 Good evening. There's no understating the importance of the mod in Garry's Mod. Thanks to the game's strong modding scene, you can join 100 Garry's Mod servers and get 100 uniquely different experiences. It's not Half-Life 2 with the Fizzgun anymore, it's now Star Wars, it's now Metal Gear Solid, it's now My Little Pony RP, it's now anything UI or some sweaty weirdo in his basement could ever possibly want it to be. Today we experience these mods through the Steam Workshop, which allows us to easily download add-ons that completely transform the game with the simple click of a button. But while the Steam Workshop was created in 2012, GMod itself dates as far back as 2004. So this begs the question, what did Garry's Mod players do to get their hands on custom content in those 8 years before the GMod Workshop was made? Well… If you're not an infant, you probably at least faintly remember modding sites. These used to be some of the biggest hotspots for gaming culture on the internet, and they actually still see somewhat regular use in spheres like the Fallout and Elder Scrolls community. Prior to the Workshop, GMod add-ons were almost always spread and collected through these unofficial mod sharing sites. It was the most popular, and pretty much only convenient way, to go about spicing your game up with dead or alive extreme beach volleyball girls. I feel kinda old explaining this era and knowing that eventually people who genuinely do not remember any of it will end up watching this video. It's definitely bittersweet to think about how distant these times already are, and how quickly not just modding, but online culture as a whole has completely changed. But to get back to the point, unlike the Workshop, these platforms required you to actually get off your ass and manage your game folder with the Windows File Explorer. And while this was undeniably annoying, and sometimes very frustrating, the whole process made the act of getting something complicated working in-game just that more exciting and gratifying. It also made it a lot scarier because there was really no way of knowing just what the hell Super Jeffery33 might have packed into his Master Chief player model file. This was long before the rise of smartphones narrowed most of the internet's traffic onto a handful of social media platforms, and also before web designers became fascinated with minimalism. So there was not only a huge selection of these different modding sites to pick from, but they each often looked completely unique from one another, and they each had their own sprawling catalogs of mods to browse through as well. Some sites would have mods others wouldn't, etc. It was a truly fascinating world to explore. To my memory, two of the most popular of these platforms back in the day were Mod DB and FPS Banana. However, in February 2006, a new competitor came onto the scene and changed everything. GMod's creator, Gary Newman, had finally sought out and purchased the garrismod.org web domain, and with it, he began allowing people to upload their own game files so that the site could serve as the official destination for custom garrismod add-ons. This created a simple and trustworthy way to enjoy the game without having to tirelessly scavenge around the internet and worry about getting a virus. And it was also the birth of an iconic online space that, despite being the forging grounds for many childhoods, including my own, would eventually face a confusing and mysterious demise. If you weren't in the garrismod community at the time, you gotta know that garrismod.org was the place to be. It would be hard to give justice to this site in words, but when I was a little kid, this place was almost ethereal. It was a wondrous marketplace of dreams. You would log on after school, see a weird or interesting thumbnail icon, and instantly get hit with a wave of excitement. You'd constantly be thrilled to see just what the new flavor of the day was. As you didn't even know what the hell you were downloading, because the picture was just like a random stock photo instead of an in-game screenshot. But it didn't matter. This era of gmod modding was a wild jungle. It was beautiful chaos, and it was exciting. Garrismod.org quickly became not only the number one modding site for the game, but also one of the most important and popular websites in video game modding history. If you saw someone using a cool mod in a gmod youtube video, you knew where to go to hunt it down. Funny story, I actually remember seeing videos online of the dismemberment mod and searching up the phrase blood to try and find it, just to be met with the bloody penis model as the first most popular result. That might be one of my most formative memories to be honest. The fact that garrismod.org was that lax on moderation might have been a bad thing in retrospect, but it did lead to some funny hijinks and I feel like it also added to the site's mystique in a weird way. I really like this top keyword system it had, where all the most searched terms would be at the top of the site for you to click and browse the results from. It was very unique and felt at home with the distinctly silly vibe of the game and its community. garrismod.org also had a link that would redirect you to the face punch forums, where most of the adults in the gmod community would hang out and discuss pretty much everything other than gmod. This place is a rabbit hole of its own that honestly might deserve its own video, but that's for another time. In spite of all of its quirks and problems, it's hard for me to not look back on the era of gmod modding that garrismod.org symbolizes with fondness. The community back then was so tight, lent itself to a truly magical experience, but by now you're probably wondering if garrismod.org was such a smashing success, just how did its story come to a close? Well, the beginning of the end came when Gary Newman formulated a genius idea for how to bring gmod's modding scene even closer to the game itself. In July of 2010, gmod was updated to implement the revolutionary toy box system. Anybody who's been in the community for a decent amount of time will tell you just how big of a deal this was when it happened. After updating their game, players would discover a new button on the main menu called the toy box that would open a browser in game and allow them to hot load custom models and Lord knows what else with the click of a button. This pushed the limits of what was thought possible within the source engine, and people really loved it. Sure, it was pretty limited, but it was also super convenient and undeniably a very cool and at the time almost futuristic experiment. People quickly became excited to see how else Gary would push the game forward. And because garrismod.org still remained up and readily available to anyone who still needed it, the situation was a win-win for everybody involved. Unfortunately, I personally don't remember too much of the toy box era because it was so short and also because it ended up being the predecessor to an infinitely larger and more popular modding service that would completely replace it just two years later. On October 24th, 2012, a day before the garrismod 13 update was released, the toy box was removed from garrismod and promptly replaced with the official Steam Workshop system we have today. The workshop was like the toy box, except with much fewer limitations. It was kind of just better in every way. It combined the enormous catalog of garrismod.org with the convenience of the toy box, introduced add-on collections and even made it easier to share saves and dupes. This update was overall a very huge deal that overhauled pretty much every facet of how the game works. And the convenience it's provided has gone a long way in making the game more accessible. The workshop undeniably played a big role in the insane mainstream success garrismod attained in the years following its introduction. And without it, the game may have never reached the cult status it has today. It did take a while for people to get used to it though. On launch, Workshop add-ons had a 60 megabyte limit that was very difficult to work around if you wanted to make bigger complicated mods. Thank God this was eventually raised to the 2 gigabyte limit we have today. With the introduction of the workshop, you could probably guess that garrismod.org immediately took its most significant hit in popularity yet that it could never recoup from, becoming effectively obsolete. However, despite what you might expect, it wasn't the workshop that ended up killing garrismod.org in the end. In fact, the reason it died is somewhat of a mystery. garrismod.org randomly and abruptly disappeared in 2014, two years after the workshop was introduced without a trace. At the time, it did still have a small community keeping it alive, but they were scattered to the wind as it literally just disappeared one day, with no warning or public explanation ever given. Nobody seemed to really know what happened or why, at least at the time. Today, if you ask around the internet, the sentiment people seem to have is that it was accidentally deleted. But I've personally never been able to find the source of this claim. Thankfully, a couple of dedicated fans eventually tried to bring the spirit of the site back with garrismod.org in 2015, which remains up today and is even where you'll be redirected to if you try to go to the original website right now. Obviously, this remake doesn't quite hold up to garrismod.org's former glory, but it does include archives of pretty much every add-on that used to be hosted on the original, albeit without the publishing dates or authors listed for most of them. I've got no idea how this was accomplished, but I'm very glad that it was. Unfortunately, there's really no reason to use garrismods.org over the workshop, other than I guess for its nostalgia value, which I'd say it honestly kind of fails to deliver on since it's been redesigned and modernized so much. It is, however, still a great resource if you want to download mods for old versions of garrismod. So there's that. Nine years after garrismod.org's sudden deletion, most of the community has moved on, and this distinct pink hue has been completely washed out of the game's identity, which is kind of sad. Its successor, the toy box, is also all but forgotten now that the workshop exists, though you can find add-ons that restore the most popular mods from it on the workshop, so its spirit isn't completely gone. Funnily enough, garrismod.org's predecessors, other sites like FPS Banana, came out of the workshop revolution completely fine, though they're rarely used for anything gmod-related these days. ModDB is still going strong, though its age is definitely starting to show a bit in its visual design, while FPS Banana rebranded to just game banana in 2011, and today seems to be most popular for indie games and fan projects like Friday Night Funkin and Sonic Ball. To wrap things up, while I think the workshop has definitely done more good than harm, it's sometimes fun to reminisce on the era before gmod collided with the mainstream. I know to a lot of people me gushing over this site is just going to sound like nostalgia dorking for something that was objectively less intuitive than the workshop, but I do think this site had value for its unique memorable aesthetics, and is worth remembering for its status as the centerpiece of the golden age of garrismod. I personally will never forget it. I am grateful for how mainstream gmod has become and how effective it's been at keeping source engine culture alive and relevant, but I just want to say that if you got on the garrismod bandwagon after the gmod 13 update and the FNAF inventory and talification of the game, then you really just missed out man. Thanks for watching, I hope you enjoyed the video, subscribe for more, and have a good day. I'm off, fuckin' silo!