When Half-Life was released in November 1998, towards the end of an incredible year for gaming that also saw the launch of titles like Thief: The Dark Project, Metal Gear Solid and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, it triggered a golden age of modding the likes of which hadn't been seen since Doom and Doom II. The legendary Counter-Strike began development mere months later in January 1999, and a cottage industry of pro-am development teams sprang up overnight: everyone wanted a piece of the Half-Life pie, especially once Counter-Strike came out. And Black Widow Games, a little fly-by-night outfit based out of Canada but consisting of developers around the world, was cranking out mods on contract work. After a string of mods for Quake and Quake II starting in 1997, they eventually graduated to Half-Life, with USS Darkstar (a space-themed fan sequel to Half-Life) being developed for PC Gamer magazine in 1999. Soon after they began work on They Hunger, what would turn out to be the first pure horror mod for Half-Life in a long, long line of them. I don't know what it is about Half-Life that so attracted horror fans to the modding scene. As a friend of mine even pointed out to me yesterday, Half-Life is already kind of a horror game. I think it's a combination of the design tools' ease of use, Half-Life's emphasis on realistic spaces, and an at the time fairly robust lighting system that made it easy to plunge the player into darkness with a working flashlight (a relatively new innovation) to light their way. Whatever the case, we can look at games like Cry of Fear and see in them the DNA of They Hunger.
They Hunger has a simple premise, out of a thousand B movies of the 70s and 80s. A nameless writer, struggling with personal issues, takes a vacation to the rural American town of Rockwell; on the radio, it's announced that meteorologists have been observing strange electrical phenomena. Our hero's car slides into a river during a thunderstorm; seeking shelter in a nearby church, he discovers that something terrible has happened: the dead walk, and are feasting on the living! It's a classic, even archetypal concept, going back at least to 1968's Night of the Living Dead and its protagonist visiting a cemetery far from home just as mysterious radiation from a returning satellite resurrects the hungry dead. And indeed, They Hunger is, at least on paper, intended to evoke a 1950s or early 1960s aesthetic. In practice, however, it's a pileup of anachronisms, with guns and devices from the 1980s or even later. People have attempted to fix some of these anachronisms, largely by replacing the more modern weaponry with more period-appropriate ones, but the game as a whole definitely seems more intent on evoking the feeling of the era rather than achieve any sort of authenticity. The whole thing is seemingly intentionally vague; even the location of Rockwell has no state given, though some have theorized Pennsylvania or West Virginia.
If you've played Half-Life before, They Hunger won't bring you many surprises. The gameplay remains pretty much the same: progress is linear, though rarely in a straight line as you traverse real-world places like a hospital or graveyard; most of your enemies are monsters, in this case almost entirely zombies (using stock AI routines, so you can engage them in melee by dancing in and out of range of their predictable attacks) but with the occasional armed soldier or half-zombified cop. Most of your weaponry, at least in the original version of the mod, is more or less reskins of the Half-Life (or Counter-Strike) arsenal. Where They Hunger differs from its parent game is its emphasis on camp horror, with its Frankenstein's monster knockoffs, cyborg mad scientists, zombies walking around with shotguns rammed through their foreheads, zombie farm animals, and so on.
They Hunger was originally released in three parts. As near as I can tell, the original episode dropped sometime in 1999, before getting updated and published on the Demo Disk that PC Gamer used to include with their magazine (remember those?) in February 2000. The later two episodes were sponsored by PC Gamer directly, and each was published online and in the magazine as a package with the previous episode(s). When the long-awaited third episode came out in early 2001, I was on dialup at the time and it would have taken far too long to download the whole three-episode installer, so a friend of mine bought the magazine and sent me the disk. Nowadays I can download the whole thing in a matter of minutes off ModDB. What a time to be alive.
The mod is over a quarter century old now, and obviously it shows its age. Neil Manke headed up much of the map design and while he has a particularly recognizable style, we're still talking about maps made from 1999 to 2001 for computers of the era; nothing too fancy was really possible like today. The strange aesthetic choices of weaponry (and mishmash of technology — a hospital in the third episode has a very modern X-Ray machine) can be explained by it being the late 1990s/early 2000s, a time when the Half-Life modding community was very different to what it is now; it was a lot more self-referential, with modders constantly referencing each other's work. There's even a weapon or two from Counter-Strike! (A few years later, the Poke646 mod, which seemed to anticipate Half-Life 2's aesthetic a little bit, cheekily had a movie theater marquee advertising They Hunger 4.)
Given the age of the mod and some of the issues that have become more obvious or annoying over the years, people have done their level best to fix it up. Various patches for new Half-Life updates pushed out over Steam have been released; the version of the mod I played was called They Hunger Relit, which boasts a new pass over the map lighting, several fixes and minor changes, new zombie models, and period appropriate weaponry (nearly all of it coming from Day of Defeat, mostly the American arsenal.) It also includes an achievement system (in-engine, not via Steam, sadly) and even a survival mode. There are still some things I would have changed, namely the Half-Life monsters that never got replaced and the soldiers who are all still just reskinned HECU troops rather than dressed in period-appropriate uniforms. But nonetheless, it does a lot to update the mod, even a few surprises (those nurses are fast!) The only thing it doesn't really fix is probably They Hunger's biggest flaw, the final battle, where you must fight off a helicopter circling around you. Its HP is absurdly high, possibly requiring more ammunition than you've actually brought. I definitely had to cheat myself more ammo just to finish the job — bad!
Some time after Half-Life 2 was released, Black Widow Games announced They Hunger: Lost Souls, a spiritual successor running on the Source engine, intended to be commercially sold. Set in Eastern Europe in the early 1960s, it was between three-fourths to four-fifths complete when it was announced in late 2005, but development stalled out not long after as Neil Manke, for years the heart and soul of Black Widow, seemingly dropped off the face of the earth. The rumor was that he had fallen seriously ill, and without him holding the team together, the project fell apart. PC Gamer recently tried to get at the truth of what happened to Lost Souls, but the results were somewhat inconclusive.
While more recent mods like Afraid of Monsters, Cry of Fear, and others have defined the style and tone of Half-Life horror modding in the last ten to fifteen years, there's no denying it: They Hunger shuffled so the others could run. It was groundbreaking, sometimes terrifying, always spooky; fans have been hungry for more ever since.
Original version (updated for Steam)
Relit version
No comments:
Post a Comment