It was late one evening in December of 1998; I was 9 years old, and we were celebrating Christmas at my grandparents' house with the rest of my extended family. Waiting for me under the tree was a roughly 9 inch by 10 inch by 2 inch box, covered in wrapping paper. I carefully tore off the paper to reveal the copy of Half-Life inside, but far more important was what I discovered on the disc in the weeks that followed. Lurking within the additional files, waiting for me to complete the game and seek out more, was the installer for a program called Worldcraft.

Worldcraft, or as it is known today, the Hammer Editor, is a level editor for Half-Life and its close relatives. Just sitting there on the disc is the level editor for the game I had just beaten. Anyone can just make and publish levels for this game? Anyone can just... work on games? These seem like common concepts today, but this was the moment I tumbled through the looking glass. You can plot a direct path between this event and my current career, but a small handful of years down this road when I was already contributing my share to the Half-Life modding community, I had just learned about a modification called The Specialists.

Take Half-Life, dunk it in a wire-fu bucket of paint, roll it around in a bunch of spent bullet casings and blood-filled squibs, and you have The Specialists. For a teenager who had The Matrix fresh in their mind, this was the holy grail of multiplayer experiences, so naturally I dove in, quite literally, and rolled out on the other side within the forums for the mod's community. People were discussing the mod itself but there were also several sub-forums dedicated to creative endeavors, not just in the effort to customize the mod itself but for all manners of video game artwork, as well as categories for simply shooting the shit with our fellow netizens. It quickly became a home for me among the vast and rapidly growing internet, and 20+ years later I still know a handful of people from that time.

It's easy to write this off as nostalgia; I think we all find ourselves flipping through the archived logs of our youth, longing for a time and place we can perceive but can no longer interact with. But the lasting emotional weight of those memories didn't come from the stylish gunplay of the mod nor the novelty of being a teenager online in that era of the internet. It came from the environment itself. Dodging bullets gave us something to bring us together, while the forums gave us a foundation to nurture and grow those bonds.

The forums also never felt unapproachable. Even with roughly 22,500 forum members at its peak and new posts showing up nearly all day, you still saw familiar faces everywhere. And despite the internet culture of the era having an arguably unhealthy obsession with hazing rituals, the intent was rarely to harm, but to encourage kinship and develop social callouses. It was clear that while we came together because of our love for The Specialists, we stayed together because of our love for the community that took form around it.

Then the forums died.

There were several efforts to revive them by various community members. I even offered up my amateur webdev skills and limited hosting space in an admittedly desperate and ill-conceived attempt, being a rather naïve 20-year-old at the time. However, competing revival efforts only served to fracture an already dissolving community; the glue that kept us together was gone, and it was only a matter of time until we drifted apart or retreated to tiny, fragmented cliques. Skype had established itself as a powerful and versatile messaging program, with AIM or IRC as comfortable fallbacks, but these programs aren't designed to house entire communities.

Without a stable, tangible history of events for people to cling to, large communities cannot form nor thrive. When too many people are packed into one vast stream of text, you get swept up in the current, and individual voices converge into background noise. Your quietest voices get stifled, the loudest dictate the flow. Forums give everyone equal footing.

This is why WitchWorks plays The Specialists. A forum on its own is a solid foundation, but an empty concrete slab is just a monument to good intentions. Creativity is what drives us together, but it alone doesn't build culture; it's just a thread we share in common. We need an excuse to get together and find the loose ends that we can weave into a community together. And in a way, it's game preservation! You can open up the maps and dive around alone, but a multiplayer game only exists when people are playing it and giving the experience a chance to live on.

You can find the server info and dodge-roll your way into our community here!