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2006 · First-person shooter · Indie

Garry's Mod

Garry's Mod is a physics-based sandbox game built on Valve's Source engine. In its base mode, there are no objectives. Players can spawn non-player characters, ragdolls, and props, then manipulate them using a physics gun that can pick up, rotate, and freeze objects in place. A tool gun provides additional functionality such as welding objects together or adjusting facial expressions on ragdolls.

Released: 29 November 2006
Platforms: Linux Windows macOS
Genres: First-person shooter Indie Physic Sandbox Simulation
Developers: —
Publishers: Valve Corporation
Modes: Co-op Multiplayer Single-player
Perspective: First person
Themes: Sandbox
Engine: Source
Country: United Kingdom
Languages: Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian and 13 more
Copies sold: 25 million as of 2024-11-29
Time to beat: 55hmain story557hcompletionist

About

Garry's Mod, commonly clipped as GMod, is a 2006 sandbox game developed by Facepunch Studios and published by Valve. The base game mode of Garry's Mod has no set objectives and provides the player with a world in which to freely manipulate objects. Other game modes, notably Trouble in Terrorist Town and Prop Hunt, are created by other developers as mods and are installed separately, by means such as the Steam Workshop. Garry's Mod was created by Garry Newman as a mod for Valve's Source game engine and released in December 2004, before being expanded into a standalone release that was published by Valve in November 2006.

Ports of the original Windows version for Mac OS X and Linux followed in September 2010 and June 2013, respectively. As of September 2021, Garry's Mod has sold more than 20 million copies. A spiritual successor, S&box, was released in 2026.

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The articlegameplay, story, development, reception

Gameplay

Garry's Mod is a physics-based sandbox game that, in its base game mode, has no set objectives. The player is able to spawn non-player characters, ragdolls, and props, and interact with them by various means. Using the "physics gun", ragdolls and props can be picked up, rotated, and frozen in place. The individual limbs of ragdolls can also be manipulated. The "tool gun" is a multi-purpose item for tasks such as welding and constraining props together, and altering the facial expressions of ragdolls.

Development

Garry's Mod was created by the programmer Garry Newman. He started developing games under the studio name Facepunch Studios after dropping out of college, at the time out of his parents' house. He did this as a hobby, simultaneous to his occupation as a PHP programmer for a dating website. He was later fired when he launched his own dating website.

While developing his first game, Facewound, Garry's Mod became a side-project of his as a mod for the Source game engine and, principally, the game Half-Life 2. Newman soon found more enjoyment in developing Garry's Mod than in maintaining Facewound, so development on Facewound was mostly halted (and put on indefinite hiatus in 2004) for him to focus on Garry's Mod. He stated that, at the time, his skills in computer programming were not advanced enough to create a full Source-based game and he resorted to the mod format. The first iteration of the mod, version 1, was released on 24 December 2004.

Reception

GameSpy named Garry's Mod the "PC Mod of the Year" in 2005. Craig Pearson of GamesRadar regarded it one of the best mods for cooperative gameplay in 2007. In 2017, Brendan Caldwell of Rock Paper Shotgun described the game as a "must-own sandbox game", while PCGamesN included it in its 2019 list of the "best sandbox games on PC".

5 million by July 2013, 6 million by September 2014, 10 million by January 2016, 15 million by December 2019, 18,671,533 by December 2020, over 20 million by September 2021, and 25,560,290 at the game's eighteenth anniversary in November 2024. 5 million copies annually. Sales of the game made for revenues of $3 million by December 2008, $22 million by March 2013, $30 million by February 2014, and US$119,836,074 by December 2020. The game's success allowed Facepunch to grow further, eventually branching out into other games, such as Rust.