 Good evening. In the world of Garry's Mod, few places are remembered as fondly and missed as dearly as the Gmod Tower. It's a name that older players probably haven't heard in a while, and that some younger ones may have never even heard at all. Once one of Gmod's biggest online attractions, Gmod Tower was a game mode enjoyed by countless players during the game's golden age. The premise was simple, but innovative. It was a server built around a big tower that acted as a hub where players could hang out, play mini-games with each other to earn in-game coins, visit shops to customize their character, decorate their own personal condo, and generally have a good time with their friends. It quickly became a social hotspot for players all around the world, cultivating one of the strongest online communities that Garry's Mod has ever seen and becoming a permanent fixture of the game's culture and legacy. Not only did it earn a permanent mention on Gmod's official Wikipedia page, but its massive popularity was actually even the reason Face Punch upped the game's server player count limit from 64 to 128 back in 2009. Hundreds, even thousands of players from all around the world would log on to Gmod Tower every single day to socialize, goof off, game, and generally unwind. In fact, I guarantee if you scroll down to the comments right now, you'll see countless posts from people recollecting their own unforgettable experiences they had on Gmod Tower. There was just so much to do, so many people to talk to, so many memories and friends to be made, and so much fun to be had. With regular updates bringing new game modes, player models, and even changes to the Tower lobby itself, it was truly a living, breathing experience that you could never get bored in. Additionally, if you were a fan of the community and culture surrounding Gmod, there was no better place to take it all in. The copyrighted characters and music, the eccentric people you'd run into, the goofy tone juxtaposed with the genuinely impressive technical feats the server accomplished within the limits of the Source engine, it truly embodied the heart and spirit of Garry's mod. Simply put, Gmod Tower was easily one of the most memorable and impactful things to ever happen to the game. It brought people together in a truly wonderful way, and played a big part in helping shape the game's identity and legacy. But unfortunately, Gmod Tower's story ends in a rather unfortunate way, one that has led to a decade-long conflict and controversy. See, the people behind Gmod Tower, Pixel Tail, announced in 2016 that they were shutting it down to focus on hosting and developing a new standalone game they were working on called Tower Unite. Tower Unite was basically the same exact premise as Gmod Tower, but instead of being built from Gmod, it was going to be built on the Unreal Engine using all new original assets and designs. Simply put, Pixel Tail had gotten tired of working within and around the confines of Gmod, and figured they could make more money for their hard work by turning the project into something more professional. Which, as unfortunate of news as it was, made a lot of sense. A lot of time had clearly gone into Gmod Tower for over half a decade at this point, and it's not at all unreasonable that its creators would want to take their ideas into a more profitable and original direction. And frankly, the idea of a better and more stable standalone version of Gmod Tower was still pretty enticing to a lot of people. Pixel Tail even promised that the final game would have no microtransactions, just a $20 price tag, which really isn't that bad for how much content they were planning to dish out. So after years of entertaining people and bringing them together to form lifelong friendships and even marriages, Gmod Tower was officially shut down in 2016. And it was one hell of a bittersweet moment. The pictures from the night it closed down truly tell the story of how well loved this project was, and how much it meant to so many people. So fast forward to 2023. What's going on now? Well, it's been eight years since Tower Unite was announced, and at a glance it's been a pretty big success for Pixel Tail games. Lots of successful YouTubers like Pyrocynical, XQC, and the Sidemen have all made videos playing on and promoting the game, and its Steam reviews are overwhelmingly positive. The thing is though, from what I can tell, the people who play and enjoy Tower Unite are largely not the same audience of people who play Gmod Tower. In fact, there are apparently a lot of people from the original Gmod Tower community who found it to be quite a disappointment. There's a lot of things these people take issue with in Tower Unite, be it its price tag, its art direction, or the fact that it's been in early access for a decade now. But frankly, the real root of the matter is that what people fell in love with all those years ago was Gmod Tower, in all its copyright violating old internet source engine glory. And to a lot of people, a sanitized spin-off made in the less interesting Unreal Engine was just never going to scratch the same itch. With all of this in mind, it shouldn't be that big of a surprise that some fan projects have sprung up in the last couple years with the goal of reviving the original Gmod Tower. But unfortunately, Pixel Tail hasn't taken very kindly to this, and that is where things in this story get hairy. Pixel Tail are at this point notorious for filing DMCA complaints to get these fan projects shut down. Like whack-a-mole, any time a Gmod Tower re-host would pop up, they'd get shut down in a matter of days. In an attempt to preserve themselves, some of them started including their own advertisements telling players to go buy Tower Unite to support the original devs. But this didn't seem to slow the DMCA hammer in the slightest. From what I can tell, Pixel Tail doesn't want people re-hosting their old Gmod Tower content on new servers, because A, they're making unauthorized use of the Gmod Tower name and even leaked code without permission, and B, their free servers are potentially stealing players who otherwise might purchase Tower Unite. Obviously, this has been met with its fair share of backlash. Many diehard Gmod Tower fans argue that Pixel Tail has no right to copyright strike these projects down, because the original Gmod Tower built itself off unauthorized use of other copyrighted material like its player models and music. I mean hell, Gmod is in the name, and Pixel Tail sure as shit don't own the rights to that. Additionally, regardless of the legality of it all, it's just generally not very good publicity to shut down fan projects to people who just want to play games you're not even really supporting anymore. Nintendo is infamous for this exact reason. Across the last seven years, this conflict has led to an extremely wide and extremely saddening rift growing between the Pixel Tail dev team and their once adoring audience. Pixel Tail eventually put up their own Gmod Tower reboot for its 10 year anniversary, but from what I've heard, it had an abundance of technical issues, bugs, and Tower Unite ads placed absolutely everywhere through the game world and wound up dividing people even further, with some claiming that the reboot was strictly performative to mitigate the controversy and capitalize on it to advertise Tower Unite. And while that's kind of hard to substantiate on its own, today it seems the official Gmod Tower servers are all but completely inactive. So, who's in the right? Well, from the perspective of the people trying to play these reboots, Pixel Tail comes off as though they're anti-historical tyrants abusing the copyright system to squash what little joy people are getting from playing the old version of the game that people are volunteering their own time and money to host and play at no profit. But on the other hand, they do apparently own the trademark to GM Tower, and it's also kind of hard for me to not sympathize with them. It's probably seriously annoying to constantly deal with people wanting to play your old abandoned shit from 2009 instead of the new game you've put a budget and years of your life into building and supporting, especially since a lot of these projects apparently run on stolen code that was leaked just to spite you. And frankly, the way Pixel Tail had Mack D Guy got ripped apart on online forums for trying to speak out against people using his own creation in ways he didn't approve of is kind of messed up in my opinion. I can actually uniquely relate to putting my heart into something new and interesting just to be disappointed by people still wanting the old slop I made years ago that I'm nowhere near as proud of. Anywho, I tried to reach out to the Tower Unite devs to get more of their side of the story, but it looks like they were too busy working on pushing an update to give me a word for this video, which is fine. And this goes without saying, but please don't give these guys any shit for this. At the end of the day, they're just a small indie team trying to promote and protect their products. Ultimately, I think the whole thing boils down to two main facts. One, the Tower Unite was never going to be an acceptable replacement for Gmod Tower for some people due to its intrinsically different direction and roots. And two, that Pixel Tail basically gets sovereign rule over everything they've ever distributed, unless someone tries to take them to court, which will never happen and would probably be a very bad idea. I can only hope that an agreement can eventually be reached between Pixel Tail and these other fan re-hosts that allows them to continue existing in a way that keeps everybody happy. Because I talked to some of the people behind these re-hosts, and they genuinely seem to be motivated by love, not spite. And that brings me to the real point of this video. Last month, I was tipped off by a friend that yet another fan team has come together and got the good ol' Gmod Tower up and running again. They're paying money out of pocket to re-host these servers at no profit, and they seem genuinely passionate about preserving the game and its culture. There's no telling how long it'll stay up, so I figured now is a better time than ever to have a gander at this classic mod that people have been fighting for over half a decade now to keep up and running, and show you all just what's so special about it. Afterward, I'm gonna have a look at the official Gmod Tower Reunion server in Tower Unite for the first time, and tell you how those experiences compare. Now, I don't want to step on any toes here, so I'm not gonna tell you guys where to find these servers, and I'm also gonna say that if you're gonna go out of your way to find them and play on them yourself, it's probably only morally and ethically right that you purchase a copy of Tower Unite as well, which I did. But with that out of the way, today, I want to dig into this historic relic of my childhood, and one of the most legendary Gmod game modes of all time. Alright, so getting into a Gmod Tower Re-host was as simple as downloading their mod collection off the workshop and then connecting to the server using the console. From there, I was faced with an all-too-familiar loading screen, and could immediately tell I was in for one hell of a nostalgia trip. Once I connected, I spawned in the Metro, where I enjoyed tinkering with my player settings to change my character model and enable Viewroll because I'm a sicko. Then afterward, I walked up the stairs to the main lobby, and that's when the memory started really pouring in. Welcome to the Gmod Tower. This is the hub world and nexus of this game mode, and from here, there's a bunch of different directions and places you can go. Why don't we start out with this theater on our left? Now, if you've played Gmod Multiplayer before, there's a pretty decent chance you already know what's going on here, but just in case you don't, basically, there's certain Gmod add-ons that let you spawn TVs and watch videos or listen to music with other players. And in the Gmod Tower, they've rigged one of these TVs up to a literal theater where you can sit down with friends and strangers to watch YouTube together. Now, this is definitely not as novel as it was 10 years ago before the existence of Discord and such, but you can probably still see how something like this helped build the game's sense of community back in the day. It was always a fun surprise to waltz in here and see what people were watching. In fact, the Gmod Tower Theater was actually popular enough that it got forked into its own game mode called Cinema back in 2013. Complete with popcorn and some really sleek-looking levels for the time. As much shit as people might want to give pixel tail, there's no denying they've had their hands in a lot of Gmod history. I even learned while making this video that there are apparently also the people who made Elevator Source, if any of you guys remember that. Getting back to the theater itself, though, it actually has a couple of nifty secrets. If you head up to the back area and press E on this coffee mug, you'll get teleported to a separate cinema that's on the moon and get your player model set to the Fallout 3 astronaut. You can also follow this busted open vent and climb all the way through these dingy backdoor areas to the top of the tower, which you can then jump off of for an easy achievement. That's about all there is to do over here, though. I personally never spent too much time in the GMT theater, especially once cinema came out, so I unfortunately don't really have too many memories to share about it like I do some of the other parts of this mod. And chicken sandwich. Next we're gonna have a look at the entertainment plaza. This is the place you get faced head on with when you first enter the lobby. It's this little area that's kind of reminiscent of a mall or maybe an airport and basically serves as a shopping district where you can hang out and spend your in-game currency that you can see in the bottom left. I always really liked how sunny and warm this place was. People on YouTube love to talk about how creepy and gritty the source engine is, hell, even I'm guilty of it, but I think we tend to overlook how joyous and colorful it can be too. GMT uses a lot of the same stock HO2 and CSS assets we associate with the grittiest and most desolate locations, but uses them to instead create a comforting place you might actually want to spend time and watch the world go by in. It's kind of pleasant to just take a seat at one of these tables and watch the other players run around. As for what's in the plaza, probably the first thing that'll catch your eye here is this appearance store. If you've ever played the GTA games, this is kind of like the clothing stores from that. Here you can pick up new unique player models like Master Chief, Leon Kennedy, Zelda, Postal Dude, Nico and Roman Bellic, Walter White, Carly, like from the old Walking Dead games godmen, what a throwback. There's really something for everyone here, but I'm partial to the male 07 in the suit model personally. If that's not enough for you, this place also lets you deck your guy out in hats and accessories, all kinds of glasses, headcrabs, Majora's masks, Mario and Luigi caps, etc. And right outside, you can also hit up one of these vending machines to take a potion and make yourself bigger, smaller, flatter, or even whatever the hell this is. To the appearance store, GMT really gave the player a lot of options to personalize their character and express themselves. And I think that was one of the most appealing things about it back in the day since it came out around the same time TF2 was booming. There is plenty more to do in the plaza than just play dress up though. For example, you can head over to this arcade to see some old school flash games on arcade cabinets, which you can actually play by the way. Fancy Pants, The Last Stand, even Portal Flash Edition. I can't stress how seriously awesome this is to me. Not awesome however are the controls on blockles, which is the GMT Arcade's version of Tetris. It fucking sucks. You can't slow drop your blocks, only instant drop them or let them slide down at a snail's pace, and the game also seems to have been programmed by a monkey because shit just sometimes doesn't work how it's supposed to. This version of Tetris is uniquely annoying to play, even more so if you're a niche internet micro celebrity and a bunch of people are getting in your ear bothering you while you're trying to focus. Oh fuck, you're an asshole, bro. You're such a fucking asshole for making me fuck up. You ruined my whole fucking night. I owe my fucking god. You can also duel other players in chess, checkers, and tic-tac-toe, or even compete against them in a little trivia game, but that's about it for the arcade. As we head back out, there's something else I should probably tell you about the main lobby. If you stick around there long enough, you might eventually notice you've been suddenly handed a chainsaw, or that the place has been flooded with cardboard cutouts of Obama that the game is telling you to break with a crowbar. These are random events that you can participate in to earn bonus money, and I always thought they were a pretty fun way of keeping the hub world interesting and chaotic. They're definitely a bit puzzling to encounter with no forewarning though. Now here's a question, are you a chronic gambler? I'm not, but sometimes it feels like GMON Tower is trying its best to turn me into one, because on the second floor of the plaza is the Tower Casino, offering all kinds of ways to gamble your hard earned cash down the toilet. How about spending 100 coins to spin a Wheel of Fortune? There's a microscopic chance you might win a crazy rare item that you can resell for tens of thousands of coins, but more likely you'll get a hula girl worth almost nothing, or even literally absolutely nothing at all. Are you interested yet? I've played the wheel in here way longer than I ever want to admit, and the best thing I ever got out of it was the backpack that I resold for like a thousand coins. I'm honestly convinced some of this shit on here isn't even possible to get. This Sonobuzu shrine apparently resells for like 80k coins or something, but I've never seen a single soul ever get it. Heading away from the spinner you can also play poker and video poker, or even sit down at a slot machine and try to hit a big jackpot, which I highly recommend against. You will just lose all your money. I have never gambled or been to a casino in real life, and honestly I have no real interest in doing so, but even I have spent thousands of my hard earned coins at the Gmod Tower Casino, because it is just that addictive. And apparently that appeal has survived under Tower Unite, since one of the most popular reviews for that game dubs it VR chat for gambling addicts. But before I forget, the casino also lets you outright challenge anyone onto the server to a duel to the fucking death. You both have to agree on how much money is on the line and what weapons you'll use, and then the game will teleport both of you to a walled off part of the map called Narnia, where the last man standing wins. It's quite a thrill. There's a few other areas and shops around the lobby you can explore, like this outdoor area you can access from the metro leading to a cabin and a public pool, as well as this bar if you want to get drunk and vomit all over other players. But for the most part, we've now covered pretty much everything there is to the main lobby. Thankfully however, the main lobby is nowhere near all Gmod Tower has to offer, because if you hit this right and hit up these teleporters, you'll get a choice to go to two other lobbies, Suites and Game Modes. Let's start out with the Suites. Once you arrive in this lobby, you'll be faced with a front desk reception area, where you can talk to the sweet lady and rent your own personal room from her. For free. It's basically a little apartment just for you. It comes with a living room, a kitchen, a bathroom, a yard, a fish tank, a bedroom, and even a closet where you can store all your hats. It also serves as your own little sims house that you can rearrange and decorate however you want. If you head back to the entertainment plaza, you can hit up electronic stores, poster stores, and furniture stores to pick up stuff that you can freely place around your suite wherever you want. You can also win more eccentric decorations as prizes back at the casino. There's a lot of room for expression. Want a nicer couch? Sure. Want to build a whole new room in the empty space above the living room? Why not? How about a rave ball? Anything you want, pal. I've personally turned my suite bedroom into a bar run by the 44th president. He's serving up hope on the rocks. I recently learned the layout of these Suites is actually based on the real-world Iron Blossom Lodge in Snowbird, Utah. I can only assume one of the devs stayed there and chose to copy it because they found it to be really cozy. Anyway, decorating is great and all, but what's the point if you don't have any guests to admire your pet? Well, luckily, Suites are one of the most social elements of GMod Tower. You can invite anyone you want over, or even host house parties and invite the whole lobby to come watch Pokemon. I probably won't ever have an opportunity to tell this story again, so forgive my crassness here. But one of my earliest memories online was seeing someone in GMod Tower's chat advertise that they had porn playing in their suite and then meandering over just to be met with a weird close-up video of a woman shaving her kuchi. It was super well-shot and well-lit and honestly kind of looked like a clip out of a commercial or something. That's still honestly one of my most bewildering memories. Anyway, if that story didn't make it clear, basically anything goes in the suite for better and for worse, and it can be great fun to look around and see what other people have managed to make out of the same little house template from one random corner of Utah. Or what god-awful music they're listening to. Heading back to the teleporters, though, we've now got to have a look at the last lobby in the GMod Tower Nexus, which also happens to be the real meat of the game mode, the mini-game lobby. You know how I've been periodically mentioning the GMod Tower coins that you can earn and spend? Well, this is the best place to get them. See, the genius of GMod Tower is that it wasn't just a single server running a second-life-esque virtual hangout zone. It was actually a network of servers that each branched off from the central tower through this mini-game port, where you could go up and queue for any game you wanted at any time. So in a way, GMod Tower was actually a dozen or so game modes wrapped into one that you could pick from to earn coins. I remember each of these having a ton of soul and passion poured into them, and I was very excited to check them all out again after all these years. On this server, it looks like they've got seven mini-games online and working, so let's have a look see why don't we? When I came back to GMod Tower, Virus was the first game mode I rushed to, because it was always my favorite. It's basically a zombie survival kind of mode, where everyone starts out as survivors, but then one player at random gets turned into a Fallout 3 ghoul, who then has to infect more players by getting close to them. The humans have to try to survive until a time limit runs out, and it gets pretty damn fun and hectic. From what I can tell, it's based on the game mode of the same name from Timesplitters, which I haven't played since I was a very young child, but I do remember it looking really cool. Anyway, GMod Tower's take on Virus is seriously great fun. The weapons are awesome as hell, the music is great, and there are plenty of wonderfully crafted levels to play on. My personal favorite is the hospital. It's just always stuck with me for some reason. I actually highly recommend checking this mode out sometime if you've never played it. It's a great hectic take on the zombie genre and forever has a special place in my heart. Moving on though, next up is PvP Battle. This mini-game is, as it sounds, GMod Tower's rendition of a free-for-all-death match mode. Just like Virus, there's a bunch of really cool maps to explore and play on, and a lot of cool guns to pick from as well, like the akimbos and the shotgun. Unfortunately, I find that the easiest way to win PvP Battle is actually to forgo guns entirely, because the melee weapons are very powerful, especially on close-range maps, and everyone moves so fast that it's kind of hard to land precise shots anyway. My favorite levels in PvP Battle were this big open snowy one where melee attacks are a bit easier to dodge and therefore the gunplay shines more, as well as the subway, which is just really cool looking and fun. One thing that does kind of suck about this mode is that there's only one song that plays every time the match starts and it gets really repetitive and annoying the longer you play. Oh, and I almost forgot to mention this, but PvP Battle is actually loosely based on Jake and Bacon Source, an old mod for Half-Life 1 that was really popular before my time. It was also the groundwork for Gebrony Brawl Episode 3, an actual source game that came out not too long ago and is unfortunately completely dead. Funnily enough, I personally find GMod Tower's PvP Battle to be more fun than either of these games, but that might just be me. Next up, we've got to have a look at Source Carts. Okay, this one is exactly what it sounds like. It's fucking Mario Kart. It's Mario Kart, except you can trunk a drive and vomit everywhere and play as Nico Bellic, which is awesome. Source Carts has a bit of a reputation as GMod's worst or jankiest minigame, but I actually find it to be really fun. Basically, everyone competes for a couple laps around a regular race course, then the match closes out with two rounds of a battle mode. Whoever did the best overall collects the most money. Sometimes when I'm cruising through these levels, I honestly forget I'm even playing GMod with how colorful they are. Then I get to a ramp or a curve in the course where my camera completely breaks, and I quickly remember this is still just an elaborate mutation of Half-Life 2. Source Carts is kind of a stupid idea, but I honestly find it to be one of the most enjoyable game modes GMod Tower has to offer. What can I say? Mario Kart is a great party game, and GMod Kart is a fun twist on it. I'm speaking of just putting stuff in GMod, next up is- It's fucking mini golf. That's it. There's not even a twist this time. I'm definitely not very good at this mode, but I still kind of find it fun to play when shooting this shit with friends. And once again, some of the maps have really cool vibes. If you somehow never played mini golf, basically you gotta get your ball into the hall with as few putts as possible, sometimes working around ramps or in this version moving platforms to try and outperform the other players. There's really not a lot to say about this, other than much like Source Carts, it's kind of novel to see something like this built in the Source Engine. And from what I can tell, it's one of the more popular modes in this game, so I guess I'm the odd one out for not particularly caring for it. But enough little kid shit, okay? Because next up, it's time for a motherfucking zombie massacre. Zombie Massacre is a high octane, top down, PvE zombie survival mode. Wow, what a mouthful. And to me, it feels a lot like an old flash game. I've heard some people say it's based off the Dead Ops Arcade mode in Call of Duty Black Ops, but I've never played that, so I don't know how true it is. Anyway, you pick one of these loadouts that come with different perks and special abilities. I'm partial to the Father Grigori propeller trap, and then try to hold out with your buddies until a rescue chopper comes to get you. It definitely feels a little strange to play a top down shooter in the Source Engine, which is probably why I never got into Alien Swarm. But you know what? This game mode is actually pretty fun. The gameplay of just spamming your mouse button does get a little repetitive, and it's definitely not anywhere near as exciting as Virus in my opinion, but there's still an opportunity for a lot of variety and teamwork with the different classes. And also, sometimes there's a giant fucking T-Rex that comes out and insta kills you, so all in all, it's a pretty good zombie massacre, but maybe put more dinosaurs next time. Have you ever played Super Monkey Ball? Well, the creatively titled ball race game mode is basically just Super Monkey Ball co-op, and I fucking suck at it. It's not all my fault though, some of the maps are just bullshit. You basically just gotta make your way to the end of these tricky rotating spinny obstacle courses without falling into the void or getting a game over. If you've got better balance than me or you're a big fan of Super Monkey Ball, you might really enjoy it though. Because even despite how bad I was at it, I actually still had a bit of fun rolling my character around in whatever this place is. You know, I've never even played the source material before, but even as a kid I knew as soon as I looked at this mode that it had to be based on some weird Japanese shit. Anyway, to finally round us off, I gotta look at what might be the most iconic GMod Tower game mode of all time. Ultimate Chimerahunt. UCH is a game mode everyone seems to really love and remember fondly. I feel like if you ask people if they remember GMod Tower, this is probably the first thing you'll hear brought up. I also seem to remember playing on it a lot back in the day, though coming back to it in this, I struggle to remember how it worked or even how to play. From what I can tell, it's actually one of GMod Tower's only original game modes, though it's built using characters from the Mother series or Earthbound, and the premise is that there's two teams, one team being the Pig Masks, and the other being a single guy playing as the Chimerah monster. The Chimerah's goal is to eat everybody else by stunning them with his roar and owning them, while the Pig People's goal is to disable the Chimerah by sneaking up behind him and hitting a button on his back that instantly wins the round for them. It's pretty simple. I actually remember the maps for this game better than I did the game itself. A lot of them are cartoony and kind of TF2-infused, and coming back to them after all these years was very interesting. As for the gameplay, I feel like I remember it being better when I was younger. There's a few factors that I think might play into this, one being that I was 10 years old back then, the other being that in the 10 years since then, everyone has gotten a lot better at juking the Chimerah, so now he dies instantly like every single round, and also according to some of the other players I talked to, this version of UCH is apparently slightly out of date. Putting all that to the side though, Ultimate Chimerah Hunt is still a nifty little game mode, and an undeniable classic. I do wish this server had the New Park City map though, that one was always my favorite. But with that, we've now unfortunately covered all the game modes available on this fan-rehost of GMod Tower. In my opinion, they're all still pretty fun to play with friends, or even just the other randos you can find huddling around in the lobby. Coming back to them all these years later was definitely a really cool experience and reminded me of a happier, more innocent time in my life. But now that I've shown you what the GMod Tower experience looks like on a fan-made server, it's only fair that I next show you what things are like on the official GMod Tower server that PixelTale put up in 2019 for its 10-year anniversary. Let's have a look. The first thing I noticed is that to join, not only do I have to download a workshop collection, I also have to manually download a zip file off their website, which is a bit odd. It's whatever though, I'm an epic grizzled GMod veteran, so the act of dragon-dropping files doesn't even phase me. I did notice this weirdly intimidating terms of service I had to agree to and the fact that even enlisting GMod Tower's game mount requirements, PixelTale are basically already telling you to fuck off and go play Tower United instead. Setting my reservations about that to the side, once I had everything sorted out and installed, I booted up GMod and joined the IP provided. Immediately I noticed that the loading screen seemed to be failing to format images and was kind of broken. Also that despite having downloaded a full workshop collection and manually installing files off their website, I still somehow had thousands of Lua files I had to wait to download from the server, which kind of put a bad taste in my mouth. Once I got in, I was immediately faced with a giant Tower United advertisement that I had to close, but then I actually got really excited when I realized I still had my old items and player data from way back in the day. This excitement was very quickly interrupted however when I hit Tab and saw that there were zero other players online, at 2pm. I tried to set my player model to the one I had equipped in my inventory, but no matter how I tried it just wouldn't work. I spotted another Tower United advertisement on the metro wall, then had it deeper into the tower and it was actually kind of unnerving how empty this main lobby fell. Going towards the shops my intrusive thoughts wanted me to go gamble, but I realized I was kind of broke, so I swallowed my skin since it wasn't working anyway, and headed up to the casino just to find that all the spinners were missing for some reason. I then headed over to the arcade, but none of the flash games there seemed to be working either. As I headed back to the main lobby, more and more Tower United ads started popping up in the empty chat, which at this point was kind of starting to get annoying. I decided to move on to the teleporters and check out the suites. Since this server still had all my old player data, I was excited to see what my old place looked like. I hadn't seen it since I was a kid and had no idea what to expect. I held my breath as I checked in with the desk lady and made my way in. It was almost completely empty and decorated like absolute shit, though that's really not anybody's fault by my own. When I went upstairs though, a great sadness began to wash over me. This little room I had made as a child in the midst of one of the most vibrant times in Gmod's history, and what surrounds it now? A completely abandoned, empty server that no one uses. Damn. Once I'd taken that in, I left for the game mode lobby. I heard from a friend that some of these didn't work and were unplayable, so I wanted to see that for myself, but once I made my way up there, I realized that with zero other players online, that simply wasn't going to happen. All of Gmod's game modes require at least two or three people to play. Now, it might sound like I'm being dramatic or something, but this moment in the suite where I was faced with a distant shadow of my childhood, followed by me entering a game mode port just to realize I won't be able to play any of them, made me so viscerally disappointed that I legitimately quit the game on the spot. It just made me so upset to see that what remains of Gmod Tower's official legacy is a buggy, unsupported, empty lobby that basically just serves as a giant billboard telling people to fuck off and go play Tower Unite, and it'd honestly be better if the server didn't exist at all than to exist in this state. And it's not even like I'm particularly mad that they want to advertise Tower Unite here. They gotta get their bag and everything, but if they're gonna make a big spectacle out of bringing the server back for a reunion, couldn't they at least make sure it functions properly? And if they're gonna make it so Tower Unite ads show up on every inch of the game world, can they at least make them go away if you're someone who's actually bought the damn game? After experiencing this, to me it's no wonder why people are up in arms and want to take things into their own hands. But listen, alright, I don't want to end this on a sad note, and I don't want to be unfair to the talented people at Pixel Tail, so to close this off, I want to give Tower Unite a fair shake. The reviews are really good, and a lot of people have clearly poured years of their life into it, so I figured it wouldn't be right not to. Let's have a look. Booting up Tower Unite. The first thing I met with is a giant disclaimer that it's still in early access, so if anything is bad, I can leave a bug report, which is good to know. It's easy to knock this game for still being in early access all these years later, but to be fair, it is a very small team, so play nice people. Second thing I got was a notification that they've added Steam Workshop support, which is kind of a relief. When the game came out, there was very little meat to its character customization. You could be Generic Guy, Generic Girl, or Skeleton, and I think that was about the full list. Now you can be anything you can find on the Workshop, which does actually encompass a pretty sizable amount of content. If you're trying to follow up on the infinite expression offered by Gary's Mod, Workshop support is honestly kind of a bare minimum, but it's still definitely a step in the right direction, so kudos for that. I went to the server browser, and for all the big names who blessed this game, it was really not as popular as I was expecting. I only spotted give or take 100 people across all the cumulative servers, which surprised me because SteamChart says this game averages between 300 to 400 users a day. Neither of these are bad for a low-budget indie game, mind you, I just figured there'd be more. Anyway, I joined the most popular server, and the first thing I noticed is how different the movement feels from Gmod Tower. This definitely feels like the Unreal Engine. I tried walking into a train and glitched through it head-on and got stuck for a second, which made me laugh. Once again, the game is in early access, so I don't want to knock it too hard for something harmless like this. I walked out to a very intricately well-crafted world that almost looked like GTA Online or something, and didn't even know where to start. I wanted over to some random structure that I quickly figured out was Tower Unite's version of the Game Mode hub and started browsing. I noticed there were a few single-player games, which I guess is good future-proofing given the state of GMT reunion. No one else seemed to be around the Game Mode hub, so I called out and chat-task if anyone wanted to play Virus, which I was genuinely excited to try. I eventually ran into this guy who looks like Sonic, which was pretty cool, and after waiting around a while and trying to wrangle enough people together, we finally got a Virus Lobby going. I of course voted for my favorite map, the hospital, because I wanted to see what the new rendition of it looked like in this game. Here's how that went. Yep, the first game I tried to join spit me back to the main menu. Now, chances are this is rare and I just got unlucky, but in the moment it was kind of infuriating. I tried not to let it spoil my experience though, so from the main menu I got booted to, I decided to take the opportunity to go check out the condos, which our Tower Unites take on GMT's suites. And to their credit, there's plenty of interesting layouts and designs to pick from. There's a lot more opportunity for creativity and expression here, with how much bigger these environments are than the old GMO Tower suites. The only thing is, these condos actually serve as individual servers that you can invite friends to, not a fluent part of the actual Game's hub world. Basically, instead of walking next door to your friend's apartment, it's more like connecting to a Minecraft realm or something, and in my opinion that takes half the fun out of it. I loved running around the sweet lobby in GMT and just barging through random people's doors, but it doesn't seem like that's even possible in Tower Unite. I went back again and successfully tried a few of the Game Mode remakes, and they're actually all pretty decent. They're mostly just faithful re-imaginings of the old GMT classics, and it's kind of cute to see how they try to skirt around copyright law by just barely changing the designs of the Chimera and such. The game does have some charm to it that I can't deny. I don't want to give anyone the impression that Tower Unite is bad. It's not really my thing, but if the reviews are anything to go by, there's still undeniably hours of fun to be had in this game. And I even saw people mic spamming call on me by Eric Prides by the fountain, so as far as I'm concerned, the people calling this game soulless are kind of just wrong. All that being said, it is a different experience to GMT, and seems to have a different audience too to some extent. I went around the lobby asking people if they had ever played GMT before, and most of them said no. And if I'm being totally honest with you, I probably won't ever play Tower Unite again after I post this video, because the main reason I liked GMT in the first place was for the GMT's soul that it carried, and I suspect a lot of other people feel the same way. I do want to praise the fact that they never reneged on their pledge to know microtransactions though. It would be so easy to monetize this game that way, and they didn't, which definitely deserves a salute in my opinion. If I had to sum up my whole experience, playing on a rehost of GMT years and years after I last played it in a shutdown nearly made me cry tears of joy. Seeing the official state of the reunion server, however, filled me with an existential dread. In Tower Unite, I mean, it was cool, but it was also kind of just a different experience altogether. Anyway, to wrap things up, in regards to the whole DMCA controversy I mentioned at the start, I think it's really obvious that the reason people play the fan rehosts instead of GMT's official reunion isn't out of any spite for Pixel Tale or Tower Unite. It's because they're clearly run by people who care more about maintaining the game than they do. And Pixel Tale probably has the legal right to strike down these projects, but I don't think that necessarily translates to it being morally correct. GMT Tower was once so popular and well supported within the Garry's Mod community that they were able to get the game's player count limit raised just to accommodate them. But now they've kind of completely turned their back on that community that made them by failing to maintain their servers and shutting down anyone who tries to pick up the torch. From where I sit, Pixel Tale owes the existence of their company and product to making use of other people's copyrighted ideas through modding, and yet they're shutting other people's mods of their work down, which I think is kind of shitty and unfair. Then again, there very well could be a part of this drama or some context that I'm missing out on that would change my mind. That's why I'm kind of sad that MacD Guy declined to interview. He seems like a guy who has a hell of a story to tell. What's weird is Pixel Tale clearly doesn't hate GMT Tower or anything. In fact, they seem genuinely proud of what they accomplished with it. Hell, you can even apparently get the GMT Tower lobby as a condo in Tower Unite. Instead, it seems like they see GMT Tower as a stepping stone that led to Tower Unite and is now completely obsolete, which I think is a huge disservice to its legacy. I like to think maybe there's a world where the people managing the re-hosts could maybe be put in charge of the official reunion server, so nobody feels the need to do any back alley dealings anymore. But I honestly doubt we'll see anything that diplomatic out of a story like this. This is the internet after all. Regardless of all that though, I'm not a hater, so if anything I've talked about in this video seems at all interesting to you, you should consider checking out Tower Unite on Steam. If nothing else, just to support an indie dev team trying to hustle their way out of the proverbial Source Engine hood. Hopefully if you're someone who is curious as to what GMT Tower is or what happened to it in the years since it shut down or you last played it, this video helped catch you up or at least entertained you. And of course, I look forward to reading everybody's essays in the comments. Thanks for watching, I hope you enjoyed, subscribe for more, and have a good day.