 Good evening. Valve has a reputation as a very consumer-friendly company that frequently works with and assists its fans in the production of mods and other community content. Nowadays, that isn't really as true as it used to be, if you want to break down of why I recommend giving a read to this article by the Taxman. But regardless, Valve's community has proven to be everlasting, still pressing on in the face of broken and unsupported tools, soft cease and desist, and even worse, sour spaghetti. Why? Well, I guess it's because at the end of the day, they do make some pretty damn admirable games. And there have been some pretty damn admirable mods for those games as well. Some that still retain impressive counts of daily players, and even some whose devs have impressed or paid Valve enough to earn commercial status. That being said, there are also some pretty damn bad fan games. When you give out as many developer resources as Valve does, you lower the barrier of entry, and you're obviously going to get a lot of amateur stuff flowing in through the cracks. Now, in a video like this, people tend to get pretty pedantic in the comments about what exactly is considered a fan game. So for the sake of hopefully quelling that argument, here's my criteria. Maybe it's not officially correct, you disagree with it, whatever, but it's for the sake of the video, okay? Be nice. A fan game is created either directly from or with heavy inspiration from one of Valve's IPs, but it's not created or developed by Valve themselves. They can be licensed or published by Valve, however, even a standalone product sold for money. Why? Well, partly for my convenience, but also because most of them would still be classified as source mods. My only caveat is that I'm not going to count mods that were picked up by Valve and then developed alongside the original modders. Like Counter Strike, Team Fortress, and Day of Defeat. Because if you clicked on this video, there's a good chance you already know about them, and this video is probably already going to be pretty long. Many Valve fan games have their own interesting legacies, communities filled with inside jokes and cultures that very rarely get explored on YouTube. So I'm going to split this into three categories. That being the good, the bad, and the ugly. The good being those that, even if they may not necessarily be up to Valve's standards of quality, are still fun and enjoyable experiences. The bad being, well, those that are not. And for the ugly, well, it's the exceptionally bad. I think everybody knows what I mean there. We're going to start with the good, and first on the list is a commercial game with a full history and legacy of its own. Black Mesa is a remake of Half-Life 1 on the Source engine, which was initially spearheaded as a community project. Half-Life fans weren't satisfied with the bare-bones port approach Half-Life Source took, and instead wanted a true graphical update to the FPS classic. Over time, what was once called Black Mesa Source became a more and more ambitious project, and eventually metastasized into a retail game, with its developers taking on the moniker of Crowbar Collective, and the product's final name designated as just Black Mesa. Black Mesa technically spent more than 15 years in the oven, and there was so much to its development that their entire documentaries about its evolution. The Zen chapters in particular were a big hang-up for the team since they're widely considered the worst in the original game, and the developers wanted to improve on them. This took them absolutely forever, but their work was not in vain, as the Zen adaption to Black Mesa is much longer and plays and looks completely different to how it did in the original game. Black Mesa is regarded as one of the best fan games of all time, and for good reason. It is truly impressive how much effort and love went into adapting everything to the modern era. It does have its fair share of critics, but pretty much all of them will waver and leave a footnote in the review saying that, at the very least, it is a well-made and fun product. I wouldn't recommend Black Mesa over the original game, but I would recommend it in conjunction. It's definitely a must-have for any dedicated Half-Life fan, and worth the 20 bucks in my opinion. Next up is another Half-Life fan game, but it's one that you might not know about. Codename Gordon is a fan-made Half-Life side-scroller released in 2003 shortly after the Half-Life 2 leak. Valve, despite being pants-shittingly mortified at their entire developer base being published online, was quick-witted enough to buy out the tiny studio behind it, Nuclear Vision Entertainment, and put the game on Steam prior to Half-Life 2's release as a promotional stunt. As it was built before Half-Life 2 was actually released, Codename Gordon features references to content that was cut from the final game, such as the Ravenholm Docks and the Wasteland. The story is also weirdly meta. It revolves around Gordon being trapped in 2D and trying to fight his way back to the third dimension. Altogether, Codename Gordon is a cute, interesting, and fun time-waster if you're bored and willing to fiddle with Steam protocol commands to download it. Anyway, on to the next and final Half-Life game I'm going to cover in this part of the video. Entropy Zero is a fan-made Half-Life 2 campaign created by a dev named Breadman, in which you play as a Metro Cop in the new location City 10, dispatching rebels and zombies alike. I'll admit that it is maybe a little clunky at times, but it's got a solid story, some neat gimmicks like deploying manhacks, and overall some pretty fun gameplay. It's available for free on Steam and I would recommend it if you're looking for some more Half-Life 2-infused action. Recently, I got the chance to be a play tester for its in-development sequel Entropy Zero 2, but I sadly can't tell you much about it other than it's pretty fucking awesome. They were even kind enough to give me a cameo, so look out for that. Anyway, on to Portal. Portal Reloaded is a fan-made Portal game involving a new third-time Portal. It's pretty damn difficult too, at least for my durable brain. I played it for a few hours and I honestly couldn't beat it. This mod impressed a ton of people with its valve-esque level of polish and its innovative design. Tyler McVicar called it, quote, the community's Portal 3. If you're someone who has beaten Portal 1 and 2 and want to rack your brain with some much harder puzzles, I would definitely check it out. Next up is one of the most memorable fan games in video game history. 2D Portal was created before the original Portal came out, and it was a lot of people's first introduction to the series since it's free and readily playable in your browser. It is surprisingly intuitive, has more chambers than the actual original Portal game, and has its own cult fanbase. Also, it has a neat G-Man cameo. Anyway, the developers of 2D Portal, right after the original game's release, recreated its campaign in 3D and released it online as the Flash Map Pack. Valve was impressed enough to buy this map pack out and remake it as DLC for the Xbox 360, under the title of the Still Alive Map Pack. This Still Alive Map Pack was also re-released earlier this year, on the Portal Companion Collection for the Nintendo Switch, which is pretty neat. Before we move on to TF2 fan games, special shout-out to Mario, Mario Zero. The Mario fan game that adds a Portal gun. It's old as hell, but it's still quite a bit of fun, especially if you can get a friend to play with you. Alright, we're heading into TF2 territory and we're gonna start out retro. Gengarrison is a 2D pixel art remake of Team Fortress 2, dating back to 2008. It's unique and cute to see how its creators adapted things like the spy, stealth, and backstab mechanics to a 2D format. By the way, there's a secret that lets you play as the characters from Cave Story for whatever reason. In terms of gameplay, I don't remember it being anything too special, but it still has a lot of charm. I mean, just listen to that 8-bit rendition of the TF2 theme. Anyway, back to the realm of the Source Engine. Let me provide some context here. After the TF2 2007 leaked source code was forked onto a more modern base to patch up security exploits, a couple of developers began adding back some of the game's most well-accepted changes, like Pyro's air blast and the engineer's ability to move buildings. This became a project known as Team Fortress 2 Classic, and its scope eventually widened as the developers began to add elements from Team Fortress Classic, like a 4-team mode and a VIP mode, as well as cut content from the original game, like the Scout's Nail Gun, which is a fucking nuisance and if you use it, I hope you get shot with a Nail Gun in real life. TF2 Classic also features many quality of life changes such as higher-quality character models and fixed view models, and since there's no cosmetics for the game to render, it runs and honestly looks a lot better than the actual game. TF2 Classic is a lot of fun. My personal favorite addition is the 4-team arena mode. With tiny teams and high stakes, communication, coordination, and clash choice are all more important than ever. Oh, come up the- I bet you won't come up the stairs, though. Oh, you fell for the oldest trick in the book. I blew myself up, you ain't even gonna get the kill, you suck. Nah, I ain't gonna kill, boy. You do do do, boy. Hit him with a spin. At one point, TF2 Classic had a free-for-all deathmatch mode, but it became too hard to maintain alongside the main game. The developers were basically juggling two entirely separate projects on the same codebase, which got very messy. So this deathmatch mode got split into its own project called Team Deathmatch Classic, which still, after years in development, has yet to officially release. And before TDC received any mainstream attention or was even officially announced, well, I don't have a more elegant way of putting this, other than someone basically copied their homework and turned it in before them. Open Fortress is effectively Quake Deathmatch with a TF2 code of paint. It was birthed out of a giant shitstorm of drama that happened after one of the Team Deathmatch Classic devs contemplated out loud selling the game on Steam once it was finished. A couple of people were so upset at this prospect that they decided to split off and make their own open-source version of TF2 Deathmatch, which they decreed, would be totally free forever. And that project quickly exploded in popularity, recruiting some of the most talented people in the entire source community. Open Fortress is pretty damn fun, I can't deny it. It's got a solid gameplay loop, good art direction, and clearly a ton of passion put into it. By the way, I should probably put a disclaimer here that I hold no ill will toward the developers of TF2 Classic or Open Fortress or Team Deathmatch Classic. I'm just telling things how I remember. Anyway, enough buttering up. Let's talk about some bad fan games. So, I've got a giant confession to make, and that's that I am a softy, and I don't want to go down a list of stuff posted on ModDB by teenagers and crap on it for not being up to AAA standards of quality. As fun as that might be. So for the bad part of this list, I'm only going to be looking at stuff that is either being sold for a retail price, which in my opinion makes it fair game for criticism, or is well-hated enough in the community to warrant a mention. And the first up to bat is Prospect. Prospect is a fan-made sequel to Half-Life Opposing Force in which you resume the perspective of Corporal Adrian Shepard and clear your way through the Nova Prospect Prison, the Alien-Zen border world, and even a Combine Space Station or something. This mod is widely criticized for its lack of interesting content. See, while the original Opposing Force expansion had a lot of new weapons and enemies that made it unique from the original Half-Life, Prospect uses nothing but bare-bones weapons and enemies that are already seen in Half-Life 2. The gameplay is really repetitive as well. For the last half of the game, you're pretty much fighting nothing but giant hordes of Combine soldiers ad nauseam. Visiting Zen is probably the most interesting thing you do in this entire mod, but sadly, that part is really amateur-looking and isn't a whole lot of fun. Prospect is basically a Half-Life 2 map pack with long stretches of extreme darkness and even longer elevator rides. It has a couple obnoxious flashback scenes with crude gay jokes and a boring finale sequence that I couldn't even stomach to finish on stream. When you realize this is being sold on Steam for a higher price than the original Opposing Force, it becomes easy to see where the Half-Life community kind of took it as a slap in the face. But the sad thing about Prospect is what it could have been. Now, I don't want to talk out of my ass here since we're kind of getting into internal politics of a dev team that I was not in any way a part of, but my understanding of the situation is that after Prospect released, the lead dev got very busy with other projects and effectively abandoned it. The sad thing is that in doing this, he left behind a dev team of people who are now sitting on a ton of assets and ideas that they developed for the game, which they will seemingly never have the green light to actually implement. There is a private unreleased build of this game with a ton of new interesting content that will unfortunately never get out to the public. I got these screenshots and videos by conversing with one of the devs who asked that I leave them unnamed. And just look at this, man. This is one of the most promising Source Engine renditions of Zen I've ever seen. And look, this version of the game even has weapons like the pipe wrench and the Desert Eagle. All these new environments will never get to explore, too. What a colossal shame. Half-Life before is a remarkably short fan mod for the original Half-Life that is hosted for free on Steam. I won't lay into this thing too hard since another creator named Pat Bytes already did a great video on it, but the cut and dry of this mod is that it's only a couple of levels long and can be beaten in less than 10 minutes. Its story doesn't really make any sense, and the barnacle nilent boss at the end is janky and goofy as hell. Because of this, despite being totally free, it has overwhelmingly negative reviews on Steam and a pretty bad reputation. However, knowing the full story of this mod, being that it was made by one guy for a mapping competition that never panned out, it makes it a lot harder to hate. I mean, after all, if you had the chance to get your Half-Life fan game officially put on Steam, you would seize that opportunity no matter how short or lame your mod was, right? Alright, you guys are gonna hate me for this next one. Look, look, I know what you're thinking. Calling this a fan game is kind of a stretch. I mean, it's made by a fuckin' AAA studio. But listen, listen. Be nice. Back for Blood is a zombie shooter heavily based on and banking on the identity and success of the Left 4 Dead games. It's developed by Turtle Rock Studios, who are accredited for their work on the original game in conjunction with Valve. There is some contention about how much of the Left 4 Dead franchise's success is really Turtle Rocks to claim, but I'm not here to argue about that. Now, here's a full-out clarification. I have not played Back for Blood and I do not own it. However, I do know that this game had a massive fallout and is widely considered to be a disappointment. Many people write that the game does not have the attention to detail or fun factor of the original Left 4 Dead series, nor the polish. The real reason I'm including Back for Blood is because I didn't want Prospect in Half-Life before to be alone in the bad category. But I also didn't want to start ripping apart more random Eastern European teenagers' free fan games. So here you are. And hey, I promise I'll make it up to you. Because next up is The Ugly, and the game I'm sure you've all been waiting for. Hunt Down the Freeman is a Half-Life fan game so bad that it has earned its own category in this list. What is there to say about this game that hasn't already been said? Well, I'll give it my best. Hunt Down the Freeman is terrible at everything. Its premise and story is basically an offensively bad attempt at adapting Metal Gear Solid 5 to the Half-Life universe. Its development cycle was a horrible disaster. It was intended to be supported by a GoFundMe that promised such insane shit as a multiplayer Battle Royale mode. But unfortunately, despite this GoFundMe being a giant flop, the lead dev was insistent on creating his shitty Metal Gear Half-Life game and worked through multiple delays to make it happen. There's a whole other dramatic side of the story about how people believe Hunt Down the Freeman might have only been approved on Steam due to mass vote-bottling and how its acceptance may have been what led Valve to canning the Steam Greenlight system as well as talks about how some of the people who worked on the game with the promise of later payment still haven't received anything and have now hijacked the Steam build to make fun of the lead dev but there's just too much going on there for me to care about or keep up with. And as for the game itself, well, it puts the Steam and Steaming pile of shit. I've sworn a bit of an oath to myself to never buy or pirate this game just out of sheer principle. But from what I've been told and have seen, it plays similar to how DoDo smells. There's proning and broken parkour mechanics which are totally out of place in a Half-Life game. Are you excited to see what's at the top? I'm no clipping downwards. No, let me up. No. No, it's taking me back to- And there's so little direction in the level design that some developer eventually cracked open the files to the outdoor levels and added random bridge props in the snow so that players could actually figure out where the hell they're supposed to go. Another thing that really sucks about Hunt Down the Freeman is its cult status. Immediately after its release, it quickly became not only hands down the most infamous Valve fan game ever, but also one of the most infamous fan projects of all time. Its shittiness rang out loud through the halls of the internet. Heavily assisted by the E-Celebrities totally uninvolved in the Half-Life community who were either casted in the game as pivotal characters in a cringy attempt at marketing, made videos stating the obvious about how bad it is for a quick buck, or even both. To put it succinctly, the fact that Hunt Down the Freeman's atrociousness is readily available even to those who know nothing about Half-Life and has a ton of mainstay in E-Celebrities circles has led it to become one of the most notorious fan games of all time. And one of the main things people know the Valve community for. It's also ironically popular to a tragic degree. People have made memes out of every line of dialogue from this game. They've changed their profile picture to the characters and they've made video essay after video essay after video essay after fucking video essay about it every single year since its release. And look at me! I don't even like talking about it, but it's such a hideous blot on the community's skin, I feel obligated to address it. If I didn't, there'd be a hundred people in the comments asking why I didn't. I guess it's true. The good guys never get ink like the bad guys do. Now, I definitely could have made this video longer, but I really only wanted to talk about the particularly notable titles. So I'm sorry to the one guy who was waiting for me to talk about Henry's Great Escape from City 13. But with the good, the bad, and the ugly out of the way, I'm afraid that's all I have for today. I hope you enjoyed. Subscribe and join my Discord if you did. And to shake my virtual tin can a bit, I've got a Patreon too. Thanks for watching, have a good day.