Way back on the 12th of February 2009, two brothers created what remains, arguably, the greatest Half-Life fanfilm (or greatest Half-Life film, period) ever made. Escape From City 17: Part One went viral almost immediately after release, and inspired numerous other filmmakers to create their very own Half-Life fanfilms. Since then, the creators, the Purchase Brothers have been very busy with a number of projects, including a feature film. They released another teaser for Part Two and a recut of Part One in October of 2009, but since then, we’ve heard absolutely nothing from them.

Through some bizarre twist of fate, both Valve and Team Fortress came about on the same exact day as each other!

Update: And Valve have not forgotten about the anniversary! They still have their Birthday Mode on within TF2, except this year it’s getting some awesome new additions, chiefly including… hats! Head over to the TF2 Blog for more.

Yes, Team Fortress is now 15 years old! This means that if Team Fortress lived in Sweden or Denmark, it could now… well, legally get busy. Oh, they grow so fast.

So, you’d like to make a mod one day. But you’re not that good at level design or writing, you’d learn ancient Sumerian cuneiform before you’d stand a chance of learning coding, and you can’t do texturing or modelling. What can you do, then? Well, maybe you’ve got a voice of gold! Which means you could become a voice actor. But finding projects that need voice acting can be a challenge, because so many mods forget about voice acting, or leave it for the very final stages of development, assuming their mod will even make it that far. But finding a voice actor for your project can also be quite a challenge. Asking around can be tough because there isn’t really one particular place where you’ll find voice actors.

Just to underline the importance of good voice acting, I don’t think I need to remind anyone of Portal: Prelude, one of the more infamous Portal mods, where the voice acting was done entirely by low-quality text-to-speech synthesizers. The mod itself garnered mixed to negative reception, but the robotic voice acting was almost universally hated. But PlanetPhillip might have the solution to these voice acting problems.