 Did you just see that I swear to God that cup of coffee just moved. Oh, I guess I must be seeing things Wait a minute. Good evening prop hunt is one of the simplest joys that the internet has to offer Whether it's hopping on for a quick fun game with your friends or just watching your favorite internet celebrities on YouTube Hold back their laughter in a precarious position prop hunt has captivated tens Maybe even hundreds of millions of people over the last 15 or so years It's become a staple of online gaming and long since graduated from a funny gimmick minigame on g-modern roblox to an undeniable cultural phenomenon You know how it goes one team are the hiders who disguise themselves as random objects and try to hide from the other team the hunters Who are humans armed with guns and explosives instructed to find and eliminate them if the hunters kill all the hiders before the time runs up They win if not they lose what results is a thrilling stealth experience They can be just as tense as it is comical filled with clever japes and funny strategies that simply couldn't exist in any other context Are you a bicycle? Rarely has a minigame trend like prop hunt retains such popularity and relevance for so long You'd think it would have gotten old by now I mean I remember playing this game when I was six or seven years old yet now I'm coming up on 21 and across its many forms this game mode still continues to fuel countless memories and viral funny moments Year after year after year even to this day it remains popular with both old-timey Nostalgic people like me and skippity band-band iPad kids alike And I think it's safe to say it's become a bit of an icon of internet pop culture at this point But have you ever stopped to ask yourself? How did we get here before every popular modern multiplayer game had a mode about hiding from hunters as paint buckets and traffic cones How did people get their fix for these sneaky shenanigans and where did this bizarre concept even come from in the first place? For myself, and I would wager a lot of viewers prop hunt has kind of just been a constant online for as long as we can remember But as it turns out it does have a history a very long one In fact one with many twists and mysteries and one that I find quite fascinating So why don't we have a look and see if we can figure out just how exactly prop hunt took over the internet? 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We're going to have to go all the way back to 1998 Do you remember 1998? I sure as hell don't I was negative six years old in 1998 and back then the video games industry was Similarly infantile for reference Half-Life came out in November of that year And that was pretty much the first immersive first-person shooter game ever made It was a time long before loot boxes battle passes in-game economies or even physics engines and seven months before Half-Life on April 14th A man named Chris Holden was stricken with inspiration quickly cobbling together and releasing a mod for quake 2 multiplayer by the name of Crate DM. That's right If you think Half-Life is old enough to be considered a boomer shooter that means prop hunt technically is too jokes aside The story behind Crate DM is pretty novel. Here's how Chris described it in the mods readme file One day I was experimenting with player model plugins while I was working on a new project and I made a crate player model now This was just for testing but I left my ass off watching it move around the map I consider the possibility of a deathmatch mode with both players using this crate player model and a map with a lot of crates So you could stop running and blend in so to speak I didn't really see any quake 2 maps that had the number of crates I was looking for so I tossed together a single room map I sent the mod over to a friend and we played for several hours having a great time with it the gameplay was insane It's just funny to see a crate sliding around the map and then when you're mid-battle all of a sudden your opponent disappears It was extremely fun and creepy. So I figured why not release it as stated The mod consisted of just one map called Crate DM 1 a single room filled with crates with custom code embedded in the map file That turns everyone's character model into crates leading to sneaky mid-fire fight hijinks and ambushes It was simple good fun and the concept wound up being a lot more popular than Chris Holden expected A lot of early quake fans still remember Crate DM fondly and it even wound up being ported over to other games like quake 3 arena And even Unreal Tournament in the following years It's not bad for a mod made in under an hour But while the concept behind Crate DM was funny and unique it was pretty simple and especially given that it only came with one map It definitely got old after a while However as mentioned earlier another highly moddable FPS game was right around the corner and in 2001 around three years after Crate DM's release another mod are known online as Planet Sun or bacon sandwich Real name Paul Arath created his own take on the idea this time built from Half-Life deathmatch dubbed box war Here's the tagline the premise of box war is as easy as pie when all the factory workers leave to go home for the night The crates come out to play suddenly the once work-filled factory floors become deathmatch arenas as the crates pick up their weapons and let out Their frustration on one another so what's so special think about it You're a crate fragging other crates in arenas filled with crates Stand still and you blend into the scenery a simple concept, but it's oh so much fun Funnily enough Paul seems to claim he actually came up with the idea for box war completely independent of Crate DM Stating I got tired of making the same people slash monster player models and turned to more interesting objects like couches chairs Tables lamps etc. I went on a quest into the depths of Worldcraft to seek out a prefab that would be best and easiest to use as a Player model the answer the crate Unfortunately, I was only able to get the box war mod the launch using the original release version of Half-Life from the 90s Not via either version of the game currently hosted on Steam So I'm sorry if the graphic settings in the footage look a little weird once I did get it up and running though I did find it to be pretty charming It's a lot more fleshed out than the original crate DM project for one It's technically a standalone game with its own really funny looking menu and for two It's got a lot more content to chew on it comes with six maps as opposed to Crate DMs one as well as light medium And heavy classes called captain oak chip and speedy McPly on a gameplay level It's not too different from Crate DM outside of being built from Half-Life instead of Quake 2 But it does have a pretty funny set of weapons like this freakish pump action double barrel shotgun and in place of the ankle biting Snarks from the original Half-Life deathmatch mode termites get it Is everyone's playing as wooden boxes? I thought it was cute online bloggers at the time noted just how tense box war Could get do you dare move was that crate there the last time you looked it's really rather eerie to see The boxes gliding around the rooms and hiding now I know some of you by now are thinking Richter isn't this video about prop hunt. What's up with this dumb crate box? 1998 poop shit. Well, well, it might have been a rough start These two early mods are important to mention because they almost certainly help lay the foundation for the strategic and deceptive gameplay later seen in hide-and-seek in 2004 valve released Counter-Strike Source and this games community quickly gave rise to one of the most legendary PC game modding scenes of all time not only were the custom weapons and maps that were made for this game Completely balls to the wall insane but tons of iconic game modes like jailbreak surf and gun game were all either created for or otherwise heavily rooted in the counter-strike source modding scene and hell even left for dead technically started as a counter-strike source mod However, for the sake of this video, we're going to be honing in on only one of these cool game modes that spawn from CSS I'm talking about a bizarre somewhat obscure script mod simply called hide-and-seek This game mode took the concept of hiding among the scenery in an FPS map from box war and crate DM and expanded it beyond crates to Allow players to hide as any object they could find on the map It also took advantage of counter-strike's team-oriented gameplay by introducing the hunter versus hider dynamic stripping weapons from the Hiders and blindfolding the hunters at the start of the round to give hiders time to find a good spot and to prevent hunters from just spraying down Every room in the map the server would also hit them with damage penalties anytime They fired a shot at a wall or a non-player prop this at least from what I can tell was the first ever iteration of what we now know Today as prop hunt now unfortunately even after digging through countless form archives I still can't find an exact date for hide-and-seek's initial release the earliest video I can find of it on YouTube was posted on April 14th 2007 but it's definitely older than that though since everywhere online seems to say that by 2007 the plug-in had already been updated to version 10 Unfortunately, it's been shockingly hard for me to track down the original 1.0 release or the name of the original hide-and-seek script creator I spent a good while running dead form links listed in old YouTube videos through the internet archive and scouring them for hints But I didn't find much other than this deprecated page that credits the script to a person named Mitsu Digi The only other traces I could find of a Mitsu Digi online were a PSN hacks page abandoned in 2007 and a hotmail address that I sent an email to But got no reply out of however another archive page my friend Fragato found as well as this game Banana listing of hide-and-seek 13.5 both write that the original mod was made by a guy named Kevin Who then apparently promptly abandoned it leaving another user named Typhoon West to take over the mod for a period of time and save it from death So unfortunately, it seems like arguably the most important person in prop-hunt history The person responsible for taking the deceptive crate DM formula and turning it into what it is today is Ambiguously credited as a guy named Kevin who may or may not have also gone by the name Mitsu Digi 17 years ago Before seemingly leaving the internet forever seeing how big this hunters versus props concept went on to become and how much of a Culture and even industry it later helped build I can't help but feel a little sad about that fact So if anyone watching thinks they can find a better lead on who this Kevin guy is Let me know if you find anything in the comments below and be fascinating to know what he thinks of just how far his idea has spread nowadays Anyways, if you boot up Counter-Strike source, you'll see that hide-and-seek is just about completely dead nowadays But for good reason Counter-Strike source was never really intended as a modding platform in the way that Half-Life and Quake were and it Seems like a lot of upkeep was required to even keep it running as the game continued to receive engine updates In other words this captivating idea was definitely being held back by the limitations of the game It was made for and it was kind of in desperate need of a new home Luckily, however right around the time hide-and-seek started picking up steam another source engine game called Gary's mod had begun emerging Which not only prioritized community made content But also took advantage of a highly flexible programming language called Lua making it a much more ideal platform for writing and maintaining Custom game modes thus a remake of hide-and-seek for gmod created by a user named amt or Andrew Theos was released on September 15th 2007 this time titled prop hunt As far as I can tell this remake of hide-and-seek is where the name prop hunt actually originates from thanks to gmods aforementioned lua support this new prop hunt project ran much better than the CSS hide-and-seek game mode and also had new fangled features that Could have never been properly implemented in the Counter-Strike version such as auto balance and an actual proper hide because of this overall much Better playing experience gmod quickly became the place to enjoy prop hunt You can find videos of people playing it on YouTube as far back as 2007 as it turns out living toilets have been a part of gmod culture long before the advent of skibbity toilet in October 2010 prop Hunt apparently even wound up being added as an official game mode in Gary's mod for a short period alongside ttt Ascension and dogfight arcade assault by the time the big gmod 13 update rolled around in 2012 though All of these had been removed other than ttt it wound up not mattering However as prop hunt still remained massively popular in the games community eventually becoming the most subscribed gmod add-on of all time on the steam workshop And it's not even close either at the time of me recording this prop hunt has over six million subscribers While the second place add-on Star Wars lightsabers has only three million prop hunt is king by a very very wide margin And it's actually not far fetched to say a lot of people probably bought Gary's mod just to play prop hunt anyways By this point where was getting out about this nifty new sneaky game mode and then it started peaking people's interest outside the gmod community on October 22nd 2009 a user named dark immortal released a port of the game mode to tf2 Helping bring it to an even wider audience in this version The blue team are all hunters in the form of pyros while the red team are all props as scouts Now I don't mean to be overly negative or put down people who created and played this version back in the day But I personally never thought tf2 prop hunt was any good It's very limited by the game It's in even more so than the counter strike source hide-and-seek mode in my opinion unlike gmod Which was basically built for custom shenanigans like this tf2 prop hunt feels like it's being Held together by chicken wire and in my experience most matches revolve around props Just trying to clip into objects and become basically invisible because frankly in tf2 The props are so fucking massive that there's just not a lot of good hiding spots The jank has always been part of the fun of prop hunt though and in a new more colorful game prop hunt immediately became an even bigger hit with Many games journalists sites running articles about this new fun tf2 experience and just like gmod prop hunt wound up being somewhat Officially supported in tf2 as well with multiple official updates pushing features and fixes directly intended for the community Developers of the custom prop hunt mode to take advantage of by this point There were now three different popular valve games hosting their own versions of prop hunt and things were definitely starting to heat up for the game mode a very popular roblox version by a guy named maximum ADHD was also released in March 2010 And it was in the following two or three years that prop hunt started really going viral in 2011 and 2012 two things Happened that helped lead to a huge boom of interest in prop hunt content on YouTube for one The gmod 13 update came out making the game less prone to crashes brighter and more colorful looking and overall more Accessible this led to a massive wave of new players checking out gmod and all of the wacky things it had to offer Including prop hunt for two team fortress 2 went free to play up until this point The game was sold on steam for around $20 But now anyone with a computer and a steam account could join and peruse the game server browser at their leisure These two factors led to a massive spike of interest in prop hunt and with YouTube content entering a renaissance around the same time A culture was born with these multiple different versions of the game right for the picking Vanoss gaming markiplier scene enters PewDiePie and countless others started having fun in prop hunt and broadcasting their japes to millions and millions of their viewers Before the age of Minecraft SNPs We had these guys yelling and expanding into a web of funny guys gaming on the internet for fun And back then it almost felt like an infinite supply of content Tons of videos came out in this era showcasing funny moments and clever strategies The combination of humor creativity and the deceptive nature of prop hunt made it a very engaging choice of game for youtubers This is also probably a good time to mention taunts taunts were a big part of prop hunt back in the day Basically every minute or so the props would emanate a noise to help hunters find people who had been hiding in an unfair or glitch spot I'm not really sure when but at some point this evolved into a system where props could choose what sound they play from a list And even play them at will if they wanted what immerse was a culture of running around and spouting memes at hunters while narrowly avoiding the wrath And it was massively entertaining at times Of course when something is good People tend to copy it and by the mid 2010s the amount of eyes prop hunt was catching online made people outside the valve community Realized just how much of a demand there was for silly shenanigans like this and thus prop hunt grew wings One of the first major companies to embrace prop hunt outside of valve was activision on march 31st 2017 Call of Duty modern warfare remastered was updated with the addition of a new prop hunt mode for the first time in the series And it was actually very interesting. I personally will always be most fond of the gmod version But I can't deny the charm that call of duty prop hunt carries There's just something really interesting about seeing this weird frankenstein game mode with roots in a 1998 quake mod Officially adapted in a triple a gritty serious military console shooter How far we've come just a few months later in may 2017 arcane studios released an fps stealth game called pray With mechanics very much reminiscent of prop hunt The main enemies in the game are called mimics and their opponents with the special ability to turn into any object In the game on a whim later on you get the ability to scan objects to determine if they're mimics or real objects And you eventually even unlock the mimic ability yourself with the game letting you copy any item in the world and opening up all kinds of Opportunities to explore find new secrets and glitch out of balance. It's neat in 2018 They also released a multiplayer spin-off called pray typhon hunter That was basically a full-on imitation of actual prop hunt, but was not received very well by the community I've actually not played pray myself But the original game has incredibly good reviews and seems to be an undeniable cult classic So it's probably worth checking out sometime if prop hunt in space sounds like an interesting premise to you Getting the helicopter on the roof. Just go ahead and uh get inside this What I I died I I got an achievement Over the years there have also been a few other projects that have tried building standalone indie games based on prop hunt And posting them on steam or various mobile game stores now in theory this could be cool And I understand where the impulse comes from all the versions of prop hunt We've covered so far have been created by mutating other games and are thus kind of flawed They've got exploits and other imperfections that sometimes detract from the experience So I can see why people would think there was room on the market for a more refined product Being available on mobile also obviously opens prop hunt to a larger market of younger people as well The thing is in my opinion, most of these just kind of look boring There was some real personality to the props and counter strike gmod and tf2 running away from a guy as the Fucking hypno toad or a bunch of bananas was funny. This this just looks kind of lame It seems to me like a big part of the charm of prop hunt lies in its transformative and janky nature And while I haven't spent a whole lot of time playing prop night or any of these other spin-offs I feel like the reviews tell me all I need to know about them Speaking of reviews back in 2023 everybody's favorite game overwatch added its own prop hunt game mode called mischief and magic I don't play overwatch I never really cared to check it out to be honest and apparently the guys who make it also do no good bad Nasty stuff in their office or something But I do have some friends who are into the game and they tell me that this mode is actually pretty fun And one of the better things they've added in this game in the last few years From what I hear every 10 or 15 seconds the props make a noise to alert the hunters akin to the taunts in gmod And they also get grenades or flashbangs to stun them for a quick getaway Which sounds like it probably leads to some pretty entertaining loony tune shenanigans Oh and the fortnight, of course they put this shit in fortnight In the last few years fortnight has been trying to expand to host other kinds of game content in a way similar to roblox And of course one of the game modes they've jacked is prop hunt from what I've played It takes the player to a small map and sets things up just about how you'd expect Though the team of hunters are handled a little differently the damage system in place to punish hunters from just shooting everything Isn't present instead the hunters are limited by their weapon a single shot shotgun with a slow firing rate It does seem to insta kill the hiders though who once again occasionally emanate sounds to help give away their position Basically, if you're a hider you hide and if you're a hunter you just run around and shoot everything that moves or seems out of place I played this one map themed around the house from home alone And there were rc cars and shit on the ground that seriously confused me for a second Now I know the audience I've cultivated on my channel is probably not big fans of overwatch or fortnight And I'm not either but I think it's important to mention them in this video to show just how far this idea has come The flavor of the month minigame culture birthed by early custom game modes like prop hunt has now evolved into the modern live service standard of triple a video games Custom game modes have been adopted and turned into official content because nowadays games need to have a revolving door of content In order to stay relevant in a modern social media landscape And while in some ways the commercialization of this once organic phenomenon is sad I for what I'm glad that this beloved minigame continues to live on and bring people joy When I look at the journey that prop hunt has gone through and rising to the top I can't help but notice the parallel its story has with that of the source engine itself It all started with a simple mutation of quake then evolving into its own more interesting identity Then with the technological jump in video games from the early 2000s Something truly great was born and then promptly served on a golden platter throughout online pop culture via gmod and tf2 In the early 2010s still echoing to this very day Playing a match of prop hunt with my friends never fails to take me back to my younger years Holding back laughter in the same way you would when your friend makes a silly face at you from across class While the teacher is in a bad mood it's a reminder that the best most earnest joy is usually the simplest as of today Craig dm is 26 years old and it's fascinating to me that the fruits of its labor are still creating laughs and smiles A quarter century later So here's to prop hunt if you want to talk more about its history or your favorite version join my discord in the Description and tag me and call me a poopy head. Thanks for watching. I hope you enjoyed Shout out to this article by robert yang on the radiator design blog That included some really good info on crate dm and box war and partly inspired me to make this video and have a good day