Thx for getting the ball rolling! Saw that initial post, then more people asked about it on Discord, I ordered it... and here we are. Honestly it was fun to make!
Having illegal shovelware CD's made for your game was one of the most sure signs of success in the 90's. Doom and Duke Nukem 3D, especially, had heaps of such compilations.
Also first Quake. The most infamous one is "Eternal Darkness", which contained circa 100 maps literally stolen from Internet (they were normally available for free, bur ED "authors" decided to monetize them)
@@AmaroqStarwind My parents brought home more than one WarCraft II "expansion cd" which were just custom multiplayer maps someone threw together in the Map Editor, burned to a disc and sold before Blizzard could stop them.
@@nikivalfi226 Have you heard of "Q2?" It's a whole bunch of bland levels, usually covered with only one texture on all floors, ceilings and walls. Just lovely.
Nothing illegal about them, levels where always freeware, so people where pressing cd's full of them, this is a bit sketchy because of the artwork more than anything.
it’s funny how HL was like right on the edge of this practice dying. there was a a very brief time mostly incited by Final Doom in 1995 when mods could be sold on CD without people saying anything. it happened with Doom, Quake and even Duke 3D
I remember seeing an LGR video about Sims 1 + 2 packs that basically did the same thing, taking user created content and shoving it into a cd. Kind of like an unofficial stuff pack, i think the pack for the second game had like a first person shopping mall where you could buy the items with your sim.
The PC Gamer map was actually made by Dario Casali. Dario has a RUclips channel where he did his own commentary on Half-Life 1 and he explained that the PC Gamer map was something that he was tasked to do, I guess as part of some promotional thing for Half-Life. Id Software actually did something similar to this except not scummy. For Quake II they handpicked all of the best maps, skins, and game modes, and compiled them onto a disc called "Netpack 1: The Extremities". I believe it was only available as part of the Quad Damage collector's pack and it's the least known of Quake II's three (now four) official expansions. The idea was that if you had a poor internet connection and you didn't know what the good mods where, you'd have a physical disc to install them straight onto your machine instead of waiting ages to download something that turned out to be junk. Id Software would have paid the modders for their work and I've actually met some of them on Reddit years ago, a few are still making Quake mods all of these years later. Presumably a Netpack 2 would have been planned based on the name although that never happened.
The same Dario Casali who worked on The Plutonia Experiment and also Half-Life 1? The same Dario Casali's whose birth was deemed unholy by the Vatican? (true story)
probably cause Quake II underperformed and ID was already thinking about what would become Quake III Arena. I’m surprised Valve never did their own version of this with how popular deathmatch mods used to be
@@Cyclobomber It wasn't Dario, but his younger brother Milo (who also worked on The Plutonia Experiment). The reason was because Milo was conceived several months after their father's death, from his frozen, er, juice.
Ah yes, the shovelware level pack CDs, these were quite popular for games like Doom, Quake, and Duke Nukem 3D back in the 90s, and they were all pretty much the same thing as this disc. some publishers who made these did actually put their names on these collections, and inevitably they got sued. probably the most infamous of these collections were D!Zone, Maximum Doom, and Duke!Zone, and some of those were even more of a scam than this one as they used fake screenshots on the boxes. I only knew of one or two other CDs like this for Half-Life, Half-Life Add Ons being one of them, I had no idea this one existed before though. There's actually a collection like this for CS 1.6 as well called Mods and Maps: Counter-Strike, that one claims to have over 1000 maps. There's one more "good" thing about these CDs that you didn't mention, some of them potentially preserved some stuff that would've otherwise become lost, as a lot of game modding websites that were around back then have long since been dead
I was honestly under the impression that shovelware level pack CDs more-or-less died by the time Half-Life came out. Also, Maximum Doom has the distinction of probably being the only such pack to be done by the base game's publishers
The concept is not bad. A third party expansion pack. You get talented people from the mod community and junior devs and let them make an expansion pack.
@lyokianhitchhiker I didn't say pull I meant they created from scratch or just add water. Like bits companies for miniature or third party modules and parts for vehicles, pc's ect.
@@thomaskrogh1244 these shovelware level pack CD would essentially give the "just add water" treatment to curated collections of pre-made levels they pulled from third-party sources
including the quotations of the authors who said they will not allow their maps to get included in the Disc, to be included as the map descriptions with all personal info being public is fucking diabolical.
Really interesting video! A bit scummy from whoever made this fake expansion, but at the same time it's a curious relic with a lot of old modding history. Loved watching this.
The Sims also got its share of shovelware CDs containing mods kanged from fansites all over the web, as what LGR covered in his video. Funny enough, as scummy as these compilation CDs as they were back in the day (to the point that modders took notice and voiced their objections to these discs), they had the unintended side effect of preserving what would be otherwise lost to time as BBSes and websites move and/or change their contents if not go offline.
Der Publisher scheint cdv Software Entertainment gewesen zu sein wenn man sich die Logos vom Installer anschaut. Sie waren auch in den frühen 1990er Jahren der größte deutsche Vertreiber für Shareware und Public-Domain-Software. Daher würde es Sinn ergeben wenn sie so eine CD raus bringen
@@tHiNk413 Die haben ne menge legitimes Zeug Vertrieben. Die waren z.B. in Deutschland der Publisher für die Retail versionen von Blood, Shadow Warrior, Doom 2, Duke Nukem 1, 2 und 3D, Blitzkrieg und Shogo.
Funny coincidence that Civvie just recently had a video talking about a similar "unofficial expansion map pack" made for Duke Nukem 3D. I'm guessing the business model is similar.
I remember this kind of thing being common in Germany at the time. I bought "expansion packs" for Age of Empires and Star Craft, which were pretty much the same: just a collection of user-made maps sold in a box, of very inconsistent quality. The boxes made them look like legit products, but the content was really low quality. At least it said "unofficial expansion" on the box, but still.
I’ve never even heard of this which is pretty surprising. For a second I thought it might be kinked to the alleged expansion in development for Half-Life 1 that would involve characters from Team Fortress Classic. Like a fake or something but it’s obviously not.
Don’t know about the rest of the world, but these sorts of boxed unofficial add-on packs weren’t uncommon in the US in the 90s. I remember going to Best Buy and buying two different Warcraft 2 map packs. Just a bunch of new player-made maps on a cd. In the days before it was easy to download player-generated content on the internet, your options were basically this, or trading discs with a friend (or maybe there was a BBS that had some for download)
I find these kind of CD's charming once you look past the copyright infringment (which lets be real its 2024 we can do that quite easily its not that big of a deal), they sort of served as the moddb or nexus mods in the era before the internet was popular. Kind of a cool way that online art and mods found their way to those people who couldn't access them, especially seeing ones mods on the real store shelf, is honestly pretty flattering an image compared to how fledgling and unrespected mods were compared to now where they are talked about in the same breath as full games
This was mighty ripoff back then. But I have fond memories of those maps. I was with my cousin at my grandma´s house and both of us had own PC. We played deathmatch on Half-Life - a lot. Well and when we run out of maps, we just downloaded few more via phone line. I think it might be 56kb or so. We were very suprised how easy it was to put mods in HL (remember, this was our first experience with modding and we knew nothing about it - at that time I knew very little english, but was able to translate instructions). Good times!
Pretty cool video, but figured I'd share a little tidbit about that AOL ad the guy showed when taking about dial-up. Basically, I called the number just to see where it'd end up because sometimes these old 1-800 numbers get taken over by... Interesting things. (For instance, ID Software's old number was an adult hotline at one point.) It leads to a fax machine, which is not something you should be calling straight up on a phone as it's not meant to receive calls from phones, it just uses the telephone network to receive faxes. I'll probably figure out how to send faxes solely to clear that up in case I inadvertently caused a malfunction or something, and will let y'all know if I get a reply! ^_^
The fact that I immediately recognized the Heavy HEV playermodel at the back of the box, prepared me for what was about to come in the video. Yeah, this just more of the typical shit moves one could see in the 90s, like these "official map packs" for Wolf3D or Doom, although I gotta admit that I'm surprised about one about HL was done. Although, it surprises me more that it doesn't have some SP mods that already were around by then, like They Hunger or Mission Failed.
Honestly including a lot of single-player mods woulda made this worthwhile, especially these days. I like to play HL1 on a retro PC but a lot of HL1 mods will not run unless you're using a modern Steam version of HL1. Learned that the hard way trying to play Afraid of Monsters...
back in 99 not many people had internet access in Germany, so I understand why somebody thought: "Hey let's just download the whole deathmatch map pool, put it on CD and sell it for some bucks", because people of course could play deathmatch without having internet access via LAN. A bit scammy of course, as many computer magazines back then came with CDs that were packed with games, demos, patches and also multiplayer maps of games like Half Life. That kind of scam still has sort of a tradition here in Germany: in several stores you can buy CDs / DVDs that contain "200 games" or "1000 games" for "zwischendurch" (a German word that describes in between times) which often are only 20 or 30 games that come with various reskins. Yet today you "only" pay like 10 bucks for them. Target group are mostly boomers.
In late 90s Poland, I once found a carded foil with 6 or 7 random German shareware CDs at a newsagent's for about as much as a pack of cigarettes was back then. It actually had a copy of Mechwarrior 2 but the installer was hardcoded for German Windows lol, never got that to work. Most of the stuff on the CDs were demos of adventure games, that was _fun_ without knowing the language.
There is also Extreme-Life for Half-Live. No not Half-Life, HALF-LIVE for some reason. Same thing like half-time. Quake 2 and Doom had also the same Level-CDs, but they also included a uncut patch for Quake and Doom for german players.
Tell you what. All of this is not new to me. I mean, in my country back then buying official licensed stuff was next to impossible, simply because of how expensive it was. Thus people were buying none licensed stuff to left and right. And so did I, simply because we didn't had good internet back then. So yeah, I was scammed multiple times back then via stuff like this. Well, at least that stuff was cheap as nails. Like, before playing the actual Half-Life 1 single player, I had to witness a mod for it that were sold to me as a game, called Half-Life Chernobyl. It was a bad, unfinished and broken mod that I couldn't even beat. The other time when I was scammed was with Half-Life 2, and yes with a mod called Half-Life 2 Antlion Duce. And when the game started and you were stuck in this alien ship that flies you to some location, judging from what I saw, I thought that Half-Life 2 is simply a some kind of battleship simulator or something. Simply because, before that I didn't played the actual Half-Life 2. But when the game started, and I figured out that it's a FPS game, I was actually happy. And then there was a option to switch to actual vanilla Half-Life 2 story campaign, and via that mode I could play OG Half-Life 2. Same happened to me with Counter-Strike 1.6. Bought the game, went home happy as heck because I already played the game in computer clubs online with other people, so having my own CS 1.6 at home would be great. Even if it means playing with bots back then. But guess what, the game was a scam. Yes, it was Counter-Strike 1.6 but it didn't had radio chatter nor radio commands sound, there were like over 100 maps to play on but good half of them were not working and they were crashing the game. That was frustrating. Then I got scammed with GTA Vice City because, like with CS 1.6, I already played it in computer club, so when I bought the game, on the box it said "Long Night". I bet you get where I'm going with it, right? And the guy who sold it for me were telling me that it is the actual GTA Vice City. So guess what, I went home, popped the disc in to the CD drive, installed it and when I launched the game, it was not the vanilla GTA Vice City that I was expecting. It was some kind of a mod about surviving a zombie apocalypse. And it would be cool if the mod would actually worked normally but nope. It would crash randomly every now and again, and it was impossible to complete since I sucked at modern PC games back then. The only one time when the scam was actually worth it, was when I bought GTA Vice City where it said on the box "GTA Vice City Deluxe". So when I installed it, I saw completely new modern cars, new weapons, new mini map and stuff like. But it was the actual vanilla GTA Vice City that I wanted. And that was only one scam worth giving money for. Other times, I was angry about myself that I even bought all of that stuff. Yes, it was cheap but it ruined my gaming experience for all of those times.
This is exactly the slimy tactics that people pull off to get your uninformed elders to buy this for you since "it was in the clearance bin and I know Johnny mentioned this game before"
first time seeing this channel. good fun, pep in the voice. so nothing is just a 'school presentation' feel. and im pretty sure ESC is a blonde anthro fox girl. +1
12:15 ... look... no longer sold, was never a legit offering to begin with? You could have taken to the high seas to get it and no one would have gave a damn. FINDING it on the high seas might have been a bit tough though.
heavily agreeing with this, and even if you had to download it instead of finding a copy, everything on the disc itself was already a free download without any royalties going to the original authors and with the CD, you're able to archive it online for more people to mess around with and explore
This CDs were common in the 90s for many popular games. Bought several of them for Doom, Duke Nukem 3d and Command and Conquer. The content most likely was stolen and downloaded from some BBS. Quality also was a mixed bag, many bad maps, but also real good ones. They were sold for little money, helping a student with a small allowance to get more fun out of games he already played for many hours. Also many people had no Internet connection at all in the 90s (I only got internet in 1999).
I used to own this, bought it totally legally at a Karstadt in Germany. Had some cool stuff on it like the models and maps. Of course this was basically a scam, but a decent way to get more content before most people had access to the internet.
made in german reminds me of "That's Life" for The Sims "That's Life 2" features a first person mall experience which is ahead of its time, however its prone to bsoding Windows 98 at the time. And yes back in the day there's hundreds of levels discs, it was before the internet is accessible.
Oh my god, all your furry stuff is the best part of your videos (I don’t want to downplay everything else). It's really nice to see. Oh, by the way, great video, great editing
Didn't know this ever existed and could be a german scam. Lots of Games has been sold without having proper licencing in the 90s, because it was way to much work to check every local market back in the day. F.e. those Gold Games Game Bundles and similiar boxes.
These were pretty common back in the day before the DMCA came into effect and made European copyright a little more shitty like US copyright. These were compleyely fair use and some of them like the Warhazard expansion for WC3 were pretty cool
The 56K analogy gets even worse when you factor in that most people never _had_ 56K modems. When this came out, if you didn't have ISDN, you had a 33.6 modem.
Fun fact: Drug Barons was the first HL mod made by a company called Maverick Developments, who later made official HL content such as Redemption (later called Absolute Redemption) and Counter-Strike Training, not to mention Wanted! The Half-Life Western Pack and the Gunman Chronicles demo.
Are you going to censor the words doo doo and meanie head next? Seriously, censoring a child's word because you are afraid of losing a profit. Are you a video game company now? I'm sorry, but I'm not subscribing to a dude who obviously has a dying passion in his craft. Wish you the best.
Ur angry on him, because he wants some compensation for all the time and effort he put in his videos, and tries to obey the rules that are given by youtube?
@@mymarci No. Making money is fine, but he straight up went the coward's way out to ENSURE he made the maximum profit, which means greed got in the way of actually putting up a good video which he still would have made money off of.
It would (maybe) be better if it was 'half life challenges' that provided challenges for the game. like for example: Real half life challenge would be to play the entire half life campain but the health cap is 50 instead of 100
Once on electronic flea market in Poland, I bought a strange CD called Half-Life 8 in 1 PL (it supposed to be in Polish), indeed, only subtitles was in Polish but poorly translated. I guess it was some copy of Russian pressed bootleg CD (it was burned on CD-R so definitely not original pressed CD), they were known for poor Polish translations in many other games.
![[SFM] Risky Recital](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/RzNkY1_Nk3o/mqdefault.jpg)
I love how me asking this on Lambdageneration evntualy turned into a video
Thx for getting the ball rolling! Saw that initial post, then more people asked about it on Discord, I ordered it... and here we are. Honestly it was fun to make!
all the people on lambda gen nudging esc to play it. lol
@@TauGeneration nudging? hmm... 🇬 🇲 🇦 🇳
8:20 8 8:20 8:21 : 8 8:22 :22
can you ask alex from lambdagen to unban me
Literally "L" on the box, dammit
Technically, there is an L on the box in the original
@@gobbleygourdiscursed6782 Damn
L means scam
@@reflectxiiiL means LOSS/LOSE
L Life :(.
The “over 150 levels”, “29 models”, and “46 objects” part reminds me of those “1000 games in one” toys.
Or those curated community content compilation CDs for games like Doom
Or that 700k games Jerma played years back
9999 in 1, 999999 in 1 and other ones
Or Action 52 :P
@@AlexeiVoronin now thats a name I havent heard in yearss...
Having illegal shovelware CD's made for your game was one of the most sure signs of success in the 90's. Doom and Duke Nukem 3D, especially, had heaps of such compilations.
Starcraft had this happen too
Also first Quake. The most infamous one is "Eternal Darkness", which contained circa 100 maps literally stolen from Internet (they were normally available for free, bur ED "authors" decided to monetize them)
@@AmaroqStarwind My parents brought home more than one WarCraft II "expansion cd" which were just custom multiplayer maps someone threw together in the Map Editor, burned to a disc and sold before Blizzard could stop them.
@@nikivalfi226 Have you heard of "Q2?" It's a whole bunch of bland levels, usually covered with only one texture on all floors, ceilings and walls. Just lovely.
Nothing illegal about them, levels where always freeware, so people where pressing cd's full of them, this is a bit sketchy because of the artwork more than anything.
came for half life themed fursona.
stayed for a good and fun video.
You DID WHAT!?!?
The hev furry is amazing
Men having feminized personas just strikes me weirdly
🥸
Cringe!
Gamers > Furries
my grandma would definitely buy this and hand it to me saying "Here sunny have your 'Half-Life' video game you wanted!"
lmao
it’s funny how HL was like right on the edge of this practice dying. there was a a very brief time mostly incited by Final Doom in 1995 when mods could be sold on CD without people saying anything. it happened with Doom, Quake and even Duke 3D
I remember that one cursed CD that got a ton of subpar wads. How was it being called?
@@ikaguramaximum Doom?
I remember seeing an LGR video about Sims 1 + 2 packs that basically did the same thing, taking user created content and shoving it into a cd. Kind of like an unofficial stuff pack, i think the pack for the second game had like a first person shopping mall where you could buy the items with your sim.
@@lyokianhitchhikerD! Zone
@@FR4M3Sharma Id also did their own called Maximum Doom
so this is what you needed that HD image of the box art for lol
Exactly!
buh
instructions unclear
installed full life instead...
The PC Gamer map was actually made by Dario Casali. Dario has a RUclips channel where he did his own commentary on Half-Life 1 and he explained that the PC Gamer map was something that he was tasked to do, I guess as part of some promotional thing for Half-Life.
Id Software actually did something similar to this except not scummy. For Quake II they handpicked all of the best maps, skins, and game modes, and compiled them onto a disc called "Netpack 1: The Extremities". I believe it was only available as part of the Quad Damage collector's pack and it's the least known of Quake II's three (now four) official expansions. The idea was that if you had a poor internet connection and you didn't know what the good mods where, you'd have a physical disc to install them straight onto your machine instead of waiting ages to download something that turned out to be junk. Id Software would have paid the modders for their work and I've actually met some of them on Reddit years ago, a few are still making Quake mods all of these years later. Presumably a Netpack 2 would have been planned based on the name although that never happened.
The same Dario Casali who worked on The Plutonia Experiment and also Half-Life 1?
The same Dario Casali's whose birth was deemed unholy by the Vatican? (true story)
@@scottishdrunkard1845 Wait what? His BIRTH? Please tell me more, I'm so curious now!
@@scottishdrunkard1845The same Dario Casali that made Archviles, Chaingunners and Revenants the very bane of our existence.
probably cause Quake II underperformed and ID was already thinking about what would become Quake III Arena. I’m surprised Valve never did their own version of this with how popular deathmatch mods used to be
@@Cyclobomber It wasn't Dario, but his younger brother Milo (who also worked on The Plutonia Experiment). The reason was because Milo was conceived several months after their father's death, from his frozen, er, juice.
Ah yes, the shovelware level pack CDs, these were quite popular for games like Doom, Quake, and Duke Nukem 3D back in the 90s, and they were all pretty much the same thing as this disc. some publishers who made these did actually put their names on these collections, and inevitably they got sued. probably the most infamous of these collections were D!Zone, Maximum Doom, and Duke!Zone, and some of those were even more of a scam than this one as they used fake screenshots on the boxes. I only knew of one or two other CDs like this for Half-Life, Half-Life Add Ons being one of them, I had no idea this one existed before though. There's actually a collection like this for CS 1.6 as well called Mods and Maps: Counter-Strike, that one claims to have over 1000 maps. There's one more "good" thing about these CDs that you didn't mention, some of them potentially preserved some stuff that would've otherwise become lost, as a lot of game modding websites that were around back then have long since been dead
I was honestly under the impression that shovelware level pack CDs more-or-less died by the time Half-Life came out. Also, Maximum Doom has the distinction of probably being the only such pack to be done by the base game's publishers
The concept is not bad. A third party expansion pack. You get talented people from the mod community and junior devs and let them make an expansion pack.
@ the problem is that there was really no quality control or crediting when it comes to curating the stuff they pulled off of third-party sources.
@lyokianhitchhiker I didn't say pull I meant they created from scratch or just add water. Like bits companies for miniature or third party modules and parts for vehicles, pc's ect.
@@thomaskrogh1244 these shovelware level pack CD would essentially give the "just add water" treatment to curated collections of pre-made levels they pulled from third-party sources
including the quotations of the authors who said they will not allow their maps to get included in the Disc, to be included as the map descriptions with all personal info being public is fucking diabolical.
Really interesting video! A bit scummy from whoever made this fake expansion, but at the same time it's a curious relic with a lot of old modding history. Loved watching this.
The censoring of "Sucker" with a Crowbar sound is confusing, but funny.
RUclips does not like cursing in the first 30 seconds of a video. I wasn't sure if they mind that word too.^^
I thought it's just a joke lol because crowbar noise
@@ESCalationsucker isn’t a swear word as far as I know, just an insult
😂
So conchfusing
1:14 no "greetings" intro
He didn't say he was a GOOD ripoff.
The Sims also got its share of shovelware CDs containing mods kanged from fansites all over the web, as what LGR covered in his video.
Funny enough, as scummy as these compilation CDs as they were back in the day (to the point that modders took notice and voiced their objections to these discs), they had the unintended side effect of preserving what would be otherwise lost to time as BBSes and websites move and/or change their contents if not go offline.
Are there any good/popular mods that got preserved this way? 😅
Yeah that's the one positive I see from these scumware level/mod packs
Der Publisher scheint cdv Software Entertainment gewesen zu sein wenn man sich die Logos vom Installer anschaut. Sie waren auch in den frühen 1990er Jahren der größte deutsche Vertreiber für Shareware und Public-Domain-Software. Daher würde es Sinn ergeben wenn sie so eine CD raus bringen
Erinnert mich an das "That's Life!" Ding für die Sims 1. War ja glaube ich auch ne deutsche Firma.
Haben die dann eigentlich die Kurve zum "richtigen" Publisher geschafft oder blieb es bei "Cossacks"?
@@tHiNk413 Die haben ne menge legitimes Zeug Vertrieben. Die waren z.B. in Deutschland der Publisher für die Retail versionen von Blood, Shadow Warrior, Doom 2, Duke Nukem 1, 2 und 3D, Blitzkrieg und Shogo.
as a mod author the idea of some scummy guy just stealing a bunch of stuff I made and selling it makes me unreasonably mad.
@@Pigness7 I feel you, same goes for uncredited re-uploads of stuff you made.
As a mod author, I find it funny.
Funny coincidence that Civvie just recently had a video talking about a similar "unofficial expansion map pack" made for Duke Nukem 3D. I'm guessing the business model is similar.
These were very common back then, usually not in a big box but in a jewel case.
Ah yes, "TUT2". An all time classic Half-Life map.
I remember this kind of thing being common in Germany at the time. I bought "expansion packs" for Age of Empires and Star Craft, which were pretty much the same: just a collection of user-made maps sold in a box, of very inconsistent quality. The boxes made them look like legit products, but the content was really low quality. At least it said "unofficial expansion" on the box, but still.
LGR segment? Thumbs up
The CD is only 170MB? missed opportunity to put in '500+" maps. Though this was probably all they could find at the time.
0:47 *furry senses activated*
What tipped you off
@ Yes
Added to the list
mmmmm shovelware yummy
Its not shovelware
@patrickplus9815 how is it not? it's just crap put in a package to get a quick buck.
@@evelin1006 shovelware is stuff like cheap wii or ps2 games they are made really cheap and fast. Half time is just theft
@patrickplus9815 it's still shovelware.
I’ve never even heard of this which is pretty surprising. For a second I thought it might be kinked to the alleged expansion in development for Half-Life 1 that would involve characters from Team Fortress Classic. Like a fake or something but it’s obviously not.
ESCalation hand reveal. Anyway, Half-Time is just D!Zone for Half-Life. I thought we were beyond that in 1998.
I bet is a chubby guy
@@scottishdrunkard1845 I've been on camera fully multiple times XD
I love how you got your fursona in game, it's a cute low poly model :3
Ah yes
the good old days of half-life shovelware cd's that consist of stolen mods, models and maps from the internet
Wasn’t expecting the cute furry covering half life scams
Don’t know about the rest of the world, but these sorts of boxed unofficial add-on packs weren’t uncommon in the US in the 90s. I remember going to Best Buy and buying two different Warcraft 2 map packs. Just a bunch of new player-made maps on a cd. In the days before it was easy to download player-generated content on the internet, your options were basically this, or trading discs with a friend (or maybe there was a BBS that had some for download)
Nice fursona lol
I find these kind of CD's charming once you look past the copyright infringment (which lets be real its 2024 we can do that quite easily its not that big of a deal), they sort of served as the moddb or nexus mods in the era before the internet was popular. Kind of a cool way that online art and mods found their way to those people who couldn't access them, especially seeing ones mods on the real store shelf, is honestly pretty flattering an image compared to how fledgling and unrespected mods were compared to now where they are talked about in the same breath as full games
This was mighty ripoff back then.
But I have fond memories of those maps. I was with my cousin at my grandma´s house and both of us had own PC. We played deathmatch on Half-Life - a lot. Well and when we run out of maps, we just downloaded few more via phone line. I think it might be 56kb or so.
We were very suprised how easy it was to put mods in HL (remember, this was our first experience with modding and we knew nothing about it - at that time I knew very little english, but was able to translate instructions).
Good times!
Pretty cool video, but figured I'd share a little tidbit about that AOL ad the guy showed when taking about dial-up.
Basically, I called the number just to see where it'd end up because sometimes these old 1-800 numbers get taken over by... Interesting things. (For instance, ID Software's old number was an adult hotline at one point.) It leads to a fax machine, which is not something you should be calling straight up on a phone as it's not meant to receive calls from phones, it just uses the telephone network to receive faxes. I'll probably figure out how to send faxes solely to clear that up in case I inadvertently caused a malfunction or something, and will let y'all know if I get a reply! ^_^
2:30 modding a model of your fursona into a videogame you love that's what I call dedication
6:31 What are the chances that that entire disc is just full of stuff ripped from Counter-Strike Banana?
My head was spinning after playing that Spiral map! 4:56
It's not LGR without woodgrain and Duke Nukem voice.
What interesting content to watch in the background while playing Abiotic Factor. I'm really sinking into my comfort zone
6:12 hmm, whos gonna be better at taking down a drug operaton:
Actual police, S.W.A.T, Military
Mute scientist with a cool suit
The fact that I immediately recognized the Heavy HEV playermodel at the back of the box, prepared me for what was about to come in the video.
Yeah, this just more of the typical shit moves one could see in the 90s, like these "official map packs" for Wolf3D or Doom, although I gotta admit that I'm surprised about one about HL was done.
Although, it surprises me more that it doesn't have some SP mods that already were around by then, like They Hunger or Mission Failed.
You know, I would really like to know which stores carried these products. Big chains or small independent stores?
@@ESCalation Here in America it could be a bit of both. I never saw one for Half-Life but stuff like D!Zone and Q!Zone were all over the place.
Honestly including a lot of single-player mods woulda made this worthwhile, especially these days. I like to play HL1 on a retro PC but a lot of HL1 mods will not run unless you're using a modern Steam version of HL1. Learned that the hard way trying to play Afraid of Monsters...
Just got recommende this vid never having seen your vids ever. First thing I see is a wolf woman in an HEV suit, life is good
Half-Time? more like Half-Assed
back in 99 not many people had internet access in Germany, so I understand why somebody thought: "Hey let's just download the whole deathmatch map pool, put it on CD and sell it for some bucks", because people of course could play deathmatch without having internet access via LAN. A bit scammy of course, as many computer magazines back then came with CDs that were packed with games, demos, patches and also multiplayer maps of games like Half Life.
That kind of scam still has sort of a tradition here in Germany: in several stores you can buy CDs / DVDs that contain "200 games" or "1000 games" for "zwischendurch" (a German word that describes in between times) which often are only 20 or 30 games that come with various reskins. Yet today you "only" pay like 10 bucks for them. Target group are mostly boomers.
In late 90s Poland, I once found a carded foil with 6 or 7 random German shareware CDs at a newsagent's for about as much as a pack of cigarettes was back then. It actually had a copy of Mechwarrior 2 but the installer was hardcoded for German Windows lol, never got that to work. Most of the stuff on the CDs were demos of adventure games, that was _fun_ without knowing the language.
Love the half life furry in the beginning
There is also Extreme-Life for Half-Live. No not Half-Life, HALF-LIVE for some reason. Same thing like half-time. Quake 2 and Doom had also the same Level-CDs, but they also included a uncut patch for Quake and Doom for german players.
Half Time? Sounds like a 90s 18+ content. 😹
Sounds more like a Half-Life themed mod for Hard Time
Cute fursona :3
Halflife was something my brother had back then, I still have the mega scratched up CD somewhere... never knew what it was lmao
Came for the half-life history, stayed for the cute fursona~
Not enough wood grain to rip-off LGR
Tell you what. All of this is not new to me. I mean, in my country back then buying official licensed stuff was next to impossible, simply because of how expensive it was. Thus people were buying none licensed stuff to left and right. And so did I, simply because we didn't had good internet back then. So yeah, I was scammed multiple times back then via stuff like this. Well, at least that stuff was cheap as nails. Like, before playing the actual Half-Life 1 single player, I had to witness a mod for it that were sold to me as a game, called Half-Life Chernobyl. It was a bad, unfinished and broken mod that I couldn't even beat. The other time when I was scammed was with Half-Life 2, and yes with a mod called Half-Life 2 Antlion Duce. And when the game started and you were stuck in this alien ship that flies you to some location, judging from what I saw, I thought that Half-Life 2 is simply a some kind of battleship simulator or something. Simply because, before that I didn't played the actual Half-Life 2. But when the game started, and I figured out that it's a FPS game, I was actually happy. And then there was a option to switch to actual vanilla Half-Life 2 story campaign, and via that mode I could play OG Half-Life 2.
Same happened to me with Counter-Strike 1.6. Bought the game, went home happy as heck because I already played the game in computer clubs online with other people, so having my own CS 1.6 at home would be great. Even if it means playing with bots back then. But guess what, the game was a scam. Yes, it was Counter-Strike 1.6 but it didn't had radio chatter nor radio commands sound, there were like over 100 maps to play on but good half of them were not working and they were crashing the game. That was frustrating. Then I got scammed with GTA Vice City because, like with CS 1.6, I already played it in computer club, so when I bought the game, on the box it said "Long Night". I bet you get where I'm going with it, right? And the guy who sold it for me were telling me that it is the actual GTA Vice City. So guess what, I went home, popped the disc in to the CD drive, installed it and when I launched the game, it was not the vanilla GTA Vice City that I was expecting. It was some kind of a mod about surviving a zombie apocalypse. And it would be cool if the mod would actually worked normally but nope. It would crash randomly every now and again, and it was impossible to complete since I sucked at modern PC games back then. The only one time when the scam was actually worth it, was when I bought GTA Vice City where it said on the box "GTA Vice City Deluxe". So when I installed it, I saw completely new modern cars, new weapons, new mini map and stuff like. But it was the actual vanilla GTA Vice City that I wanted. And that was only one scam worth giving money for. Other times, I was angry about myself that I even bought all of that stuff. Yes, it was cheap but it ruined my gaming experience for all of those times.
5:01 Cameo 🗣
I didn't realize there was something like D-ZONE for Half-Life but in hindsight I shouldn't be surprised with how popular it is.
This is exactly the slimy tactics that people pull off to get your uninformed elders to buy this for you since "it was in the clearance bin and I know Johnny mentioned this game before"
first time seeing this channel. good fun, pep in the voice. so nothing is just a 'school presentation' feel. and im pretty sure ESC is a blonde anthro fox girl.
+1
12:15 ... look... no longer sold, was never a legit offering to begin with? You could have taken to the high seas to get it and no one would have gave a damn. FINDING it on the high seas might have been a bit tough though.
heavily agreeing with this, and even if you had to download it instead of finding a copy, everything on the disc itself was already a free download without any royalties going to the original authors
and with the CD, you're able to archive it online for more people to mess around with and explore
The computer chronicles reference is fuckin amazing. 3:52
I love that show!
You are the first to note that :D
@ dude I’ve watched every single episode from 1983 to 2002 on RUclips lol. It’s a real wholesome way to turn back time. Stewart Chiefet is a legend.
LGR mentioned let's gooooo!!!
I love all the cute art in this video!
Femboy fox make brain go brrrrr
I saw this guy is a furry, then I saw the fat hands and my theories were confirmed
Rot
coombrain
good arts +1
@@marduck5544 he's not fat, he has a Twitter where you can find his IRL photo
This CDs were common in the 90s for many popular games. Bought several of them for Doom, Duke Nukem 3d and Command and Conquer.
The content most likely was stolen and downloaded from some BBS. Quality also was a mixed bag, many bad maps, but also real good ones.
They were sold for little money, helping a student with a small allowance to get more fun out of games he already played for many hours.
Also many people had no Internet connection at all in the 90s (I only got internet in 1999).
I used to own this, bought it totally legally at a Karstadt in Germany. Had some cool stuff on it like the models and maps. Of course this was basically a scam, but a decent way to get more content before most people had access to the internet.
i love all the art and models of ur fursonas they're so cutee :3
made in german
reminds me of "That's Life" for The Sims
"That's Life 2" features a first person mall experience which is ahead of its time, however its prone to bsoding Windows 98 at the time.
And yes back in the day there's hundreds of levels discs, it was before the internet is accessible.
cute fursona!
thx!
Oh my god, all your furry stuff is the best part of your videos (I don’t want to downplay everything else). It's really nice to see. Oh, by the way, great video, great editing
Random furstuff is usually a treat unless you're boring and hate fun
Or if you’re just a normal nigga
*Jeez man. This facts are so rare back then. Now is common thanks by this video.*
1:05 - something tells me he will not be the least bit offended.
2:32 Is that fucking Yahatzee??? It sounds way too much like him!
That's ESCalation himself :D
rise and shine Gordon furman
Didn't know this ever existed and could be a german scam. Lots of Games has been sold without having proper licencing in the 90s, because it was way to much work to check every local market back in the day. F.e. those Gold Games Game Bundles and similiar boxes.
The real Hunt Down the Freeman
These were pretty common back in the day before the DMCA came into effect and made European copyright a little more shitty like US copyright. These were compleyely fair use and some of them like the Warhazard expansion for WC3 were pretty cool
The 56K analogy gets even worse when you factor in that most people never _had_ 56K modems. When this came out, if you didn't have ISDN, you had a 33.6 modem.
LGR MENTIONED PEAK MENTIONED
0:19 it's blues clues, i feel old now!
Finally... Life Time...
this is the best video I've seen in a while lol
this is so interesting, had no idea this existed lmao
Fun fact: Drug Barons was the first HL mod made by a company called Maverick Developments, who later made official HL content such as Redemption (later called Absolute Redemption) and Counter-Strike Training, not to mention Wanted! The Half-Life Western Pack and the Gunman Chronicles demo.
Nice video! Very interesting..😆 Shoutout from the Counter-Strike beta 6.1 community! 😁
Hey, thanks!
Spiel Des Jahres 🗣🔥
You had to use a modern computer just to use WinRAR? But... that runs on Windows 98...
aww the fox is gone from the thumbnail
Who is the fox?
@@gupster24 the fella on the channel banner
Yeah, the thumbnail without the fox got more attention so RUclips chose that one
@@RavenKStudios damn...
I'm Suprised WizardWorks didn't make Half!ZONE
its a cool time capsule. a lot of those maps are probably impossible to find now, because they arent worth finding
came for the HL content, stayed for of the furry content 🦊
i was very disapointed when i found out that the girl in the thumbnail is not a part of the mod but your oc
Actually there is a playermodel of the Fox!
Gonna release it soon.
Are you going to censor the words doo doo and meanie head next? Seriously, censoring a child's word because you are afraid of losing a profit. Are you a video game company now? I'm sorry, but I'm not subscribing to a dude who obviously has a dying passion in his craft. Wish you the best.
Okay see ya
Ur angry on him, because he wants some compensation for all the time and effort he put in his videos, and tries to obey the rules that are given by youtube?
@@mymarci No. Making money is fine, but he straight up went the coward's way out to ENSURE he made the maximum profit, which means greed got in the way of actually putting up a good video which he still would have made money off of.
@@cheeseboi588youtube detects if curse words had been used in the first 30 seconds - 1 minute of the video
It would (maybe) be better if it was 'half life challenges' that provided challenges for the game. like for example: Real half life challenge would be to play the entire half life campain but the health cap is 50 instead of 100
So much femboy fox content in one HL video
You should show off more of your fursona
Hey I have this! I also have a copy of Life2, another one of these type of CDs
My brother got this for Christmas one year, probably 2001. For years this is what I thought "Half-Life 2" was.
WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS TO ME
Once on electronic flea market in Poland, I bought a strange CD called Half-Life 8 in 1 PL (it supposed to be in Polish), indeed, only subtitles was in Polish but poorly translated. I guess it was some copy of Russian pressed bootleg CD (it was burned on CD-R so definitely not original pressed CD), they were known for poor Polish translations in many other games.
4:12 "Für 'Half-Life'"🤣
The 90s were filled with these "questionable" CD packs with maps, models, sounds, etc... for all sorts of games. Love it.
First video I watched and immediately hit like as soon as I saw the HEV furry. Love all the fursona art :3
5:53 is that Wildcat?