentioned, all we've got to do is keep the ground clear of zombies while he prepares the chopper. You finally hop in with him and both successfully lift off, however, the mad scientist cyborg then comes out and starts trying to shoot you out of the air. So you've got to gun him down from inside your helicopter as the deputy circles the compound. Once you kill him, you and the deputy finally escape Rockwell for good. But there's just one last problem. The zombie sheriff has come after you with a vengeance for killing his scientist buddy, and he's trailing you in a helicopter of his own that serves as the final obstacle between you and freedom. This last part of the game is fucking bullshit by the way. It is outrageously easy to softlock yourself here. Once you get in the helicopter, there's no opportunities to pick up any more ammo for either of these airfights. And while the scientist isn't too tricky to take down, if you find yourself out around with the sheriff guy still on your ass, you're shit of luck, better load an old save. Which I did, but even after making careful notes to pick up as much ammo as I could before the lift off, I still somehow wound up not having enough bullets to take the sheriff guy down. So this is the only part of the mod I cheated to beat, and thanks to the colorful things other people online have said about it, I feel no shame in admitting that. Once you do finally take the sheriff down, though, the game and trilogy comes to a close, as our protagonist and his new friend fly off into the sunset with this extremely campy song called You Are What I Eat playing. Presumably the two escape the apocalypse and live happily ever after or something. Now, it probably goes without saying, but this final chapter is fucking insane. It feels like Black Widow really just wanted to dial everything up to 11 for the conclusion, giving you crazy weapons like flamethrowers and giant enemies and all these ridiculous set pieces, and as engaging as it was at times, it honestly feels like the game wasn't planned out well enough to handle all this new content. This Jerry Hoops guy coming out of nowhere to save you and the sheriff and scientist miraculously surviving the explosion from the last episode both feel kind of cheap. And this campaign's level design is definitely a bit weaker than the previous two as well. There's a lot of dead ends that you'd expect to at least lead to ammo or something, but instead lead to absolutely nothing. And a good majority of the episode is spent not only backtracking, but even recycling levels from the previous episode, which just comes across as lazy, and helps make a lot of a rude awakening feel like an uninspired rehash of the previous two campaigns. Not to mention that even if the ending somewhat sticks the landing narratively and is more climactic than the endings of the previous two episodes, from a gameplay standpoint it's basically broken, and makes an otherwise pretty excellent series and on a very weak note. It kind of anchors the quality of They Hunger as a whole down, and yeah I can definitely see why it's considered the weakest of the bunch. But then again, you could definitely say a lot of the same things about the Zen conclusion in the original Half-Life, so for all it's worth, I think it's pretty impressive that Black Widow managed to make a free Half-Life campaign that's basically on par with its source material and quality, and I'd say it definitely carries its own unique charm that makes the series worth checking out sometime. Nah, I don't really have too much to say about They Hunger's multiplayer mode. It's the single-player campaign that's most revered about the game for a reason, but I tried it out on a server with a few friends and actually found it to be surprisingly fun. At its core it's basically just Half-Life deathmatch but without as many insta-kill laser guns, but thanks to the silenced pistol it almost feels more like Goldeneye than Half-Life at times. Most, if not all of the DM maps are spins on levels from the main campaign, and it's clearly a bit of an afterthought, but I still appreciate the fact that it exists. Anyway, after the release of They Hunger 3 is where a story starts to take a turn for the bizarre. From here Black Widow announced that they were re-branding as a professional studio and were going to focus on creating standalone games from here on out, and they announced in October 2005 that the first project they'd started work on was a source engine remake of the They Hunger trilogy called They Hunger Lost Souls. Black Widow seemed to have negotiated with Valve to get full access to their development tools and asset repos to make this game, and it was even shown off at the 2006 Steam Developer Conference alongside Gary's mod and the cancelled Return to Ravenholm project as examples of exclusive third-party games that would help drive players to steam. However, despite Neil Mankey's claims that the game was around 75% done, it unfortunately went completely silent in 2008. It never came out, the whole studio disbanded, and the guy was basically never heard from again. From the screenshots, it looked like a really cool project, kind of like Resident Evil 4 infused with Half-Life 2 in a way, and even despite some of the more peculiar choices they had made, like changing the setting to Northeastern Europe instead of America and removing the HUD so you have to count your shots and look at a watch to keep track of your health and ammo, it still seemed very promising. The best explanation offered by various online blogs seems to be that Neil had fallen deathly ill to some mystery sickness that pulled him away from the game and left the rest of the remote studio completely directionless as it slowly dissolved without him. But it's extremely hard to find any concrete sources on what actually happened, and it all seems to be mainly hearsay. Some claim that Neil is now dead, though there seems to be a lot of evidence that suggests otherwise. The project's lead programmer said that last he had heard Neil was alive and well, though that they hadn't kept in touch in years and he wasn't entirely sure what had come of him either. Some even speculate that Neil stays off the internet out of shame that his mystery illness forced him to destroy his company and let down its community. And while that's not impossible, it seems just as likely to me that he's just gotten old and is now focusing on his real life. We might never know exactly what happened to the game or its creator, but a leaked unfinished build of Lost Souls eventually did surface online in 2019. And even though it's apparently a very outdated build and isn't really in much of any playable state, it's still quite the sight to behold. We can piece together from bits of developer interviews we have as well as the leaked material that the story was going to begin very similarly to the original. You'd be playing as a tourist this time, riding in a taxi cab with a driver named Jeff, and then you'd both careen off the side of the road and crash, with the player waking up hours later in a destroyed shoreside restaurant and running to get help but finding no one. You'd fight through European villages, farms, swamps, and cemeteries, and all things considered the game seemed to be shaping up to be quite the interesting adventure. There's plenty of interesting stuff in the files too, including a surprising number of character models. There's ones that are clearly placeholder like Blonde Mossman and this funky looking priest character, as well as more original ones with their own art style. And thanks to the fact Black Widow had access to Val's repo, there's even shit like this unmarked Half-Life 2 supply crate model in here. Now, I'd be lying if I said a lot of the maps didn't kind of just look like Ravenholm, but I still find it sad that we'll never see what would have come of this project had it been finished. Who knows, maybe it would have joined the ranks of the other legendary Source Engine games from its era. In the time since Lost Souls' cancellation though, there's been a surprising amount of interesting fan content for TheyHunger that's come out and kept the bench warm. For example, people have actually gotten it running on the PS2 and Dreamcast, which is pretty cool. I can imagine that playing this late at night on a CRT would probably be some mystical shit. And before the leaked build of Lost Souls surfaced, some guy got fed up of waiting for the game and made his own Source Engine remake of TheyHunger called TheyHunger again. According to the reviews I've seen, it's pretty bad, but I can still rate the effort that went into it. There's also, as I mentioned at the start, a few fan mods set in the same world, like Twilight and Rockwell, and MoreHunger. And also a surprising amount of custom maps for the deathmatch mode given its obscurity. Some Russian team is even apparently currently working on porting the entire series to Half-Life Source, which is kind of bizarre, but I guess it might be worth checking out once it's finished just for the sake of its upgraded flashlight and chapter select system. These AI upscale textures look a little funky though. And of course, you can still play through the game with friends any time using Spen Co-op, which comes prepackaged with all three campaigns and actually might honestly be the best way to experience TheyHunger. The people behind the port seem to have recompiled all the levels to have improved lighting, and they've even combined a good amount of them so you won't have to deal with as many loading screens. They've also packed in some really nice-looking error-appropriate replacements for the weapons, like a new Tommy gun, a double barrel shoddy, ranch gun, and even an old-school battle rifle, which is great because the G36 and Tek-9 never made much sense for a game set in the 1950s anyway. On top of that, the campaigns actually work surprisingly well as co-op experiences and can be quite a blast to run through with a couple buddies. It's pretty awesome to hop out of a moving train with your friends and blast the fuck out of the undead with your Tommy guns. It honestly gave me the same fun feeling I remember from when I played Left 4 Dead for the first time, and it's also probably the closest thing to an official remaster we'll ever see. So for all that, I can definitely recommend it. From what I can tell though, that's basically where the story of TheyHunger ends. For all of its good and bad, it's the grandfather of Half-Life horror mods, and I think it deserves some recognition. It's a relic of the early 2000s, from before horror became super psychological, and it was fun to come back and be creeped out by good old-fashioned zombies instead of some kind of cerebral enigma that only exists in my head or something. You can really tell this game is from a simpler time, because one, each episode is clearly made out of passion and love, and two, they make the female zombies call themselves mommy to a nerve you, even though nowadays if they did that it would just make half the internet start jerking off. Yeah, the series gets a bit weak at the end, but TheyHunger is still three straight hours of impressive and engaging Half-Life horror gameplay made available to the public for completely free, and I'd say it's definitely a must-play for anyone who has a fondness for the original Half-Life and its history, or who enjoys lighting dogs on fire and beating soldiers and police officers to death with a shovel. Whatever happened to Neil or wherever he might be now, I hope that he knows he made something special. And also that I find him growing his beard out until he looks like the unabomber and creating one of the best Half-Life mods ever, just to disappear and never tell anyone why is kind of hilarious. Is TheyHunger Half-Life's most impressive mod? No. Does it carry some deep metaphor for suicidal depression that you'll be thinking about for the rest of your life? Also, no. But it was still a cult classic for a reason, and if you're a fan of Afraid of Monsters, Nightmare House, or even Cry of Fear, you should try to remember that those games are only possible because of the blueprints set by these three campy campaigns. And in my heart, I think I'll probably always remember TheyHunger as Half-Life's spookiest mod. Thanks for watching, I hope you enjoyed, subscribe for more, and remember to brush your teeth Hey everybody, this is Dimby, reporting live from the beautiful Isla Vista, okay? Now, before this video ends, I need to ask all of you, tweet hashtag TheyHunger2022. We gotta get this trending, okay? If we can't get this trending, I'm gonna throw myself off of this cliff. Hashtag TheyHunger2022