What Happened to the GMod Tower?

My favorite part of Gmod tower was waiting for 10+ minutes for all the addons to download just for almost none of the assets to actually load in

I've read this somewhere on the internet once: "People don't want a re-imagining of things, they want to re-visit what they had back in all those years", which is the part PixelTail isn't getting to and why their new thing isn't as popular as GMod Tower

my favorite part about tower unite has to be the fact that you can just walk up to one of those "coming soon" signs and check their trello board and see exactly what is actively being developed.

I remember PixelTail promising they'd release the source code for GMod Tower, but only after Tower Unity comes out of Early Access. That was four years ago.

Its so sad seeing so many old gmod servers and maps once cherished by many fade away and disappear.

Richter overtime

The reason GMod Tower worked so well was because of all the flaws you could make out in it. Source was by no means something that could uphold it, but that gave the work all the more charm and amazement. You could see the seams breaking in the code and it was a love to behold how well they were stitched up. A lot of the content you also saw used in the Tower was content from other Source games. You had that nostalgic feeling seeing CSS Office walls in the lobby, TF2 maps in Chimera, or feeling like every weapon in Virus was just taken as a reskin from GameBanana. GMod Tower had a "Community" feeling where as Tower Unite has a "Product" Feeling. GMod was broken, and nostalgic. Each bit of the gamemode had to be written by exploiting every drop of the engine, and pouring love into every asset that would cost even one more entity in the BSP limits. That feeling is ultimately lost in Tower Unite because it is too clean, too perfect, sterile, flawless. It lost the charm of a community sweat-and-tears project and instead it just got "produced". I wouldn't say the port has lost any soul, but I'd say it lost a charm only the outdated 2012 Source engine could provide...

12:41 i completely forgot about that game

Haven't seen the video yet but GMod Tower was such an experience back in the day. The fact people are still using aspects of it like Pointshop still today is super cool aswell.

I was huge into Gmod when I was a kid but I didn't have a PC powerful enough to handle Gmod Tower. I was so excited when I got my first desktop PC, and then I found out that Tower had shut down a few days before.

Seeing that official server in that state fills me with an immense sadness for a game that I never played, especially seeing the vibrant life that the fan server has. Honestly, I think they're missing a great opportunity to advertise their game to the Gmod community, but instead of an inviting preview of a game that would directly support the devs, they threw the desecrated husk of a once beloved game on a stage with a sign that says 'If you don't like the performance, go buy tickets to his son's show in the next theater.'

It's really sad to see devs show such contempt for their audience. It's one thing to move on, it's another to actively fight the people who literally made you successful because they want to play your work.

personally i love both versions, i miss the old source spaghetti but i don't blame them too much for wanting to move on, just wish they were a bit less crass about it

Such simpler times. The team behind the HL2 co-op mod Obsidian Conflict were quite close with Mac for some time during GMT's golden era and we were allowed to have our own custom player models! It truly brings back fond memories.

I'm glad theres a video discussing this. I felt like it was so unfair that the devs pretty much threw Gmod to the side and washed their hands of it for Tower Unite. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed what I played of Tower Unite, but it just feels like a buggy copy of Gmod Tower. It doesn't help that there's not many people who play Tower Unite, the most I'll get in servers are like 30 to 40 people and they're typically just talking in the plaza, no one likes to play the games anymore I guess? idk.. I wish they devs didn't treat the fans of the original thing that brought them here so poorly, both can co-exist.

I think that the best course for people who want to bring Tower back would be to make a clean room open source reimplementation of the original, that way they can't DMCA you for using their code. Also, call it OpenTower, then they can't DMCA you for the name.

I hope one day Pixeltail and fan-run revival projects are able to strike some sort of deal to have GMod Tower truly brought back to its fullest. I do play Tower Unite myself from time to time and it is pretty solid and it's only seeming to get better as time goes on, so I do recommend picking it up for what it is, but I think I'd genuinely cry out of pure nostalgia if I went back to the first tower lobby to see it bustling with life and activity.

I love the fact that tower unite both acknowledges your legacy donor status and lets you change the style of the hud to old school GMod Tower, while I miss the original, specially UCH, Tower Unite keeps getting better with every update.

As someone who has played the hell out of both the original GMTower (you can even see me waving in the screenshot at 3:18) and Tower Unite (according to steam I have just under 2k hours) I feel like I have a pretty good perspective of things from both sides of the table and I'd just like to throw my two cents out there for anyone who would like to listen. Nearly 8 years ago, going directly from GMT to TU was rough, simply put I just wasn't on board. All the things you mention in your Tower Unite section, the movement, disconnected condos, TU just didn't have the same warm feeling as GMT. But, obviously, I stuck with it. Tower Unite has existed for nearly a decade and in that amount of time I've grown just as attached to TU as I did with GMT way back when. I've kept up with several people from the GMT days who still actively play TU and seeing both them and me in those old screenshots and clips is really heartwarming, so to say that there is a complete split between the GMT community and the TU community isn't entirely true. Yeah there’s some divide, but it isn't ALL us vs them. My biggest gripe with TU at the beginning was the lack of interconnectivity, two servers vs an entire video game and people are obviously going to be spread out more on the latter. Take condos for example, I 100% agreed with you originally. Being able to just stroll into someone's apartment was a lot of the charm and it was a hard sell seeing that gone in TU. BUT the difference is important, because TU's condo editor is far far more advanced than GMT's. Seriously go to the TU steam workshop page and search for top rated condos the stuff people make is mind blowing, like a fully functioning 3D all night recreation of the first FNAF game. Condos in TU are practically your own worlds with its own quasi coding language, being able to pull from any texture or model you want, and just have so much depth. The most fun I've had in TU have been just hanging out in people's condos, talking for hours and hours as they walk me through there personally crafted homes, which is something I never did in GMT. There wasn't a suite I can remember that was worth spending hours in exploring, they were far more temporary. Which again isn't a bad thing at all, but the merits of one system over the other is less conclusive for me. Seeing you play TU for the first time reminds me of the hurdles I had just about 8 years ago with the game, but I had 8 years to get over them, and slowly come to cherish them in that same feeling any comforting familiar game has. I can speak from experience, the game has soul, depth, and I've most certainly enjoyed my time with it. There are things you can do in TU that you just can't do in GMT, and vise versa, and more than anything else I don't want this to be comment to be condemnation of either of them or me just telling people off who disagree with me. But I can't help but feel like TU doesn't get a fair shake when compared to it's older brother and that's something that I wish wasn't the case. Going directly from GMT to TU is a shock, but I think those willing to stick with it can find a whole lot of fun to be had and I don't see the point in silently wishing for the failure of one or the other. I only really focused on one specific example here but both of these games have been a consistent part of my life for over a decade, which is not only wild just to think about but has gotten me reflecting on my time with the games with the recent increase in conversation surrounding the both of them. I want nothing more than to have these games breathing with life as they do mean a lot to me. I hope you've enjoyed this admittedly long winded anecdote, I'd have more to say but I think I've just about taken up all the space I can get just about now. In conclusion I think TU is pretty is fun, and a pretty damn good game in its own right.

Gmod Tower was a fantastic gamemode, and was the main reason I got Gmod in the first place. I remember logging in and just being amazed by all the minor things, like the over 100 people in the same map, the decorative and cozy suites, and being able to play Youtube videos on the screen. Lobby 1 was one of my favorites, it perfectly encompassed the feeling of Half Life 2/Gmod, which was a bit droll and dreary, but despite that, it felt like it had life with how sunny it felt at the same time. I spent most of the time playing Ball race and source karts. Lobby 2 had it's own charm to it, but it wasn't nearly as good or had as much personality as lobby 1, mostly due to how it felt like "everything was in one place, and not neatly sectioned off." I made some great friends on the server, and would play it nearly every day whenever I could. When Tower Unite came out, I remember immediately buying it as soon as it came out, to some optimism and disappointment. A lot of the gamemodes that were in Gmod Tower were missing (the only available gamemodes were Virus, Ball race, Minigolf, and a new "Planet Panic", which has been completely unlisted). There was a pretty weak variety of items in comparison, the only major upgrade to the decoration was Canvases, allowing you to put whatever picture on the internet into the game, which was fun. While I had high hopes for the future, the beginning was bland. the Casino wasn't even there from the beginning. They have a Trello that promised things that were in Gmod Tower, like maps, gamemodes, and arcades, but had a lot of really big promises, like fishing, cooking, and even island exploration, but even today in 2024, a lot of their promised additions are in the backlog, or were released to not much hype. Tower Unite today is still very much a fun game, with a bunch of workshop additions to recreate the infinite possibility, maps that very much encourages people to build literally whatever they want, and a dedicated fanbase that's still keeping the game fairly active even after almost a decade since it's release, but it simply can't hit it's old audience or any proper audience for that matter. The only time it really jumps up is when a new major update is added, creating a new gamemode or feature to the game, but it's around 80-100 people in the game as a whole most of the time. I really wish that one day it'd jump up the popularity it had when it first released, where plaza maps would be almost full constantly and you'd meet new faces almost every time, but you'll come across a couple familiar faces almost everytime you get to the most populated lobby. Thanks for bringing back the memory that was Gmod Tower, it was a game I loved when I was 10 or so, and now that I'm 22, I still would love for a comeback to either Gmod Tower in an actual form, or Tower Unite to be much more active.