My favorite was the one that spawned monsters, so you could have enemies that would attack either side during vehicle CTF or Onslaught game modes

Same. My favorite mutator was the exploding ammo cases. So much fun to see an enemy run to pick up an ammo box and just shoot it with a pistol blowing it up in his face. That was apretty revolutionary game mechanic 20 years ago. Do any modern games have such a thing?

That volatile ammo mutator was made even more awesome because it actually spawned "shots" of that type, so a plasma pile wouldn't just explode but rather spread various plasma shots around it. The granade one would have the granades bouncing around a bit before exploding. It was so easy for things to go wrong and backfire on you :)

This reminds me of Quake with the DeFrag mode "sub-game", but also gameplay available in Quake Live in which you could have a Railgun only match, but they could also behave like Rocket Launchers for rocket jumps.

Also allowing players to change the configuration of their game through the dev console was cool. My favorite visual change was to configure the railgun trails to persist for multiple seconds.

We modified Action Quake II (somehow, I forget how) to change gravity (I think it was in the map itself) and we would bounce around Cheyenne in a completely different playstyle - and everything would send you flying.

sv_gravity console command.

Railgun trail to match the reload time, always!

> also gameplay available in Quake Live in which you could have a Railgun only match, but they could also behave like Rocket Launchers for rocket jumps

That used to be my jam in Q3A, Instaunlagged. Nothing is quite like railgun jumping with no splash damage. Dusk's crossbow jumping comes close, but isn't hitscan..

Those are in TF2 and Minecraft, perhaps one reason they’re still popular

Red Eclipse has mutators: https://github.com/redeclipse/base

Luckily it seems modern games (e.g. TF2, Overwatch) make this even more accessible with so called "workshops".

Eh... it was arguably more accessible back in the day, because it was (a) server side & (b) fully decentralized, so each server admin could run whatever they wanted.

Some games come close now, but I'm not aware of any multiplayer games that afford that level of control to their playerbase.

Mutators are about the only thing keeping Starcraft 2 Co-Op players going in 2025 (and by extension, the community).

Earliest memory I have in the multiplayer FPS context was probably the 'cheat' menu unlocks for Goldeneye on the N64 in 1997.

Me and my friend are somehow still playing co-op without mutators. My friend is max level, I'm like 100 away

My favorite game of all time was Quake, similarly extended with QuakeC, into the QuakeWorld CTF game. I still dream about those maps.

Same, same. E4M3 Elder God Shrine forever.

UnrealScript was the bomb, it was what got me started coding. Specifically replicating the gravity gun from Half Life 2.

I remember the one where you got physically bigger every time you killed someone, until you couldn't fit through doorways etc. And smaller and smaller every time you died. It was pretty hilarious.

Instagib with ASMD shock rifles.

Man after my own heart <3

There was a number of games that allowed similar things in these days. My favourite was San Andreas Multiplayer. All you needed was a copy of GTA: San Andreas and download the client, the server was community scripted. This gave birth to a number of unique servers: racing, deathmatch, role play, etc.

Multi Theft Auto (another GTA multiplayer mod, still alive today) allowed for similar things. And so did the source games (Counter Strike, HL2: DM, Day of Defeat, etc.).

While most seemed to prefer Counter-strike, my childhood gaming was dominated by an Unreal Tournament mod called Tac Ops. While the games looked similar, the mechanics felt very different than Counter-strike. It was a much faster-paced game.

There were a ton of servers with wacky mods. I spent a ton of time on the low-grav servers. There were also some that made the top-scoring player huge. Those odd game modes were a blast.

EDIT: Also looks like people are still playing!

https://www.gog.com/dreamlist/game/tactical-ops-assault-on-t...

https://tactical-ops.eu/

I love Tac Ops! Was one of the most realistic mods out there (it was sooo easy to die).

I seem to remember there was some behind-the-scenes political / financial shenanigans with Counter Strike and the Game of the Year edition bundle that kind of killed it.

Haha realistic... reminds me that one of my favorite mods back in the day was Action Quake which was more action movie styled and less realistic. Last second sideways jumps in and out of the way were its claim to fame, imo.

> which was more action movie styled and less realistic

Another HL mod I remember fondly in similar veins is "The Specialists". If I remember correctly, it came out around the same time as The Matrix, and had all the fun moves like running on walls in slowmo, jumping forward/sideways and shooting in slowmo, and lots of other stuff. I think I recall it being possible to play both in 1st and 3rd person too, something that was kind of new at that point, unless I misremember.

I think at that I point I probably spent as much time with The Specialists as with Counter-Strike itself (and a cracked copy of 3DS Max 8 for making my own models of course).

That mod was awesome. They somehow managed to make slow motion powerups work in a multiplayer action game without forcing it on every player in the map!

Also had a strange RPG community entirely separate from the main game… funny how these random subcultures evolve in unexpected places.

There was also the opera mod which was pretty cool.

This is brilliant, I had complete forgotten about this one!! Thank you very much.

Wow thats a name I haven't heard in a long time! I really miss the way tacops 2.2 felt, never did get along with 3.x versions. Was definitely a formative gaming experience for me as well

I lost so many hours to this game. Thank you for the walk down memory lane.

These were my favorite part of Starsiege: Tribes. There was a modpack called Ultra Renegades that totally changed the gameplay and made it so twitchy and fun.

Loved Tribes! I mostly played Paintball mod from 2000-2004!

It was such a fun game! My friend group got really into the Shifter mod, you could build defenses for your base like walls and turrets. It was a blast!

Everything about Tribes was awesome.

Such a shame the way the post-Dynamix/T2 development studios completely failed to understand what made 1 & 2 great.

Can't happen anymore because every multiplayer game is chasing esports.

I have always hated esports conceptually, from jump.

those ant-sized man in house maps were the best. i dont think ive ever seen anything like it since.

Sniping people in the bathtub from the sink was so fun...

The game Grounded almost has that feel, but it's open world.

There's another game called Hypercharge:Unboxed that is definitely giving me the feeling of those old UT maps, but I haven't actually played it.

Having a match grind to a halt because literally everyone on the server was standing in the livingroom staring at the tv...

de_rats and similar in CS1.6

Mutators were amazing at the peak of unreal tournament, but towards the end of life they made it die that much quicker. I remember feeling a little nostalgic and wanting to play unreal tournament, but the only service I could find had a huge amount of mutators and mods installed where it was very much unlike the normal gameplay experience that I was looking for

Warcraft 3 had some of the greatest mods that kept the player base alive for decades

I've never been a fan of Warcraft, but I did play the custom Warcraft 3 TD maps at lan parties. Some were just so epic.

Counter-Strike 1.6 (and other Goldsrc based games) greatly benefited from AMX Mod X's scripting capabilities. I miss the days where people were playing modded servers.

Obscuring server browser and/or not allowing self-hosting dedicated servers killed modding in modern games. A real shame.

https://www.amxmodx.org/

Not only killed modding, but also killed the way those unique communities developed. I suppose it's possible you can find people on community Discord servers nowadays for pick up games, but not in the same way as just seeing and talking to the same people all the time on your favorite modded server.

For four great years in my career I ran game servers for an Australian ISP. I really enjoyed tossing up servers for new HL2 / UT / Quakeworld mods and seeing what picked up a community, chipping in on a cyberpunk HL2 mod in the same period.

I have such rose coloured glasses of that time.

Looking back, most of the dedicated server software felt like it was just tossed over the wall. Some of the stuff we used to have to do to get things running happily on headless linux servers was very hacky. Others simply HAD to run on windows hosts.

I feel like the entire industry died as games became "live" services.

Nearly 2 decades later when my kids got into Minecraft, I stumbled into the hosted MC server world and was just amazed by the size of the industry around it.

It was a real "arrrh this is where that same spirit ended up" moment.

And now of course there's huge servers funded by getting kids into gambling and pay to win.... Gross.

My favorite server which I think is dead by now, Dead Man Standing was a low gravity CS 1.6 server, no footstep noises, but there was a hook you could use to maneuver the low gravity, and the hook made noise, it was really something with those CS mouse maps. That was peak CS for me, I never saw anyone come close to the quality of that server. DMS I will always miss you.

I liked zombie mods

And it was literally just so they could skinnerbox people and sell skins. I still remember when if you wanted a skin you just downloaded it and could put it on your server and anyone who joined would download and use it. People running their own stuff makes DLC/lootcrate/cosmetics unviable and I do think a huge part of the "server" finding stuff is to algorithmically put you in situations you are likely to win/lose at certain rates to keep you playing. Anything other than community servers as the primary avenue is a dark pattern. You also lose out the path to getting into modding/3d modeling/programming/running servers that those modded servers were for lots of people including me.

If you have fun instagib servers that might detract from how many lootcrates people buy since they might just get curb stomped in it + it's just harder to track and measure the impact of changes when you are minmaxxing for monetary extraction when you have high variety of mods/servers. If you want to track and evaluate player behavior to manipulate it you need to control for as many variables as possible. These game companies are straight up evil.

On the other hand, during the anarchy years of bring-your-own-skins (and sprays), there was a lot of horrible shit out there — goatse was only the tip of the iceberg.

I don't buy the 'people need to be protected from things' argument.

I lived both eras.

Independent servers and self-modding were hands-down superior in terms of creativity and fun.

The current locked-box 'as the developers intended' version sucks in comparison.

And as referenced, its primary purpose is absolutely to enforce scarcity so that can be monetized.

Goatse in exchange for true ownership? Any day of the fucking week. My eyelids work, and I can close them myself.

You ran your own server within your group of (probably Internet-) friends and policed and banned players doing that kind of crap. A lot of the potential offense was limited by the low resolution of sprays anyway.

Game companies doing everything possible to turn every person into a gambling addict seems way more destructive than someone seeing a shock site.

Few games today can put me in the heightened frenzy of an Unreal Tournament instagib match. Pure, unadulterated adrenaline.

For a few years Sauerbraten scratched that itch.

i am such a slow old boomer now but i absolutely loved the sauerbraten TOSOK (Team One Shot One Kill) venice servers. also assault cube TOSOK/OSOK (dm variant). also UrbanTerror jump maps. ut_swim will always be in my heart.

I don’t know/remember TOSOK, is that a new mode? We used to play daily circa 2007-2010, my group of friends was in a well-known European clan. Haven’t played it since, sadly.

i think im mixing things up - that term might be unique to assault cube. in sauerbraten i remember a map called venice, everyone had snipers and its one shot to kill anyone, very satisfying if youre good and very frustrating if someones better than you.

I went to look for some videos of the game and damn… I guess it’s time to reinstall.

(Never played Assault Cube, always meant to but Sauerbraten was just so good)

UT1 was basically instagib by default: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Hm3m1sszTEs&t=6s

So many sounds that will forever live in my head.

I think I actually beat UT99 on a laptop trackpad a couple years later. (School device)

The entire extensibility story in Unreal series has been amazing from the get go. Where QuakeC was really more of a scripting language "on the side", with UT it felt more like the entire game is written in UnrealScript, with some native bits here and there for performance. The language was interesting too, incorporating things such as first-class support for various states (you could define different implementations for a function depending on which state the object is, and derived classes could extend that).

No wonder the mutator scene in UT was crazy. My favorite mod for the original UT99 was Dr Strangelove, which modded the Redeemer gun (the one that shoots huge nuclear missiles) to allow you to ride them.

Sounds a lot like emacs, there's a core written in C etc but the overwhelming majority of the bits that make it an editor are in a scripting layer that you can change at runtime (and indeed there's hardly any reason to use emacs if you're not doing so)

That entire realm of "Run your own game servers and do whatever you want with it" is dead. Not because of cheating either.

It's dead because if you can play on a server that lets you equip a skin you didn't pay for, that's bad for Epic's quarterly statements.

Your fun is not profitable enough. Sorry.

Battlefield 6 are trying to bring something like this back with Portal (https://portal.battlefield.com).

You can write "experiences" in TypeScript then host your own server that people can join without having to download/install a mod themselves.