They Hunger: Lost Souls - the JFK of Source Gaming

[Junkman Cicero]

I'd like to give you all a history lesson in Source modding and, by extension, GoldSrc modding. This is a story many of us know already, so I won't expend too much of your time explaining it.
Following the release and subsequent success of Valve's breakout game Half-Life in 1998 and the release of the HL software development kit (http://half-life.wikia.com/wiki/Half-Life_SDK), a number of other developers, including quite a few upcoming ones eager to prove themselves in what we now consider a fledgeling gaming industry. As Valve was still a fairly young company at the time they even occasionally offered assistance to these modders and released their mods in special releases of the game, which would seem incredible today, especially since at the time they were outsourcing the creation of a series of Half-Life expansion packs, starting with Opposing Force, then followed by the much-shorter but higher in graphics quality Blue Shift and PS2-only multiplayer expansion Decay, the latter two of which were supposed to be additions to a higher-definition port of Half-Life to the Dreamcast console by Captivation Digital Laboratories that was cancelled by Half-Life's then-distributor, Sierra Entertainment, after Sega discontinued the Dreamcast due to severe financial difficulties. Not wanting to waste the higher-quality models (which, incidentally, had double the poly count of the original models) devised for the port, they were reused initially as a High Definition pack, and then for Blue Shift and Decay.

But back to modding. As I said before, quite a few people took to Hammer Editor (originally a modified version of Quake's Worldcraft editor following the hiring of Wolrdcraft creator Ben Morris, but of course GoldSrc is just a modified version of the Quake engine, which is itself an offshoot of id Tech's id engine) and started designing their own levels, compiling their own VPKs, recording their own dialogue (well, some of them anyway), and all the rest. (Incidentally, according to the Half-Life Wiki, "Hammer's first name was "The Forge", but it was changed because the level editor for the Marathon game series is named "Forge".")

Many of these mods have become legendary in the community and beyond (and some, such as Counter-Strike and Quake import gamemode Team Fortress became standalone game series of their own right). These include Day of Defeat, Cry of Fear, Afraid of Monsters, Deathmatch, Richochet, Point of View, Sven Co-op, Azure Sheep, Absolute Redemption, USS Darkstar and They Hunger. The latter two were developed by Black Widow games, a third-party contract developer active between 1997 and 2006 specializing in contracted mods for promotional purposes. Headed by Canadian game designer Neil Manke and Brazilian programmer and project manager Einar Saukas and backed by a team of more than 20 altogether (whether they were all together at one point is not something I know), Black Widow became renowned for its unique style of mod creation that distinguished it from other companies of its time.

Black Widow's best-known work, the They Hunger trilogy, is a three-part series about a writer involved in a car crash who fights his way through reanimated undead hordes with his trusty umbrella to take on the madmen behind the plot, the insane Dr. Franklin and his undead lackey Sheriff Chester Rockwood of the Rockwell Valley PD. The series was released in 3 parts between 2001 and 2003 to critical acclaim, with IGN and PC Gamer writing rave reviews for it (ah, the days when mods were reviewed by magazines).

In 2004, Valve released a sequel to their original game a year later than promised and gave birth to the legend of "ValveTime" with what is often hailed as the greatest FPS game ever made, Half-Life 2. For this game Valve had overhauled the existing GoldSrc engine to include higher-quality maps and models, lip-synching and facial expressions, superior lighting effects and a Havok-based physics engine, and called it the Source engine. As with before, modders jumped on board the SDK and went wild with it. In 2005 Black Widow Games announced they would be making a new, standalone game in the They Hunger series, titled They Hunger: Lost Souls. The story was to have taken place in 1960's Europe and, from the description, seems to be a rehash of the original story in a new location. Interestingly, this time round the team chose to eschew the convention of having an HUD in favour of glancing at your watch. The official teaser reads thusly:

In North-Eastern Europe during the early 1960's, strange anomalies culminate with dead corpses rising from their graves. As a tourist recovering from a tragic accident, you seek shelter in an ancient monastery overrun by bloodthirsty zombies, and become involved in an escalading cascade of calamities.

As of IGN's initial report on it (http://uk.ign.com/articles/2005/10/19/they-hunger-goes-source), the game was 75% complete as of October 19th 2005, and that it was going to be a commercial game rather than a free mod due to the more demanding rigours of developing in a more advanced engine such as Source (ironic in hindsight, but don't judge them too harshly). On April 6th 2006, They Hunger: Lost Souls was announced on its IndieDB page (http://www.indiedb.com/games/they-hunger-lost-souls) as having entered Alpha stage, with a prequel in production called Episode 0.

And after that, nothing more was heard.

So what happened? Many reported that Neil Manke was ill and at one point it was reported from Einar Saukas that Neil's condition was critical and it was not known whether he would survive. This is undoubtedly the source (no pun intended) of the oft-made claim that Manke is deceased; whilst there is solid grounds for believing this, quite a few people have made claim that Manke is in fact alive, with one reporting that Saukas has been trying to contact him without success, and another that he did reply to messages but did not want to talk about Lost Souls. I cannot comment on whether or not any of this is true without further information. In any case, Lost Souls went down with Half-Life 3 and Hazard Team as yet another much-hyped game that would never see the light of day. To date there is only a handful of screenshots available of what the game might have looked like, and to Black Widow's credit the screenshots indicate that the game would have been a very good-quality game and a worthy continuation of the They Hunger series.

So what have we lost with Lost Souls? In terms of plot, I doubt we have lost much unless they were to make a really major addition to the They Hunger lore. The actual gameplay, however, if the screenshots are any indication would have been phenomenal. To date the only Source zombie games that come close to its level of quality are Underhell, Nightmare House 2, No More Roon In Hell and Valve's own Left 4 Dead series. And possibly a few gmod addons I can think of, but they're not all that good and it’s obviously not the same. Even the eventual Source remake of They Hunger, Roman Lenko's They Hunger Again, was heavily critisized for being rushed and unpolished, suffering from shortened maps and numerous bugs and glitches, and - worst of all - a complete lack of umbrellas. Curiously, Lenko has also been absent following a failed attempt to secure fundraising for a fresh attempt to remake the game in the Unreal Engine, again as a commercial standalone.

With it being over 10 years since the last official installment on the They Hunger series, where does it stand today? As far as I am aware, people are still playing it, watching it, talking about it. If it is true that Neil Manke is still alive, then all it would take to get the game back on track would be for him and Einar to get back in touch. But I doubt that will happen any time soon, and even if it did the chances of the game being released to the public after all this time are much slimmer than that of HL3. Though Valve is mostly content these days to rely on Steam for its revenue and doesn’t really do much in-house games development anymore (with the possible exception of L4D3, which to my knowledge hasn’t been announced but there has been indication that it is being worked on), along with Gabe Newell’s statement that they are more interested in multiplayer games nowadays, there is nothing stopping them from going back and revisiting the series and fans still cling to the faint hope that they will one day release the game.

Lost Souls, however, does not have this faint hope as the company is not known to be active; there has been little word on the status of the company for almost as long as there has been no word on the game they were producing, and what little word there has been largely suggests that the company is all but completely disbanded. Valve, on the other hand, makes several billions from Steam sales and is in no danger of disappearing any time soon. Personally I hope that the upcoming 20th Anniversary of the Half-Life series in 2018 will offer at least some word on it. Of course knowing Valve it would probably come out in 2019 or even 2020. But that’s all speculation.

I suppose we may never know what we have lost with They Hunger: Lost Souls, and it will probably go down in history as one of the greatest unanswered questions in gaming history.
Well, thank you those of you that didn’t tl;dr that entire post (a small amount I know), you clearly have formidable stamina. Chickensh*t b*st**d signing off.

[Generation X SMURF]

I remember this mod

[Mulder]

75% finished? Such a shame, playing through the OG they hunger for the first time in literally a decade now a days, used to scare the crap out of me and it still does to some extent, I hope Mankes alive and well

[pop rock ungulator]

I really wonder where everyone from Black Widow Games is these days...

[Junkman Cicero]

Well, Saukas I believe is still living in Brazil and is still very much active, and Manke is believed by some to be living somewhere in Canada, away from the spotlight of video game industry. I don't know about any of the others, but I'm sure a quick internet search of their names might come up with something.

[pop rock ungulator]

Originally posted by WhenWorldsCollide2:

Well, Saukas I believe is still living in Brazil and is still very much active, and Manke is believed by some to be living somewhere in Canada, away from the spotlight of video game industry. I don't know about any of the others, but I'm sure a quick internet search of their names might come up with something.

Tried finding them on Twitter... Aparently someone by the same name as one of the devs made a ZX Spectrum game in 2016, but I couldn't find any contact info.

[Junkman Cicero]

Same guy according to MobyGames.

[pop rock ungulator]

Originally posted by WhenWorldsCollide2:

Same guy according to MobyGames.

hmmm...

[carl]

I still remember there was a leaked version of the game, It never loaded for me

[SMIFFY]

This thread is also undead it seems.

They Hunger was overrated, I preferred the Resistance trilogy and USS Darkstar.

[Junkman Cicero]

USS Darkstar?

Originally posted by tAk.-:

I still remember there was a leaked version of the game, It never loaded for me

Huh, really? I wonder if it's still available, maybe somebody would be able to get it into a playable state, like those Russian modders that fixed the WC Mappack.

[ARGH!!]

It's strange how the hl sdk has the source code sections and some other parts missing.

The Hunger mod was in PC gaming magazines sometimes.

[pop rock ungulator]

Originally posted by ARGH!!:

It's strange how the hl sdk has the source code sections and some other parts missing.

The Hunger mod was in PC gaming magazines sometimes.

I think the SDK will be on an older version of gldsrc, Valve removed alot of things from the Steam release in patches, Direct3D support being one of them

[BojeSieMullermilchow]

Back in 2014 I've contacted Tad Goddard (his email was available on the BWG website) about Neil, he replied that Neil is OK. Wish I had proof (the picture i posted on mapcore is down), but i had my old emails stolen while the 2015 Nexus Leak was going on. After some time, we managed to get one of the former developers to reply to that thread. There really exists the "60% done" version of the game of the 2008 era, (he stated, he has it on an old computer somewhere). He contacted Einar Saukas, and informed us, that Einar had tried contacting Neil, but he failed.
https://www.mapcore.org/topic/12819-wheres-they-hunger-lost-souls-gone/?page=5

[Knee]

Originally posted by SSJ2 Gohan:

Back in 2014 I've contacted Tad Goddard (his email was available on the BWG website) about Neil, he replied that Neil is OK. Wish I had proof (the picture i posted on mapcore is down), but i had my old emails stolen while the 2015 Nexus Leak was going on. After some time, we managed to get one of the former developers to reply to that thread. There really exists the "60% done" version of the game of the 2008 era, (he stated, he has it on an old computer somewhere). He contacted Einar Saukas, and informed us, that Einar had tried contacting Neil, but he failed.
https://www.mapcore.org/topic/12819-wheres-they-hunger-lost-souls-gone/?page=5

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UTIE2N9NGAU

[Junkman Cicero]

Originally posted by SSJ2 Gohan:

Back in 2014 I've contacted Tad Goddard (his email was available on the BWG website) about Neil, he replied that Neil is OK. Wish I had proof (the picture i posted on mapcore is down), but i had my old emails stolen while the 2015 Nexus Leak was going on. After some time, we managed to get one of the former developers to reply to that thread. There really exists the "60% done" version of the game of the 2008 era, (he stated, he has it on an old computer somewhere). He contacted Einar Saukas, and informed us, that Einar had tried contacting Neil, but he failed.
https://www.mapcore.org/topic/12819-wheres-they-hunger-lost-souls-gone/?page=5

I don't get it. It's been ten years. He knows people are interested in it. Why doesn't he just release what he's got somewhere and let the community do the rest?