Garry's Mod was actually my introduction to Half-Life, as I'm sure is the case for plenty of kids. It was the Bananaphone video and then classics like Full Life Consequences that made me interested in it. GMod, as a platform, is perfect. It deserves a five star rating for longevity and content alone.

This game is the definition of "sandbox". You can call Grand Theft Auto an open world game where you can do anything, but you can't. You're constrained by what Rockstar will let you do - here, the sky is literally the limit. Scripts, models, sounds, maps... if it has been made in the public eye, it's probably in GMod in some form. I have fond, fond memories of just wasting hours in this game.

But I don't think I could go back to it now. I lack the imagination now, the "but what if..." aspect of interactivity. Something in modern game design has made me this way exclusively for this medium - I can still pull off all sorts of wild ideas in my head for other subjects but games tend to stump me. It feels like experimentation in a lot of games is unrewarded at best and punished at worst; but with GMod there isn't any reward beyond self-satisfaction, which I'm very fond of.

In the grand scheme of things, 123 hours really doesn't seem that much compared to other people's runtimes. It was the first game I owned on my own computer - and then I discovered I needed OTHER games to make this one work, since I got the Steam release and not the original sourcemod version. But GMod opened up an entire wealth of gaming history to me. This daft, "only as wild as you are" exercise of a game helped shape my taste to this very day.