The recent news of Half-Life series writer Marc Laidlaw retiring from Valve has sent shockwaves through the community.

Many Half-Life mods have made it to ModDB’s Top 100 Mods of 2015. But the battle isn’t over yet, as one of these mods will be crowned Mod of the Year overall.

Many moons ago, you might remember an article we posted about how Valve had given the Black Mesa team (now known as the Crowbar Collective) the opportunity to sell their mod as a full retail product. Despite announcing that a Source SDK 2013 version of Black Mesa would also be available for free, the announcement was met with mixed criticism. There was an overwhelming amount of support for the team, but there were a number of people who were concerned with what ‘ethical’ implications this choice to go retail might have. Should community made content that has always been available for free suddenly be given the chance to be monetized?

The year is 1998. A previously unknown group of game developers known as Valve Software has just released Half-Life. Of course it becomes an instant hit, entertaining a generation of gamers worldwide. But beyond that, buried away on the CD-ROM inside that ridiculously big cardboard game box is a program called “Worldcraft”. According to a note at the back of the instruction manual (remember those?) this program would allow fans to “create a replica of their garage or a fantastic alien world”. And create they did. With this tool, now known as Hammer, at their disposal, the possibilities have been almost endless. From Counter-Strike to Ricochet, from Black Mesa to deep space to World War II France, the community created a tidal wave of new adventures, far beyond what anyone might have anticipated. Fifteen years later, we show no sign of stopping.

Hello! Welcome to the Modding and Development section, where we hope to bring you more news, reviews and discussion about the latest maps and mods than you can shake a Hammer at.

I’m MisterAddy, one of the new editors at LambdaGeneration. You may recognise me as a regular at PlanetPhillip.com and this very site, as well as being a long-time lurker on the Steam Forums. I am mostly a single-player gamer so I love everything Half-Life and Portal, and will help keep you up to date with community content to help ease the SP drought.

And I, hscsguy – co-editor of Modding and Development here at Lambda Generation – am assisting in the development of this monster of an article. Like MisterAddy, I too am a fan of single player games and mods alike with a fascination of Half Life 2 multiplayer mods on the side. I am pretty active over at the forums on Steam and avidly watch over the Source modding community to an embarrassing degree. And without further ado, I leave you with that exceedingly cliché phrase as we move on to the news you came here to read.