MODS FOR HALF LIFE MOD

By December 1999, an established but ever-burgeoning Half-Life modding community had formed and Sven Co-op had earned its place at the heart of it.

MODS FOR HALF LIFE MOD

On May 2 of that year, Sven Co-op, as that package became known, launched its first version 1.0, and although Fearon admits he didn't intend his mod to reach anyone beyond his immediate circle of online friends and acquaintances, as more and more servers cropped up, more and more mappers and modders appeared to take note. From there, it sort of became a community-driven thing.' I couldn't work out a good way to have them help with the level itself, so I just suggested everyone submit their own levels that I'd then submit with the package. 'Folk started asking how they could help with it. 'People were far more interested than I thought they'd be,' he says. Fearon - who went by the online pseudonym Sven Viking - designed his first cooperative Half-Life map and published it on his site. And so, with a scant understanding of coding by way of crude experimentation in his youth, he set about changing that. Much to Fearon's frustration, Half-Life didn't support cooperative play by default.

'I loved playing local coops like Rainbow Island on arcade machines when they were still around.' 'I'd always been interested in coop games,' he tells me. In early 1999, when Y2K threatened the world and Fatboy Slim's Praise You topped the UK singles chart, Fearon ran a fansite named Atomic Half-Life dedicated to Valve's then newly released sci-fi shooter. It took Dan Fearon 17 years to get his game on Steam.

Mods for half life