That Creepy Feeling - What is it with Source games?

since the release of half-life 2 and counter-strike source in 2004 the source engine has been a staple of PC gaming for about 15 years now and thanks to its ongoing support from its developer valve hi mod ability and a thriving community spanning generations of gamers we have a present day where you can hop on games over a decade old and still find a full server browser it really is kind of incredible between the half-life games Team Fortress 2 portal 1 & 2 left 4 dead 1 & 2 Garry's Mod counter-strike source data beat source and probably more I don't even know about it actually seems like the source engine itself through its home platform of steam has formed one big community instead of a lot of smaller ones for individual games now I got in on all this a little bit late see when I was 12 I didn't have a PC capable of gaming yet but I had heard about and was interested in a new little game called portal and I got to play it and what was probably the most dated way possible I went to Blockbuster and rented the orange box for Xbox 360 I got home and played it and like most people I loved it but I also noticed something strange about it that while actually making me even more fascinated by it did make me a little hesitant to play it by myself this game was creepy now as many of you probably know this is partly deliberate that's the whole point of portal after all that beneath the facade of this humorous little puzzle game is a sci-fi horror story that has hinted at Brout and explicitly reveals itself in the final level as you make your way through the game you'll probably start to feel a sense of isolation as you look up at those observation windows and think to yourself if I'm being tested where is everyone shortly after this I got my first PC of my own and spent much of middle in high school playing these games but the thing is for me at least this unnerving feeling of being alone but not quite is present in every source game and not just the ones where it's meant to be there I was inspired to make this video a few months back by a post on Fortune's export it caught my attention with a picture of our P downtown b2 garrysmod mat which I am very familiar with the post red remember our P downtown b2 I was on a nostalgic trip through gmod the other day and downloaded it from the workshop through the comments I learned ibly rumor that the creator killed himself at some point and haunts the map people have talked about seeing shadows and the sewers and ghosts and stuff I'm not sure if the claim about the Creator is true where for how long this rumor is existed but I first heard about it only a few days ago I've always felt really uncomfortable on this map with the feeling intensifying in certain buildings for some reason I've always found source games in general to be quite unnerving as I never feel alone on an empty map this really resonated with me as someone had put two words what I had felt but never really thought about for years I hadn't played Garry's Mod in a long time but curious about the haunting claims I downloaded the map from the workshop and took a walk around although I didn't see any ghosts that old on nerving feeling was back in full force I'll just play a little bit without narration afterwards let me know in the comments did you feel creeped out and if so do you have any ideas why and whatever you did or didn't feel do you have any memories of playing on the map back in the day that last question is important for later [Applause] [Music] now the first thing I noticed when I open this map up was the ambient noises most custom maps are made up of assets from other source games most often half-life 2 as a game with a dystopian sci-fi setting that often means a distant alien hum playing in the background of a given men when played over a seemingly normal or even upbeat lookin area it's easy to see how this can create a sense of uneasiness one that you probably wouldn't notice while playing with others but is probably much harder to ignore when you're alone some maps take it a step further having sounds of conversation and traffic which can fill out the atmosphere of a populated server but just seems out of place when you can hear all this activity with no one around speaking of being alone remember before when I asked if you have any memories of playing on RP Downton v2 and whether or not you felt anything now see my thinking is this I personally played a lot on this map back in the day I remember running a bar with my friend that ended up being extorted by a gang for a chunk of our profits we went to the police who set up an outpost upstairs to monitor activity in our bar so that they could arrest them this led to an amusing little back-and-forth when they went upstairs to set up and found my own little counterfeiting operation but decided to let it go as the gang members were the bigger fish in town the point of the story is that I associate many of these maps with activity and fun memories come back to it now empty and with a now more obvious sinister ambient rec it creates a disconnect in my mind that something is wrong here and that I'm not really alone as I explored these old maps I almost expected to see a mysterious message saying a player in joined or to turn a corner and see someone watching me in the distance so in conclusion while this phenomenon is not strictly unique to source games I believe more people consistently experience this in source environments for two main reasons firstly because of a wide variety of otherwise pretty upbeat maps using the ambient sounds of half-life 2 of all things and secondly the popularity age and continued use of these games means that a large number of people are playing a set of games which are both to them and are either still present in their lives or can be easily revisited at any time thanks to steam with all this considered it comes as no surprise that there's no shortage of pre P pastas about players returning to old games to find something really wrong with them and source games in particular seem to be the perfect storm of nostalgia widespread appeal and inherent creepiness

Channel: The Librarian

Views: 2,517,129

Rating: 4.8631368 out of 5

Keywords: Source Engine, Valve, Steam, Creepy, Scary, Creepypasta, Garry's Mod, Half-Life 2, Video Games, Counter-Strike Source, CSS, Portal, Nostalgia

Id: 03yL_JCeQBI

Length: 8min 32sec (512 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 26 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/wulfinn]

I think about this a lot, and I think it extends past Source games alone (although it is BIG ENERGY in games made in the source engine). Empty Halo maps, some old PS2 games, and dead or dying MMOs give me the same feeling.

my take is that it's similar to visiting abandoned buildings, or being at work or school at odd hours when few or none others are around - we have this social context of what a place is, what it SHOULD be, what its purpose or life or soul is. divorced from that context, it feels Wrong or at the very least alien.

it sounds hokey to describe it like this, but humans have always had this morbid fascination with ruins, cemeteries, abandoned or desolate places, and I think the same thing can happen with games for similar reasons. they're something to be feared, or at least avoided, or at even leaster least respected and revered if the first two can't be satisfied for whatever reasons. we can grasp what happened there and who was in the place and what its purpose was, but only slightly and through guesswork. even the most accurate and educated guess is divorced from experience. without direct experience, we are in some ways grasping ghosts.

I think there's a similar phenomenon that isn't taken as seriously with games because, c'mon dude, they're just games. but we're still human and we treat games as if they're real places in which we live, work, play, and interact with others. when they're empty, they feel more like ruins than they do games.

obviously this is picked up as a horror trope in some good and interesting games and stories and I'm probably more-than-half talking out of my ass, but this is something I really do think a lot about (including as part of the philosophy of games, software, and internet preservation, because the question of what we can save and preserve takes on a lot of weight when the medium is so transient).

love y'all and thank you for coming to my Theodore Talk.

[u/puppyontheguestlist]

I was always terrified of the observation windows in Portal. I felt if you looked long enough something would appear, a feeling heightened by the distortion from the wavy glass looking like movement. In Half Life 2 I always had to force myself to move forward, like in a horror game. Not because of enemy encounters, but for reasons I couldn't place. Like I'm really not supposed to be here, or a total loneliness that I stumbled upon entirely by accident.

[u/WashYourEyesTwice]

Big open maps on gmod. Never go it alone.

[u/Simicrop]

Reminds me of r/liminalspace, just seems wrong when places feel lived in but are empty

[u/argonthecook]

To me these games' graphics are in that spot, where they're simultaneously bad and good enough to feel like a weird dream. A dream in which all of the geometry is simplified and blocky and you can't distinguish any details on objects, but it somehow feels real.

[u/Tiny-Lemon]

This feeling is one of those reasons I like Source games... It feels so surreal to explore a gmod map by yourself. It feels creepy. Especially gm_bigcity makes you feel like you're being watched. Ironically Left 4 Dead probably has the least creepy empty maps for being at night and mostly abandoned already.

[u/dado950]

The way I could describe it is like the backrooms creepypasta. You're just alone in this big place that you expect someone to be there but there isn't. At first it isn't so bad but the more you explore the map you come across parts that you expect something creepy to happen but it doesn't. This starts building up paranoia. You want someone else to be there but it's just you. It eventually starts feeling like your being watched. I'm really glad I'm not the only who finds those games. Idk but I have the same feeling when playing Minecraft and Gta San Andreas

[u/10000_Spoons_Irony]

I have always felt this way about source games and I feel less crazy knowing that it's a thing.

I've always played Half Life games without music and it added to the creepy atmosphere for me.

[u/Thatonepsycho]

I once got in an empty TF2 map and it felt exactly like this too. Especially since the servers were usually super active back then, it was eerie.