Garry's Mod2004

I originally discovered it as a pure sandbox and sank countless hours into simply building, spawning, and messing around. That alone would have been worth it. Eventually I found my way into GMod Tower back then an ambitious social lobby experience inside GMod, and today it lives on as its own standalone game, Tower Unite. But the real heart of my playtime went to two gamemodes: Trouble in Terror Town and Murder. TTT especially remains one of the best social deduction experiences ever built on any engine. Back in the day I didn't just play on servers I also ran them. I hosted and maintained my own game servers for TTT and Murder, and to keep them running properly I started writing Lua plugins. That's right: I learned to program in Garry's Mod. What started as tweaking a plugin here and there turned into a genuine understanding of scripting, server administration, and community management. GMod has quietly launched more programming careers than most coding tutorials ever will. Verdict: If you've never touched it, you're not buying a game you're buying access to a thousand games and two decades of community creativity. If you're technically inclined, even more so: this thing can teach you to code without you noticing.