 Good evening. How many of you remember Gmod ARGs? Back in 2021, a truly bizarre phenomenon emerged from the depths of the Gary's mod community and began sweeping the internet. A huge catalog of classic old Gmod videos, just like those some of you probably remember from your childhood, but with a twist. If you looked deep enough, there was something off about them. Dark figures stalking the player from a distance. Odd, paranoid behavior. Objects and character models moving around when they weren't supposed to. Subtle hints that something was very wrong. From Gunslinger Pro to classic GM videos, a ton of obscure channels like these kept being discovered, all with different strange undertones and cryptic hints pointing toward a grander mystery. If you read deeply enough into the blurry footage, you would uncover fascinating stories hidden in these seemingly innocuous videos. A sentient blue spy ragdoll tortured and held against his will by a cruel player, or some kind of ghostly apparition making unsettling changes to the map as the player explores it. And occasionally, there would be moments where the ominous paranormal forces behind it all would make their presence clear, and it could be genuinely startling. These videos flipped Gary's mod's goofy sandbox nature into something much darker, and they came to be known widely online as GMod ARGs. Playing off people's nostalgia and the fogginess of the distant past, GMod ARGs made everyone view this beloved game in a brand new light, and it wound up being a huge deal. Being a massive GMod fan from back in the day, I managed to get in on the ground floor and spent a lot of time shining light onto these ARGs and trying to uncover their secrets, even using my platform to bring some of them to light on my own. And it was a lot of fun. Watching these small channels grow from tens of subscribers to tens of thousands was genuinely fascinating. And it was crazy to see where these things find its way to people like Pyrocynical, and even the creator of GMod himself, Gary Newman. However, right as GMod ARG started becoming mainstream, something very sad happened. We got lost in the noise. There became too many ARGs to follow, too many with similar premises and not enough innovation. Right as the genre started to peak in popularity, people abruptly seemed to run out of ideas, and most of the ARGs people looked forward to seeing unfold stopped uploading. And for a long while, despite all the love people had for these series, GMod ARGs as a medium seemed dead. It was a bit of a bummer to see such a beloved concept fade away, leaving behind in my opinion so much untapped potential. Regardless, I marched on and kept making videos on Source Engine stuff I was passionate about. Recently though, something very strange has happened. Over the last year or so, almost as if in coordination, a bunch of the GMod ARGs that were long considered dead in the water suddenly received massive spikes in activity. Some of these channels broke years worth of silence and suddenly started uploading like wildfire again. And it's left me and a bunch of other people wondering, what the hell is going on? Why have all of these accounts, which were never previously thought to have been connected at all, suddenly come back in such a grandiose fashion, almost in unison? It's all a bit strange, don't you think? So given how bizarre these abrupt returns and sudden new developments are, how much I miss the glory days of GMod ARGs and how many videos I never got around to covering even back when these things were originally active, today I want to come back to talk a little bit more about them. I'm going to be talking about Gunslinger Pro 2009, Badwater Videos 2009 and Classic GM videos, as well as a couple of other ARGs I never got around to covering before, which should be fun. And I'm also going to try and figure out what all the fuss is about with all these old beloved projects suddenly springing back to life. So let's start things off by going back to the ARG that, in my opinion, started at all. Gunslinger Pro 2009. Gunslinger Pro was not the first GMod ARG. As far as I can tell, that crown technically goes to GMod 9 fan reuploads, which apparently started six years ago, Jesus. However, Gunslinger Pro was, at least in my opinion, the first GMod ARG that was actually compelling. And it's the first one that went viral. The reason it was so well loved on arrival is because it was the first GMod ARG to pose an at-the-time very interesting and novel concept. What if those ragdolls you played with in Gary's Mod were real humans who felt pain and emotions? And they lived in perpetual fear of you as the player, who to them was an omnipotent, god-like figure. There were a few characters established. The player, or Gunslinger Pro, who appeared as a client or player model and was the protagonist of most of the series. Then there was a blue spy who would frequently break away from the player's plans, banging on screens and desperately trying to escape his grasp. Other ragdolls were also hinted to be alive in scenes where you'd see a slight subtle movement suggesting motor function, or probably my favorite, a scene where the player pulls the remover tool on a soldier ragdoll who then frantically nods his head no as if to beg for his life. The turning point of Gunslinger Pro was a cryptic video uploaded from the perspective of that blue spy. Showing that after one too many attempts to escape, the player used his GMod tools to disfigure the spy by turning him into a freakish watermelon monster. It might sound silly now, but back when GMod ARGs were in their infancy, this was actually really creative. Wielding the innocuous tools we use in GMod as a means to body horror was unheard of. The last video I covered on Gunslinger's channel was Gary's Mod Ultimate Sled Tutorial, in which the player gives us a tutorial on how to make a fast sled for the ancient GMod sled racing game mode. At the end though, one of the heavy ragdolls they affixed to their TF2 themed sled stands up and starts trying to make friendly talk with the player, who then grabs them by the neck and chokes them as the video comes to an abrupt and unsettling end. Since my last video on Gunslinger though, they've actually released three new videos that genuinely introduce quite a lot to the series mystery. The first one was Engineer Land. It's a parody of an old Six Flags commercial that became a meme in the late 2000s, but Gunslinger's remade it using TF2 characters and it's some real classic stuff. It's only about a minute long, so why don't we give it a watch together? Now, there's nothing outwardly scary about Engineer Land. In fact, that actually put a goofy smile on my face the first time I watched it, because it's such a believable imitation of old classic GMod videos. However, there is one detail in Engineer Land that's a bit peculiar. This shot in the video shows a red heavy and a blue medic holding balloons, but this isn't the first time we've seen this scene. If we go back to the video where the tortured spy monster tries to break out of the dark room, we'll see that this same set of characters was also visible at the end of that. This implies that the video of the spy trying to escape happened during the production of this Engineer Land video, which is kind of interesting. Take special note of this blue medic ragdoll, by the way. He'll be relevant again in just a second. After Engineer Land, Gunslinger Pro then took another year-long hiatus before coming back with Gary's Mod Wire Mouse Turret tutorial, which is a bit more interesting. It's a bit of a longer video though, so I'll just summarize this one. Basically, there's an old GMod add-on called Wire Mod that has long been used by the technically inclined side of the GMod community to do crazy stuff like make mechs and minigames and complicated bases and vehicles and stuff. As a kid, I never learned how to do much of anything with Wire Mod because it seemed really complicated. But here, Gunslinger Pro flexes his knowledge of it to show us how to make a mounted turret you can control with your mouse, complete with demonstration pictures starring his, I guess you could say, Engineer Sona. This mouse-controlled turret is actually a pretty cool creation, even now in my opinion. And I like that just like in the channel's earlier ragdoll walker tutorial, Gunslinger Pro is teaching us some actual esoteric GMod knowledge here. It really helps add to this ARG's air of authenticity. I was in the middle of editing this video and realized that I forgot to mention that in a short part of the video where Gunslinger teaches the viewer how to install Wire Mod, we see a file directory that reveals his Steam username as Blood Gulch 97. Some people think this was the ARG creator accidentally exposing his real identity, but it isn't. The Blood Gulch 97 Steam account that people are linking to him isn't his, and as far as I know, nobody is uncovered as actual real identity. However, just like the sled video that ends with the heavy ragdoll breaking loose and getting choked, there's something very weird going on here. After Gunslinger hooks his Wire Mod gun up to a war machine he's built, he begins going on a rampage with it. Strangely though, rather than targeting enemy NPCs like zombies or combine soldiers, he's instead firing down on and destroying a village full of rebels and citizens. Friendly NPCs. And maybe even more peculiar, these friendly NPCs do genuinely rack to him as though he's an enemy. They fire back at him, which they never do in actual Gary's Mod, and they even duck and scream in fear, which is also out of the ordinary. And finally, at the end, we catch a glimpse of a female medic NPC who seemingly sabotages his vehicle by blowing it up with an explosive barrel, killing him and herself in the process. The kamikaze female medic also appears to have some kind of augmentation on her eye, and her arm looks a little strange too. I think that this video is pretty clearly meant to hint at us that the NPCs in Gunslinger's game are far more competent and sentient than they're supposed to be, just like the ragdolls are. And now they're rebelling too. It begs even more questions about the nature of Gunslinger's game and how aware he is of these characters' mortal anguish. In the last few frames we can see that right after being killed, Gunslinger responds and starts to quickly no-clip out of the map, which makes you wonder what his next move will be after being attacked by one of his underlings. There's actually one other thing about this video though. That strange noise that plays right as Gunslinger's tank explodes. If you run this audio through a spectrograph editor, it turns out to be a hidden message that reveals a partial link to an unlisted video on Gunslinger's channel. That's right. To everyone who has spent the last two years telling me, um, actually, these aren't ARGs because there's no secrets or audience involvement. Well, now there's secrets and audience involvement. So, uh, shut up. Just kidding, I love you. Anywho, the secret unlisted video in question is called HL2-2010-1103-1912-2049, and it's only about 43 seconds long. The naming convention of this video mirrors that of the one that showed the blue spy monster trying to escape, and it also leaves us with two dates to compare. We can tell from that that in the series' canon, these two videos take place about nine days apart. We can also assume from its screwed up title that, just like the spy escape video, it's not something that the player actually intended to upload. Let's have a quick look. The video starts off with a shot that Gunslinger posed for that Wire Mod tutorial video. Before cutting to a video feed that seems to show a blue medic dragging a female medic character around before hoisting her up using some kind of rope mechanism. The female medic appears to be the same one that we just saw blow up Gunslinger in the last video. However, she doesn't seem to have any of her augmentations. It seems like whatever was going on in the last video, the same blue medic from the spy escape video was somehow involved. Based on what we're seeing here, I'd say this is probably hinting that he's the one responsible for the female medic's augmentations, and probably coordinating that attack against Gunslinger as well. This split second shot of Gunsliper, Gunsliper? This split second shot of Gunslinger no clipping around after he respawns? Hence that the blue medic better be on the lookout going forward though. Who knows what'll happen to him if Gunslinger gets his hands on him. As for what it all means, I guess this whole thing could be implying that the TF2 ragdolls are using the HL2 character NPCs as soldiers against Gunslinger. Like it's a big ragdoll revolution or something? I don't know, it's kind of hard to tell with so little information. There's one more spectrograph message hidden in this video as well. It seems to be some kind of text printed into the in-game console regarding the skybox, but no one I know seems to have any idea what the hell it means. And unfortunately, this secret upload is pretty much where the Gunslinger Pro 2009 ARG has last left off. Though there's technically another video titled Sniper's Book Reupload that got posted just five months ago. It's a reupload of a previous video on the channel that was at some point deleted, but it's actually not a reupload. It's a remake with slight differences. Such as a different model for the book, heavy swaying gently as if he's holding a pose, and the player's tool gun coming out at the end. There's been a lot of speculation as to why this video got remade, but unfortunately the answer is kind of lame. A long time ago I did a stream where I pitched about how the TF2 book model used in the original video comes from TF2's 2013 Halloween update, even though Gunslinger Pro 2009 is supposed to take place in 2010. Me pointing out this small continuity error made its way to the creator of the ARG, and in order to fix it he made a new version of the video using the Half-Life 2 book prop and took down the old one. Honestly, it's kind of admirable how dedicated he is to the bit. I doubt very many people cared or even knew about a detail that small, and he still went out of his way to correct it. He's a real artist. Anyways, Gunslinger has always been an ARG that uploaded sparingly, but these more recent uploads show that it's very much still going, and still has much more to offer in terms of mystery and nostalgia. But there's another ARG channel that's uploaded a lot more than Gunslinger since I last looked at it, and it's one that's arguably more popular. So why don't we have a look at what's been going on with Badwater Videos 2009? Badwater Videos 2009 is a Gmod ARG that popped up a little bit after Gunslinger Pro that made use of its same Living Rag Dolls premise. But through the addition of new original characters and some cute animations, it built an identity of its own, and seems to actually be more popular than the series that inspired it. The first time I covered this channel it literally only had 60 subscribers, so it's a bit wild to see how much of a cultural phenomenon it's gone on to become, and all the cool fan art it's inspired. The plot is, as mentioned, very similar to that of Gunslinger Pro. There's a maniacal Kleiner player character in making knowing use of Living Rag Dolls in his YouTube animations. However, in Badwater the animations are a much more focal point of the series, and there's even in-universe characters with actual given names. There's a good guy superhero named Melon Man, a friendly red engineer and scout that assists him, a freaky supervillain monster named the Tetherneer, an evil mad doctor called Dr. Metalhead, and a few other secondary characters like the Pyre. Even subtracting the spooky context, the little Gmod animations that get posted to the Badwater channel from time to time are actually pretty entertaining on their own. Most of the actual ARG has followed the perspective of the Red Scout character as he's investigated these weird white doors. They're apparently how Badwater traverses between maps and his weird haunted version of the game. This curiosity and disobedience has led to the scout getting captured time and time again, and eventually tortured in the dark room in a pretty gruesome way. The last video I covered from Badwater was Metalhead's Final Straw, where in the Tetherneer once more fails to take down Melon Man, and the last scene shows Metalhead deciding to take his issue with Melon Man into his own hands. It sets up the next animation video to be a big showdown between the two. However, since my last time covering Badwater they've uploaded three new videos, the first being Revelation. This video starts out as basically a recap of the series, but it also spells out pretty clearly that not every scout we've been following throughout the ARG is the same scout, which actually makes the series make a lot more sense now that I think about it. I'd assume the reveal that there are multiple scouts is the Revelation that the video title speaks of. It's also revealed that a blue engineer and red demo man were complicit in at least one of these scouts escapes, as we see them picking up a scout's semi-unconscious body and carrying them through the white void. We don't get a look at their face, but I'd assume that these are actually Melon Man and Tithonir hauling them to safety. We then assume the perspective of a red scout walking out of the white void into GM construct, then heading into the map's dark room and coming across this. This appears to be the aftermath of the scout who we saw get brutally tortured in the channel's earlier Subjugate video. Cut apart and can join with random props, fingers broken, bloody in the face, and all but dead. Our scout looks on at the unsettling mangled version of himself before using the tool gun on the table in front of him to delete the torture victim, putting him out of his misery. I think this scout getting his hands on a tool gun is a bigger deal than it seems though. It spells some interesting questions about what could happen next. Could this tool gun potentially be used to help him finally escape or even defeat Badwater? The horrors of GMod ragdoll duplication get explored even further in the next video, punishment. In this video we follow the perspective of a scout on sawmill who gets popped in the head by Badwater's 357, then we resume the perspective of another scout right after he spawned in by Badwater, immediately getting stuck to the wall and shot with crossbow bolts, then a scout being crushed by a washing machine, then we see a scout with his leg sawed off right in front of him, a scout getting hit with a shotgun blast, a scout plummeting to his death, a scout impaled on a harpoon, a scout being burnt to death. Then finally, for the first time in the series, Badwater speaks. In a dramatic in-game chat monologue, he writes, It will never be enough. No matter how much you suffer, it will never be enough. I'm not going to let you take this from me. We see one last scout meet his demise. As he plummets from a hanging rope and slowly chokes, his body swings around, and he looks out to see a field full of all of his other dead clones. You know, the idea of finding your own dead body, or a dead body of your clone, or especially a giant field full of them, it's something I hadn't thought about until I saw these two videos. I guess that would be some pretty freaky shit. Badwater's monologue pretty clearly paints an image of him as a reckless psychopath taking out some kind of anger on these poor scout clones. But the phrase, I'm not going to let you take this from me is peculiar. It implies that Badwater feels like the scout is responsible for some kind of wrongdoing. Maybe he feels threatened by his attempts at escape, because the ragdolls getting away would mean he can't use them for his YouTube animation career anymore? Or maybe you just got blasted off a cliff with the Force of Nature on Hightower one too many times and has a real hard on against the class. I don't know. I'm not normally very critical of these ARGs on this channel, but this video does kind of exemplify something I've started to dislike about Badwater videos 2009. While it's very creative and there are a lot of great ideas clearly executed with passion, the horror itself is much less subtle than Gustlinger Pro and is at times a bit ham-fisted. This in-game chat monologue is really cheesy and the gore here is a little too in your face for my liking. It just doesn't leave much to the imagination is all. You have my permission to die. Anyways, there's one more video Badwater's released and it's a trailer for the next Meleman episode we've been anticipating. Meleman vs. Metalhead. This one's only about a minute long, so I'll let it play. It's pretty charming. Looks like in this next animation, Meleman will be working with his engineer and scout buddies against Metalhead's team, including the T-the-near and a new Sniper Monster character we saw tease back in an old video. I'm actually been excited to see what this video turns out to be because the description hypes it up as a really big deal. Until the actual video comes out though, there's not a terrible amount to say about where this is all leading. Badwater is torturing scouts and making videos, but we already kind of knew that. It's just more clear now that he's outright evil. I guess everything is riding on what that scout decides to do with his tool gun. There is another ARG I've covered, however, that has suddenly received a massive surge of activity and in the last month alone has put out more videos than Badwater and Gunslinger combined. I'm talking, of course, about Classic GM Videos. Classic GM Videos is one of my favorite ARGs. It's presented as an archive of someone's old GMod channel, but among the catalog of cool nostalgia videos are some very strange and sometimes genuinely startling clips. The series is one of many ARGs that makes use of a hero Brian-esque shadow figure who stalks the player from a distance, but in my opinion it's handled very tastefully. And beyond that, the channel's non-spooky videos are very charming on their own. Classic GM Videos is also responsible for naming and introducing the world to the ethereal realm that is the Half-Life 2 Cool Sad Area. The channel features skit-starring G-Man, a machinima series revolving around two roommates named Bob and Bill, and a ton of other miscellaneous GMod and Half-Life 2 clips, but it's also housing something much more sinister as well. Some of the videos are marked in their description as having never been uploaded to YouTube prior to this channel's supposed archival of them, and it's in these videos that the series' paranormal edge emerges. From what we've learned, it seems like the player's source engine games are in some way haunted. We see maps change in strange and downright creepy ways, radios in odd spots, viewing cryptic number sequences, and in one of the channel's deleted videos, the player even gets terrorized by some kind of burning skeleton apparition. Based on various video descriptions, the player seems to be getting help from esteemed friend named Skizzymeister who's been feeding them ideas on how to uncover more of the mystery. However, it's unclear and maybe even slightly suspicious how Skizzy knows so much about how to interact with these apparitions, and the protagonist seems more than a little spooked and hesitant about pushing his luck any further with them. B3 was the last video we covered, and it featured a scene that almost seemed to be implying that the shadow figure and the player himself are one and the same, and the months immediately following my video on them, they uploaded five videos that I never got around to covering. The first one was called Bob and Bill Minis II, Breen's Recovery. This is just a cute short machinima showing Dr. Breen sick in the Citadel after being pranked by Bob and Bill in one of the previous episodes. The second upload, a Halloween special called G-Man Can't Sleep. It's a skit where G-Man drives home late one night, then crashes on his couch, but is awoken by screams and other strange noises in the distance. He goes outside to check what it was, but he doesn't find anything. When he goes back into his house, however, a strange figure appears in the corner of his room. It's a shirtless Combine soldier, and it causes G-Man to run out to his car and drive away in fear. The spooky shirtless figure follows G-Man all the way to a warehouse on the outskirts of the town, and right as the two begin to fight, we get text reading to be continued, and the machinima abruptly ends. The video is more engaging than it has any right to After that came a video called Half-Life 2 New Secret Enemy Found and Flying Tutorial, where the player shows off how they know Clip and came across the ichthyosaur NPC you briefly see at the start of Half-Life 2, at a bounce. It's set to an avenge sevenfold song, and the description reads, cool new stuff Skizzy found with a cheat mode in Half-Life 2, uploaded for him. There's also a minute long clip called Car Test, where the player briefly shows off a vehicle he made, which ends with him running and looking around all paranoid like. And then finally, there was Half-Life 2 Ragdoll Dance Bug, a short clip with no audio that shows a zombie ragdoll freaking out after getting pinned to the wall with a crossbow. After this, the channel went dormant for almost two entire years, but about a month ago, they suddenly came back and uploaded 12 new videos. For almost two weeks straight, they were uploading on the daily, and these are actually some of the most interesting uploads on the entire channel in my opinion. The first video was called Creepy Half-Life 2 Glitch, as is both told through text on screen and shown in the footage. The player has encountered a really weird bug in their copy of Half-Life 2, where all of the NPCs are completely silent, and don't say any of their scripted dialogue, instead just sitting or standing silently. And perhaps worse, they all turn their heads to stare directly at the player, no matter where he stands on the map. It's actually pretty unsettling, especially with the music choice. What's shown in this video is probably not a real glitch, at least it's not one I've ever seen or heard of in all my years playing Half-Life 2. More than likely, this is yet another anomaly caused by whatever is haunting the player's computer. The fact that they all stare at the player almost implies some kind of guilt, as if the player is being silently judged for something we the audience don't know about. It's odd. The second upload was called Clip 3, and it shows even more footage of this silent, staring NPC's bug. Without the music, it's actually even more creepy. I especially don't like this short bit where the player turns back into a doorway and sees a citizen on the couch, laser focused, locking eyes with him. If I ever ran into a bug like this as a kid, it would have scared the shit out of me. After Clip 3 came a video called G-Man's Other Day Out, a successor to one of the channel's infamous earlier videos, G-Man's Day Out. The description reads that G-Man's bad luck strikes again. The video follows G-Man as he realizes his fridge is empty and embarks on a journey to some kind of food shop. Unfortunately, for him, the line is dreadfully long, and once he finally makes it to the front, all the watermelons have already been taken. The fact that all that time he spent waiting in line was for nothing sends G-Man into a rage, and when on the way out he spots another customer holding his own watermelon, G-Man sprints into a chase after him. However, exiting the building, G-Man loses track of the man and falls to his knees in a miserable defeat. Poor guy. This also mirrors the plot of the last G-Man's Day Out video, where G-Man goes up to a watermelon stand by Dr. Kleiner but gets refused service and destroys the stand in a rage. My guy is just not having any luck with these watermelon shops. The next upload, Half-Life 2 Hidden Zombie, shows the player shoot an SMG grenade into the air at a certain stop on the canals and killing an out-of-bounds zombie with it. Now, there is another spot like this in the canals where you can kill an out-of-bounds Combine Soldier, but as far as I can tell, this hidden zombie shown in this 22nd video doesn't actually exist, which is peculiar. I guess what we see in this video is just one more subtle anomaly with classic GM videos version of Half-Life 2. Speaking of anomalies, the next video, Root or Route, is one of the strangest uploads on the entire channel. It shows the player exploring some weird dark map with winding narrow hallways. I think this might be the same map we saw back in the Kleiner's Challenge videos, but I'm not really sure. Eventually the player heads through a door and comes across this really strange cylindrical thing, flickering through various distorted images and bringing the video's frame rate to an absolute crawl. At one moment, what appears to be a face becomes visible, and the video ends with the player closing the game. The description of this one reads, It was the right path. I said this was a bad idea from the start. I don't want to open the game again. Once again, the player seems to be telling Skizzy that he's too scared to further investigate these anomalies. And to be honest, I don't blame him. There's another G-Man skit called Moving Day again. With the description reading, G-Man decides that it is time for change again. The town is sad to see him go, but who knows what adventures he might have in his new hometown. As suggested, the video was kind of bittersweet, as G-Man sits in his house reminiscing on time spent in his town, bowling, and drinking with Kleiner, before packing his bags and driving off as his old friends wave him goodbye. In the end though, G-Man is relieved to finally unpack at his new house and crash on the couch. I can't believe I'm saying this, but this is actually probably one of the more earnestly relatable videos this channel has posted. I've never broken a watermelon stand or fist-fought a creepy shirtless guy in a warehouse, but this? Running a guy over because you're so pissed off about moving house? Now that's a real human emotion there. That's relatable. After Moving Day again, the channel uploaded what appears to be a pretty much unedited nine-minute playthrough of an old custom Half-Life 2 map called House of Horrors, and from what I can tell, there's nothing discernibly weird or off about it other than it being a spooky horror map. After that came a similarly uneventful video, a slideshow storyboard of a citizen using a metro cop disguise to infiltrate and blow up a combine base on GM construct. It's kind of cute though. I like the use of the Metal Gear soundtrack. Entering the latest three videos on the channel, however, is where things start to get a little strange again. In Half-Life 2, new creepy Easter egg in Ravenholm, the player boosts their way out of bounds and finds a hidden radio. And just like the hidden zombie from earlier, if you boot up Half-Life 2 right now and look, you'll see that this is not actually there in the real game. The last time the player found a radio in this series was in the video Half-Life 2 Nova Prospect Weird Creepy Hidden Area, and a later video showed them bringing it to a dark corner of the map where it suddenly started emitting the coordinates to the dark room in GM construct. However, the player ends this video by saying he has no idea where to take this one and asked the commenters for ideas. But wait, isn't this the kind of thing he should be asking Skizzymeister? What happened to him? Did he finally scare the uploader off? Well the next video, Combined vs Rebels vs Antlions vs Zombies, has a description implying that it was made by Skizzy. So I'm not really sure what to make of the two's relationship at this point. That video isn't much special either by the way, it's just a big NPC showdown set to some old punk music. The Combine win in the end. Another video marked as not having been uploaded, this four minute video called Checking consists of nothing but the player looking around all over GM construct. It seems he's paranoid, looking for the dark figure that's been stalking him or any other sign of paranormal activity. He even looks in the pond, which was previously established in the pond of this video to sometimes distort to become endlessly deep and even crash the player's game if they swam too deep into it. However, this time there doesn't seem to be anything there. There's nothing in this video other than the player's frantic behavior and the sound of those good old fashioned GMod 9 footsteps. The description reads, I couldn't find anything. That finally brings us to the latest video on the channel, Zombie Bowling Test. It's a short 30 second clip of the player trying to use a downward ramp in a ball to kill a zombie, with little success. Eventually he drops the ball at an odd angle and it completely falls off of the ramp, and in the last second of the video we see a dark mass start emerging from the lake. It seems like just when the player got comfortable hanging out in GMod again, the paranormal stuff immediately kicked back in. This is the first time the black figure has been seen in this series in three entire years by the way, the last time being in the video KC2 trailer broken. Knowing how classy GM videos operates, I'm sure in a couple months we'll get another carpet bombing of daily uploads and hopefully they'll reveal more clues as to what's going on with the player's game and what the hell is up with that weird cylindrical face thing in the route video. Until then however, that's about it for classic GM videos. Fuck, they uploaded a video while I was rendering this video. It's nothing special though, it's just a skit where two Metro cops get knocked out by a ninja guy, then when they wake up they're not wearing their suits anymore and they get accosted by other combine. A taste of their own medicine. Before I wrap this up though, I do want to give mention to one more lesser known channel called GModGuy2006. Generic channel name aside, GModGuy is an ARG that's been on my radar and that I've been interested in for a long time. It popped up around the same time I was covering Gunslinger, but there was never really enough content or enough of a coherent story for me to bother making a full video on it. Among the videos on the channel are a tutorial on how to make a catapult in GMod 9, a broken machinima called G-Man's Adventure, and a zombie massacre done with the help of a cool propeller mounted car. All pretty standard run-of-the-mill GMod ARG stuff. But there's also a creepy video where the player enters the dark room, then tries to leave only to find that the rest of the map has gone dark now too. There's a video where the player explores the office map on Counterstrike Source before discovering a creepy new hallway that seemingly crashes the game, and then finally a video called Gates, where the player goes back into the dark room to make Construct Black out again, only this time they actually wander out into the corrupted world and somehow find themselves near some kind of barred entryway with a payphone next to it. After this cryptic upload, the channel went radio silent for two entire years. But one month ago, literally one day after classic GM videos made their return, GModGuy 2006 came back with a new video called Gates 2 that shows them exploring more of that creepy dark room world, and it gets really bizarre. The player, whose username is shown to be Beaver 2006, finds himself walking along a checkerboard path before coming across a door emitting an ominous flashing red light. Behind the door is a radio playing a song by Elvis of all people called You're the Devil in Disguise. Beaver approaches it, then turns around as the door closes and locks behind them. They bash the door with a crowbar for a while before turning around once more to find that the radio has disappeared, and that there's now a giant bottomless pit in its place. Beaver goes to close their game, but a window's error sound plays. And given no other choice, they jump down the pit as the video distorts and ends. I want to be real, I have no idea where this one is going, or what to read from the use of that Elvis song, but since this is one of the more eccentric and interesting GMod ERGs out there that I never got around to covering, and since it came back around the same time as everyone else, I figured it at least deserved to mention. Oh, and there's one last big project that's popped up that a lot of people have been asking me to do a video on for months now called Interloper. There's only one problem. This shit is fucking long, so I'm probably gonna have to dedicate a full video to that one. It'll be a fun one. Anyways, to answer the question begged in the title, why are GMod ERGs coming back? Well, to be honest with you, it seems like the creators are probably just all getting inspired again at around the same time. From what I can tell, Badwater was the first one to have a grand return, and the other creators might have just taken that as an opportunity to follow suit and bring their project back too. However, there are a few things that make me think there might be some funny business going on. The fact that Gunslinger Pro and Badwater videos both seem to be heading toward a ragdoll rebellion arc, and some kind of ultimate showdown between the player and their playthings is kind of interesting. And the timing of classic GM videos in GModGuy 2006 both returning a day apart? Now that is suspicious. GModGuy 2006's zombie-based video is also very similar to classic GM video's zombie killer upload. So, in my opinion, the two ERGs are either connected, or GModGuy isn't. Game Jacker. Unfortunately, classic GM videos is pretty much the only ERG I've covered that I haven't spoken to the creator of before, so I can't tell you which is the case for certain. Who knows, maybe GModGuy is Schizymeister or something. Anywho, I'm not sure how much more public interest there is in these old GMod ERG projects, but I personally have always found them really fun to keep up with, and I figured it was worth talking about them at least one more time. I just wish it wasn't the case that so many of them riff off the same exact ideas and premises. Regardless, though, make sure to go check out each of these channels I covered if you get a chance. They'll all be linked in the description below. Also in the description will be the link to my Discord server. I know it's kind of a mess right now, but pretty soon I'm gonna have a GMod server up that we're gonna host game nights on in there, and it's gonna be really fun, so you're not gonna want to miss that. You gotta join. That's all for today though. Thanks for watching, subscribe for more, and have a good day. Don't like Drake. I inhale Rizz and exhale Cringe. I deserve to feel skibbity. I deserve to fend for facts from Kaisenat. I'm feeling skibbity because today is a new day. I am holding space for the universe to bring me ice spice. I am goaded with the sauce like John Halo from Fortnite. I deserve a Grimace Shake. I deserve Brecky Hill. I deserve a level 10 Gia to do the Thug Shake for me. I do not include myself in Cringe Spaces, but there is nothing for a Rizzler like me there. I Rizz, what I Rizz, what I Rizz.