 Good evening. This is a watermelon. To be specific, it's Watermelon 01, an iconic model with a surprisingly rich history. Most people know it from Gary's mod, though it technically comes from Half-Life 2 and it's appeared in tons of other Source Engine games as well. It's also always had a bit of a meamy reputation due to its comical nature, and to a lot of people it is synonymous with goofy G-Mod shenanigans. But what if I told you that this watermelon here was also the key to one of the most interesting and bizarre pieces of Lost Gary's mod history. Something intoxicating that once captivated a cult community and was seen as a staple of the game, but was removed for mysterious reasons over 15 years ago, and has now been relegated to complete and utter obscurity. Today, I want to talk to you all about the phenomenon that is let's go back a little bit. The year is 2004. The blockbuster Half-Life 2 just released, and life is… good. A scrappy young British guy named Gary Newman, who's living off proceeds from a dating site, gets his hands on HL2's mod development kit and, with some inspiration from another project called JB Mod, creates this little thing we know today as Gary's Mod. Now, you might already know this, but at its inception, G-Mod wasn't much other than a white room with a gun that could pick up props and make ragdolls do nasty stuff. However, Gary's continued support for the game and adding new maps and features helped it quickly gain a following on online forums like Something Awful, and did eventually completely overshadowed its predecessor JB Mod, becoming by far the most popular Half-Life 2 sandbox mod on the market. Gary worked hard on the game non-stop for about a year after its launch, before he finally hit his first major burnout and became bored with the project. 2005 very well may have marked the end of G-Mod's development had it not been for him suddenly discovering the programming language Lua. Lua's support would allow G-Mod to easily hot-load custom game modes and weapons, and today is remembered as one of the biggest factors in the game's success. Gary saw its potential from the start and became excited to release it in a new update and see what the community would do with it, and in order to get the creative juices flowing, he and a couple of his pals even whipped up some simple Lua-based game modes and maps to show off his examples of its power. All of this content was unveiled with G-Mod 9 in October 2005, but curiously, none of it exists in the game today. We'll talk about why in just a second. And while none of the G-Mod 9 game modes are particularly complex or impressive, they are all unique and fascinating relics of a G-Mod era that has long passed. For example, this instagib mode called laser dance where your gun kick back sends you pummeling through the air after each shot is kind of unique. This long shot mode, where whoever can get ahead on the other from the longest distance wins, is actually pretty fun. And it's interesting to see how these primitive versions of zombie survival in hide and seek might have inspired similar custom modes that are popularly played in the G-Mod community today. But standing amongst this crowd of gimmicky experiments was one clear standout by the name of Melon Race. Or Melon Racer. The two are mostly interchangeable. Melon Race is a game mode designed by Gary Newman himself, and it's the only G-Mod 9 game mode he designed more than one level for. It's remarkably simple, and from the title alone, you can probably get a pretty good idea of what it is. All players on the server take control of a watermelon, and the first person to make 11 laps around this small bizarre race course is declared the victor. Sounds pretty simple, right? Well, don't be deceived. Beneath this outwardly simple premise is a surprising amount of depth. Take the game's controls. Your only options to move are to propel forward and backward, steering with the mouse. It's easy to pick up momentum once you get the ball rolling, but it's just as easy to lose control and splatter your melon against a rock or a wall, which kills you and resets your lap from the beginning. This creates a balancing act between speed and precision, and with such a limited control scheme, it actually creates a pretty fair challenge that scales with how competitive you and your friends are. But if you're like me and you don't have many friends, don't worry, because it's also possible to play the game mode alone and just see how fast you can make a single lap around the course. This on its own is almost more fun than the game itself to me and has eaten many hours of my time. It doesn't look like I'm alone either, since Melon Race to this day has an actively maintained speedrun.com page. Getting back to the story itself, despite how simple Melon Race is, the game mode is actually very fun and, dare I say, addicting. It's almost flappy bird-esque in nature. And because of this, it actually amassed a pretty active following back in the day and even had a custom map scene. I was able to track down a couple of these, and while, unsurprisingly, most of them kind of suck, they're still interesting time capsules to explore, and go to show how much people resonated with the game mode back then. Unfortunately though, this Melon Race community was never given the chance to flourish that it deserved. By the time 2006 rolled around, GMOD was becoming quite popular, and had caught the attention of Valve themselves. They approached Gary Newman with a deal to sell GMOD on their digital distribution service Steam, which he initially denied out of skepticism anyone would want to pay real-world money for it. However, after some negotiation, Valve and Gary eventually came to an agreement, and development began on a new commercial version of Gary's mod to be sold on Steam for $10, with the proceeds split evenly between Gary's Team Face Punch and Valve. This new version of Gary's mod was what we know today as GMOD 10, and while it made the game much more secure, stable, and user-friendly, it also unfortunately made some big sacrifices. Namely, apart from Sandbox, every single game mode that was included with GMOD 9 had been suddenly removed. Was it because the team had issues porting them to a newer branch of the Source engine, or considered them too rough to be part of an esteemed commercial release? Maybe there was trouble getting permission from some of the game mode's creators to package them in a retail product? Well, no one seems to know for sure why, but when GMOD got its official release on Steam in November 2006, Melon Race and all the other wacky party modes from the previous build were completely gone. Now, GMOD has always been a game with a strong custom content platform, so it didn't take long before modders began rebuilding these modes on the newer builds of the game. There were a couple of Melon Race revival projects I was able to dig up that made their own neat little changes to its formula, like adding their own courses or even power-ups. However, none of these remakes ever managed to relight the spark that the original game mode had, and as new GMOD updates came and went, the Melon Race community eventually fizzled out. The game mode got one final nod from the Gary's Mod team in 2013, over six years after its removal. GMOD's Steam trading cards released with newly commissioned art and among depictions of the fizz gun and the face poser was one final tribute to the Melon Racer game mode that had been cut all those years ago. It was now long discontinued, yet still immortalized alongside some of the game's most iconic imagery. Nowadays, TTT and Sandbox are the only game modes that come prepackaged with GMOD, and while those two on their own are capable of producing thousands of hours of fun even without mods, it's still weird to think about how much more content used to come with the game. And to this day, I believe Melon Race is a story of missed potential. I mean, it's just a simple silly prop racing game mode, but I've probably spent tens of hours of my life playing it at this point, both with friends and on my own. I've streamed it for hours at a time, me and my friends have made our own custom levels for it. Hell, one of them even holds the speedrun world record for the game as of recording this. Although this time I've sunk into a watermelon game from 15 years ago that, honestly, at this point I've probably thought about more than the guy who made it. I wonder if he even remembers it. Gary Newman is a private and rather elusive guy. There's only a few pictures of him online, and his life has changed a lot since he prototyped this silly watermelon game at his parents' house in 2006. He's now the millionaire founder of one of the most successful game dev companies in Europe, he's a father, and he doesn't do many interviews anymore. Needless to say, he's a busy man, and getting in contact with him is not the easiest thing in the world. However, in my time doing YouTube I've come to make a few dark and shady connections, and with a little bit of elbow grease, I managed to cut myself a small portion of Gary's time to ask him about melon race. Now, GMOT has been a very big part of my life since I was young, so of course I was very nervous going into this, but here's what I learned from it. Surprisingly, Gary does indeed remember melon race, pretty well in fact. He also claims to remember working on melon sumo wrestling at one point, which I guess never saw the light of day. I asked him if he used to time himself and whether he remembered his fastest lap, but he replied saying back then he was just happy to make it around the course in one piece. I told him about the resurging community around the game, including the speedruns and the custom maps that my friends have been working on. He seemed a bit surprised, which kind of confirmed my suspicion that I and the rest of the melon race community had given more thought to it than the person who created it ever did. And finally, he told me that now that I'd reminded him of it, he does kind of miss melon racer, and that he even now plans to make a new version of it for his upcoming GMOD successor Sandbox. With that, I thanked him for the thousands of hours of fun GMOD has given me in the community over the years, and I bid him farewell. So there you have it folks, a story of something so simple but with so much depth and potential. Laying dormant in the hearts of many for nearly two decades, only to eventually rise again when we all least expect it. It's kind of beautiful, isn't it? Also, since the build of GMOD that melon race comes with is really insecure and unstable, I reached out on Twitter to find a programmer, and am happy to announce that a faithful port of the original melon race to the latest version of the game is now for the first time in history, available to download as an add-on on the GMOD workshop thanks to the talented archivist Fagardo. The link will be in the description, so go check that out if you want to celebrate this obscure piece of Gary's mod history. Thank you for watching, I hope you enjoyed this video as much as I enjoyed making it, and have a good day. I'm melon racing all day and night, I'm melon racing to my heart's delight. You can see me melon racing every single day. That's Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Got this green fruit, make it scoot and make it crawl. If I can't get a sub-13, then I'mma end it all.