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Garry's Mod (or GMod) is a sandbox physics game developed by Facepunch Studios and published by Valve Corporation, originally a mod created by Garry Newman of Valve's own Half-Life 2. Initially just the latter game with the rope, manhack and rollermine guns being the only additions, it has evolved considerably since then to the point of becoming its own standalone game.

As a sandbox with no set objectives, the game gives you the tools to take full advantage of Half-Life 2's physics engine and assets, as well as those of various Source engine games like Counter-Strike, Team Fortress 2, and Left 4 Dead, etc. You can spawn and bind together props to build all sorts of structures and machinations such as buildings, Humongous Mecha, cannons, catapults, etc. You can set armies of NPCs against each other. And with a library of ragdolls at your disposal, you can even freely manipulate and pose them them to create whatever demented setpiece or puppet show you want.

All of this makes Garry's Mod one of the most popular mediums for creating Machinima, and because the ability to play around with ragdolls lends itself perfectly to all kinds of zany slapstick, it is also widely considered the Denser and Wackier counterpart to Source Filmmaker.

The game uses the Lua scripting language for its weapons and events, meaning it's possible to code your own weapons into the game and publish them to the Steam Workshop, along with user-created maps, props, vehicles, entities, NPCs, effects, and models, resulting in a highly customizable game. Currently, it's available on Valve's Steam client for download.

A "sequel" called s&box is currently in development. According to Facepunch, s&Box is meant to go above and beyond what Garry's Mod was ever capable of, becoming a full game development suite where users can create virtually anything using the entire suite of Source 2 tools as well as the game's own toolset. The game is currently in a "closed early beta" state with only a select few number of people having access.


Games with their own pages:


This sandbox game provides examples of:

  • Abnormal Ammo: Very frequent. One of the sample scripted weapons (or SWEPs in community jargon) included with the game, the Flechette Gun, is exactly like the SMG from Half-Life 2 only it shoots an endless stream of the exploding rounds fired by the Hunter enemy from Half-Life 2: Episode 2, as well as the Manhack Gun, which is a modified USP which fires manhacks and rollermines welded to what you're looking at. You can build prop cannons that can shoot everything from sawblades to watermelons. And let's not get started on the various SWEPs devised by the community...
    • The eponymous creator of the game, once scripted an AK-47 SWEP that shot babies as ammunition. In response, someone created a Baby SWEP that fired AK-47s, and another person made another AK-47 SWEP that could shoot either babies or sawblades.
    • A mod of the already awesome molten rebar crossbow made it shoot sawblades.
    • One SWEP, named the "Scavenger Cannon", is, essentially, the Rock-It Launcher - suck up any prop you want with it and then launch it, sort of like a rapid-fire gravity gun. The newest incarnation of the weapon has access to different modes of fire that are unlocked depending on what prop it absorbs. For example, a car battery will allow it to fire plasma rounds, a propane tank turns the weapon into a flamethrower, and it can even mimic specific weapons to a limited extent, such as the aforementioned gravity gun.
    • The "Shrekzooka," which fires out flying Shreks. That explode. And shout "WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN MY SWAMP?"
  • Anti-Frustration Features: This mod adds a battery meter to the HUD, so that laptop users know when to charge their laptops.
  • Artifact Title: Garry's Mod is not actually a mod anymore, it's a standalone game that can be run without Half-Life 2 or any other Source-powered game installed. Assets from other games can still be imported though, and Counter-Strike: Source is still a requirement for most addons unless you don't mind missing textures and models everywhere.
  • Artificial Stupidity: Most spawned NPCs will stand ramrod still, firing wildly at anything that comes nearby, unless the map they are spawned on is "noded" properly to allow for complex AI.
    • Or if the user downloads one of the several mods that allow manipulation of NPC behavior. Can be useful for Machinima.
    • One exception is the Retraux mod GmDoom, since it relies on the player providing a copy of the IWAD for Doom or Doom 2 to extract monsters and weapons from. By using the old game's AI as well, they end up blundering their way after the player even on maps that lacked noding.
    • NPCs that run on the Nextbot system tend to be quite smarter due to using navigation meshes (which are significantly easier to produce than a nodegraph). However, Nextbots are completely unable to jump by default, which often leaves them embarrassingly stuck on obstacles they could easily move around.
    • S.A.P. Bots are bots that can talk via text-to-speech. This can often lead to them saying some extremely bizarre things.
  • Balloonacy: The game defaults to a optimistic amount of lift from a balloon, but allows players to adjust the lifting power. It's possible to get a 50 ton cargo container to go soaring into the sky with a single balloon. The lift slider can be set to negatives, resulting in balloons with the density of plutonium or neutronium.
  • Beam Spam: The GCombat and Spacebuild Enhancement Project addons present many different ways to do this.
    • The Multi Physgun allows you to customize how many beams it has.
  • The Big Rotten Apple: Steam user Fishke's maps, such as RP_NYCity and RP_Southside, are set in New York City. They are often grimy and dirty, with the descriptions referring to the setting as gritty and crime-ridden.
  • Blending-In Stealth Gameplay: Guess Who and, to a lesser extent, Prop Hunt.
  • Boring, but Practical: The various M9K Weapons may not be that flashy when compared to other similar weapon add-ons, but they still do a lot of damage and can kill most hostile SNPCS in a number of seconds.
  • By the Lights of Their Eyes: The S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Mutants NPC, Left 4 Dead Common Infected NPC and Cartoon Cat NPC do this.
  • BFG: The original has been made into a scripted weapon, complete with the original sprite as the viewmodel. And that's before we go into many of the community made sweps such as the Davy Crocket.
  • Blackout Basement: The default map gm_construct has an underground dark room accessible via either a brick warehouse building, or a staircase embedded into one of the map's walls. It's meant for testing out lights, meaning that it has absolutely none already inside, requiring the player to either use their flashlight or place down lights/lamps via the Tool Gun.
  • Bragging Rights Reward: One so blatant it just has to be a deliberate parody. You get an achievement each for starting the single-player and multiplayer modes.
  • Brown Note: Somebody programmed a vuvuzela in. It kills most enemies that it's used against instantly.
  • Camera Abuse: The Camera tool is very easy to knock out of place if it's not welded to something.
    • Getting slapped by NPCs or falling objects while wielding the Camera SWEP also counts.
  • Character Customization: Some addons allow you to modify the stats of entities, be it characters, vehicles, weapons, etc.
    • Sakarias88's SCars (scripted cars), allows you to edit the aspects of it. Ranging from practical such as its handling, suspension, fuel or health to the more cosmetic aspects such as paint jobs, wheels, neon lights or the sounds it' engine and horn makes.
  • Cool Car:
    • Either built by yourself or spawned via add-ons. Particularly noteworthy is cars made by TDM, SGM and LoneWaffle who recreate various real cars, especially super cars.
    • As mentioned above, Sakarias88's SCars gives a different system compared to Source's vehicles and allows you to create your own, be it modifying an existing one or starting from scratch using the editor.
  • Cool vs. Awesome: the sheer number of Non Player Characters available in addons, especially through VJ Base, can allow for some pretty epic showdowns, such as:
  • Copy Protection: If the game detects it's pirated, it will pretend to crash and display the nonexistent error "Unable to shade polygon normals" with an "error code" that is actually the user's Steam ID, in order to trick pirates into posting about it on the forums and getting themselves banned.
  • Day of the Jackboot: gm_combinestruct, a variant of gm_construct that has been ostensibly taken over by the Combine from Half-Life 2 and made to resemble most Combine-built structures. Scattered across the map are thumpers, headcrab canisters, propaganda posters, Combine health/recharging stations and forcefields. The rotting body of a dead rebel can also found in the secret room.
  • Dem Bones: One of the stock playermodels included is the skeleton model from Half-Life 2: Episode Two. They play a large role in the Fat Kid gamemode.
  • Design-It-Yourself Equipment: Sandbox, ACF2, Spacebuild, and a variety of other mods have players building vehicles and other contraptions either for fun or for objectives, such as fighting in ACF2
    • Spy's Customizable Weaponry (especially 2.0) allows you to customize weapons to a varying amount, most notably the AR-15 that allows you to change sights, barrel types, the Hollywood Silencer attached to said barrel, underbarrel options, stocks, ammunition types and magazines. Though an important aspect is handling, attaching items can reduce handling (which means your mouse sensitivity with the weapon) to simulate a big, unwieldy weapon.
    • The Forgotten Architect's TFA base provides just as much customization of your guns without the hassle of actual custom ammo types: Most TFA weapons run off Half Life 2's ammunition. Given the hard cap on custom entities, this is a good thing.
    • There's also Arctic's Arctic Customizable Thirdperson 3, which provides weapons that use a custom camera. It's not limited to third-person, but it does grant a substantial immersion factor by placing cameras on the head in that mode. It does, however, have a metric truckload of ammo types, and they're all individually tracked, unlike even CW.
  • Determinator: "Nextbots", simple bots usually made of 2D images (frequently copied from Creepypasta) who possess a single-minded goal - find any living NPC or player around it and deliver a one-hit kill, with the uncanny ability to locate even the most well-hidden player, as well as breaking through welded/frozen items to get to them. Possibly the most famous is "Obunga", but numerous exist.
  • Dual Wielding:
    • A lot of SWEPs consist of the player holding items in two different hands, such as pistols.
    • In the Lightsaber Combat System, the Butterfly stance allows the player to dual-wield sabers.
  • Easter Eggs: In addition to those found in custom maps, both default maps have these.
    • gm_construct has a room accessible via a small hole in the wall under a platform next to a spray-painted lambda symbol. The room features various furniture, posters on the walls, a small doll, and a plaque crediting those who helped make the current version of the map, including Garry himself.
    • gm_flatgrass features a similar room inside of the main platform with another doll on the floor. Notably, this room is entirely inaccessible without noclipping.
    • The older version of gm_construct included a similarly inaccessible room in the spawn building. You'd be greeted with stretched textures and a heart-shaped texture at either end of the room, crediting GMod's contributors.
  • Exploding Barrels: Just like in the original game, there are plenty abound. Many prop packs include their own variations.
  • First-Person Ghost: Played Straight normally, some addons like this one allows you to see your own legs looking down. this addon in particular allows you to see the entirety of your model as it appears to other players but like in Team Fortress 2, certain situations cause artifacts or clipping to occur.
  • First-Person Snapshooter: The Camera allows you to take pictures from in-game and have them saved to file (and Steam screenshots as if you pressed F12). Hence, there have been many Web Comics created via Garry's Mod.
  • Game-Breaking Bug: Given that this is a game mod with hundreds of player made addons, you will crash the game at some point, no matter how mundane the cause was.
    • It doesn't matter how well an addon was coded, some update to Garry's Mod or the Source Engine in general will break them at one point or another.
  • Game Mod: Not only is the game itself this, but it has another built in one where you race watermelons.
  • Griefer: So very much. Much like the "Noob" example below, they are called Mingebags. Examples include:
    • Killing while building.
      • Killing with build objects.
      • Killing with coded objects.
      • Killing... Well, there are many ways.
    • Pushing people into inconvenient places with props.
    • Flinging props at people, which may or may not kill them.
    • Crashing the server by Wreaking Havok a little too much.
    • Playing sound files — especially low quality ones — without anyone's consent (or approval).
    • Blocking off the spawn so that no one can get out.
    • Intentionally Fail-RPingnote  on applicable servers.
    • RDM'ing note .
  • The Ground Is Lava: gm_combinestruct allows the player to enable the appearance of Antilons whenever the sand is stepped on ala the "Sandtraps" chapter from Half-Life 2.
  • Gun Accessories:
    • Spy's Customizable Weaponry mod which allows the customization of various weapons from sights, silencers, magazines, ammo types, etcera, and allows you to suit a weapon to your liking, as does The Forgotten Architect's TFA base.
  • Harmless Villain: Aside from giving a good Jump Scare now and then, "Semper" (Gordon Freeman's unfinished-looking playermodel from Half-Life 2) from gm_construct_13_beta does absolutely no harm to the player and will automatically disappear after a few seconds.
  • Hit Points: 100 of them, and you can eat some bouncy balls to go over the limit. You can also have an armor meter, as if you were wearing an HEV suit.
    • If you downloaded GmDoom and mounted the correct .wad file then you can have 200 of either of them, depending if you picked up a soulsphere, mega armor or a megasphere. Due to Source's method of handling armor points, you don't get the 50% damage reduction like actual Doom.
      • If you download "TF2 Unlockable Weapons" and eat the Sandvich, you will be given 300 health points.
  • Hover Board: The Hoverboards mod adds these. They allow the player to float above the ground and move very fast. The player can also turn it off midair and do flips. You can customize how they look and handle, with many models being included.
  • Humanoid Abomination: A lot of them. Special mention goes to the TF2 Freaks, such as Vagineer, the Engina, Dic Soupcan, and many more.
    • This concept Veilwatcher. It was made with this trope in mind.
  • Humongous Mecha: Effectively impossible to build (and remain upright) in the vanilla game, but various Expression 2 chips allow players to animate their mechs. Mechs from BattleTech / MechWarrior and Armored Core are popular, but one-to-one scaling typically presents a very large problem - mechs will often either be lighter than styrofoam or denser than depleted uranium, in order to prevent them from spazzing.
    • The DakTek Combat System works in tandem with Wiremod to simulate 'Mechs out of BattleTech/MechWarrior along with the usage of Expression 2 chips and, like the games this mod is themed off of, gives you a wide, wide selection of 'Mech parts ranging from weapons, gyros, engines and other equipment like a Guardian ECM Suite to mount in your 'Mech for complete Ace Custom builds. In-fact, you can build non-'Mech assets as well such as tanks, AeroTech fighters and VTOLs with this system.
  • Hyperspace Arsenal: You can keep all of the weapons in the "weapons" section of the spawn menu on your person, which can lead to a Rummage Fail. Better yet, you can't drop weapons unless you have mods for it.
  • Improbable Weapon User: You can kill people not only with guns, but also with their ammo pickups. And also by flinging props. Heck, if a particular prop is heavy enough, you can convert the Physics Gun into a makeshift Meteor Hammer!
  • Incurable Cough of Death: Getting infected in the Bio-Annihilation II add-on, whether from a zombie bite or inhaling the "contaminated air" will result in the player coughing uncontrollably while their HP slowly goes down. The coughing will only stop when the player dies or is sufficiently healed and averts getting infected.
  • Infinite Flashlight: Compared to the Ten-Second Flashlight of the Half Life series, GMod's flashlight will stay on infinitely. This is rather useful when it comes to navigating maps ostensibly set at night or horror maps.
  • Intercontinuity Crossover: Various mods allow players to import characters from other non-Valve franchises, from... well, everything.
  • In-Universe Game Clock: The addon StormFox, as well as its sequel feature this, in addition to weather effects. The player can set whether the cycle is synced to the computer's clock or is on its own cycle, complete with presets based on the cycles of various other games.
  • In-Vehicle Invulnerability: Players can still be hurt when driving the jeep or airboat but they're completely invulnerable when sitting in the various seats or prisoner pod. The only way they can be hurt is if something is on fire next to it or the seat itself is on fire.
  • Invincibility Power-Up: The Power Melon is a direct parody of the Starman from Super Mario Bros.. It works exactly the same, plays the same music, and even makes your Physics Gun glow rainbow.
  • Joke Character:
    • The Hobo from DarkRP. No salary, looks like a corpse, only has the ability to throw crap at people (literally), and often the acceptable targets for purging by particularly sadistic mayors.invoked
    • Class-D from Breach. While every other kind of player has some form of equipment (or powerful abilities, in the case of playable SCP objects), Class-D players start off with nothing due to their lowly status in the Foundation, and are treated as either neutral or kill-on-sight by everyone except Chaos Insurgency players. As a result, escaping the map alive as a Class-D is by far the most difficult task to achieve in the mode.
  • Jump Scare: It's not uncommon for a Nextbot NPC to do this when killing a player. Perhaps the best known case of this are the Five Nights at Freddy's nextbots.
  • Laser Blade:
    • The Star Wars Lightsabers mod brings the originals into the game. It is extremely customizable, and unlike most melee weapons, can kill without the need to swing (simply touching the blade is usually fatal), just like in the films.
    • A similar mod is the Lightsaber Combat System. It's also customizable, but allows for much more complex movement, blocking, and lightsaber duels.
  • Lethal Joke Character:
    • While the Hobo King from DarkRP usually has the same traits as the Hobo, the Hobo King may spawn with a One-Hit Kill gun.
    • The Lab Gamer pill from Parakeet's Pill Pack. He's a hostage from Counter-Strike armed with a rifle that can one-shot anyone. However, he has a health of 1, cannot sprint, and plays MLG noises when shooting, regardless of if he hit anyone.
  • Lightning Gun: There is one included with the above mentioned StormFox 2. It is different from the standard lighting gun in that when fired, the lightning strikes down from the sky where the player's cursor is, rather than coming directly out of the barrel.
  • Loads and Loads of Loading: Downloading excessive numbers of add-ons can result in very long load times. Garry did an automatic survey of GMod users, and there was one person who had an average loading time of over 25 minutes. There was a short time that the game had a strange error which multiplied load times by a factor of about five. Fifteen minutes just to get on to a regular server. If you got kicked, it might as well have been a fifteen-minute ban from every server in the game.
  • Ludicrous Gibs: Generally averted in the main game; when killed, the player's corpse flops onto the ground (or disintergates when hit with an Energy Ball). There are a lot of mods that can make players explode into a mess of blood and gore, though.
  • Magnet Hands: It doesn't matter if you're underwater, in outer space, on fire, flying at 200/kph, you'll be holding your current weapon in an indestructible death grip.
  • The Many Deaths of You: Due to the virtually infinite amount of gamemodes and addons, it's pretty much impossible to experience every single kind of death the game can throw at you.
  • Massive Multiplayer Crossover: There are a lot of models available for this game. Many of them are ragdolls of characters from other games, which can be used to create some rather interesting scenes if you're good at posing. Most models need only be hexed and then imported.
  • May the Farce Be with You: There are plenty of Star Wars-themed mods on the Workshop. There is also Star WarsRP, which takes place in the military of either the Republic or the Empire.
  • Mock Hollywood Sign: The default map GM_Flatgrass has a Hollywood sign in the distance that reads "FLATTYWOOD".
  • More Dakka: The Turret tool, among other things.
  • Muzzle Flashlight: You can do this, particularly with more flashy guns, but your flashlight is infinite anyway.
  • Names to Run Away from Really Fast: What does the M9K in M9K Weapons stand for? Why, Murderthon 9000, of course!
  • Nintendo Hard: Posing is rather tricky, even if you know what you're doing.
    • Large, gangly ragdolls can be a nightmare, and can potentially kill you if you're too close while the physics causes them to flail about because you moved their arm a pixel in the wrong direction. The author of Concerned once got killed while posing a Strider, as the Physics Gun jerked the Strider's leg too fast at him. Can be offset by placing heavy objects near them, to help control their jerkiness. Possibly relatedly, he only had a posed Strider show up in one other comic, nearly two years later.
    • Finger slipped from E to R when pointing at the ground with the Physics Gun out? Say bye to your contraptions!
    • There is a way to make posing a bit easier by typing sv_gravity 100 (600 is the default) on the console command. Due to the realistic nature of the physics system, ragdolls (especially the bigger ones) can be quite difficult to manage due to their “weight”. A decreased gravity can alleviate such weight. It’s also important to use the “No Collide” tool as it will prevent you from bumping, and even dying from your own ragdolls.
  • Non-Indicative Name: As mentioned above, Garry's Mod is not actually a mod (well, recent versions aren't at any rate).
  • Noobs: Called "Mingebags" by the community, after the default player name before the game was updated to use your Steam screen name as your player name.
  • No Plot? No Problem!: You could probably create your own narrative if you really wanted to, but by default, it's just a big empty playground to mess around in for no reason in particular.
  • Nothing Is Scarier:
    • As you'll often be The Aloner (unless you're in Multiplayer, of course), this can kick in on night-time maps, or just in general. Also how most horror maps do their business, since the closest thing to getting scary with Mooks are the regular Headcrab Zombies (packaged with GMod), and those often get boring fast. Combined with Hell Is That Noise, maps like Gm_Ghosthunt and Gm_Scream have terrified audiences without even showing an enemy.
    • There exist maps that are "void" edits of other maps (for example, gm_construct and gm_construct_void). These are impossible to navigate through without a flashlight. The description for Gm_Bigcity_Void is pretty simple: "The city was shrouded in void, no people, no sounds, nothing that could tell what had happened here".
  • Not Quite Flight: Balloons+thrusters, typically combined with the airboat. It is possible to ride sufficiently large props via phys gun or thruster use, but good luck getting down (alive anyways).
  • Nuke 'em: Garry's Bombs, and Teta_Bonita's nuke addon (which allows you to choose your preferred method of detonation).
  • Offscreen Teleportation: The Harmless Companion Cube addon. Just don't forget to delete it before you turn away from it. Whatever you do... Don't freeze it. That just makes it stronger...
  • Old Save Bonus: If you have other Valve games installed on your system such as Team Fortress 2 or Left 4 Dead, models from those games can be used in Garry's Mod.
  • Ominous Fog: gm_bigcity_sh is essentially the normal gm_bigcity but covered in a massive fog that obscures most of the map, giving it a more eerie vibe as a result.
  • One-Hit Kill: With the right combination of weapon and target, plenty of these can be pulled off. An obvious example is that quite a few "basic" weapons can one-shot a citizen, while some Workshop weapons are powerful enough to take out characters like Alyx or the G-Man, who are nigh-invulnerable bullet-sponges to weaker weapons. Taken to the logical conclusion with the Tool Gun's "Remover" function, which literally deletes anything you shoot it at, so long as that something can be manipulated to begin with.note 
  • Our Zombies Are Different: In the base game, there are only Headcrab zombies, but you can install mods that add anything from the Minecraft zombies to SCP-008 carriers. There's even an entire game mode dedicated to them.
  • Le Parkour: Possible using parkour add-ons (SaVav Parkour Mod, Wheatley's Parkour, the Parkour Swepnote , Perfected Climb Swepnote , Smod Legnote , Gordon's Fists, or Beatrunnote ) and a big, urban-themed map (such as gm_bigcity or gm_goldencity).
  • Percussive Maintenance: The easiest way to fix a spazzing contraption (when the physics engine breaks and sends everything spinning around wildly out of control) is to pull out the Physgun, grab the contraption, and repeatedly smash it against the nearest wall until it stops spazzing. Unfortunately, delicate player-made mechanical objects (such as guns and engines) require much more finesse to fix - performing Percussive Maintenance on these will usually make the problem worse.
  • Player Creation Sharing: GMod 12 had the Toybox, which allowed the player to install mods and load them in-game. In GMod 13, this was replaced by Steam Workshop support, though you can install dupes and saves in-game.
  • Player Versus Player: Straight Deathmatch servers exist, however, there are many "build to fight" servers, where players build contraptions to fight each other with. Like weaponized windmills.
  • Portal Network: Players can build these using the Stargate add-on that has a selection of gates and their DHD's and yes, you can waste time Engaging Chevrons.invoked
  • Ragdoll Physics: Most Garry's Mod Machinima depends on it; There are maps and gamemodes dedicated to slaughtering ragdolls in the most gruesome ways imaginable.
  • Reality-Breaking Paradox: The game does not like it when the Havok physics engine says an object should have an orientation of infinite angles, and will instantly crash.
  • Reality-Changing Miniature: "Literally, the world" is a mod that allows you to spawn in a mini replica of the map. You can spawn objects and NPCs in any area of the map from it.
  • Retraux:
    • Quite a few addons involve recreating weapons, maps, or NPCs from older games, in full pixelated or polygonal glory. There's even a mod that takes the appropriate Doom IWAD, provided by the player, recreating the weapons and monsters faithfully by using the original's Game Engine.
    • Similar to gmDoom mentioned above, there is also G64, which uses a ROM from Super Mario 64 to recreate how Mario plays in the game, and GMBlox, which attempts to recreate how Roblox played during the late 2000s.
  • Rule of Fun: Oh so much. Highlights include building random things out of props, destroying them, making NPCs fight each other, destroying them, blowing up stuff with nukes, downloading add-ons, destroying them, etc.
  • Rummage Fail: As mentioned above, you may find yourself doing this after an extended session of messing around with SWEPs. It doesn't help that only a few user-created ones can be dropped and the only way to reset your arsenal without losing your Half-Life 2 weapons, physgun, and toolgun is dying, leading to a rather odd example of Death by Materialism.
  • Run, Don't Walk: In the default controls, the Walk function isn't even macroed to a key (back when it was, the corresponding function didn't even exist). Although, running is faster.
  • Science Fiction: The Spacebuild game mode, usually used in combination with the futuristic props of the Spacebuild Enhancement Project. Not that's there anything stopping you from just sticking an oxygen tank on a World War II fighter and flying off to Neptune, though.
  • Self-Deprecation: The Steam Trading Card pack for GMod has the "Missing Texture" card, showing the infamous purple-and-black checkerboard that plagues so many custom maps and models. "Invasion" shows the Mingebag - the unanimated default model from GMod 7 and prior versions; Kleiner with his arms sticking straight out, a physgun in his crotch and his legs ramrod straight.
  • Shout-Out:
    • In the Context Menu, there is an option called Minecraftify. It pixelates all of the textures, just as the name would lead you to think.
    • Taking a close look at the Tool Gun reveals that it has a flux capacitor on it.
    • The default gamemode icon is a blue LEGO brick.
    • According to an interview with Garry, the name and original design of gm_construct is a reference to the Construct from The Matrix.
  • Silliness Switch: The "Pirate" language from GMod 13.
    • There is also the Breathing Mod 9000, which allows you to equip lungs and have to manually breath to stay alive.
    • You can also melonize yourself, and turn into a melon that rolls around the map.
  • Sistine Steal: One of the few original models is gm_painting, which is Creation Of Adam with Garry edited in.
  • Skybox: Most decent maps will have one of these. The really good maps will have a detailed, 3D skybox. You can even put props and ragdolls inside them to make them appear massive. The only drawback is that they do get confusing on maps like the new flatgrass, nothing is more startling then crashing into the Invisible Wall in your helicopter, plane, car or whatever vehicle you built.
  • Streaming Stars: In the various Star Wars themed maps, this comes into effect when entering and exiting hyperspace.
  • Stylistic Suck: This playermodel of a pig from Minecraft. It's shorter than most playermodels and has custom animations, making it extremely accurate to the game.
  • Super Not-Drowning Skills: By default, players can stay underwater as long as they like with no ill effects, due to GMod making your suit energy infinite. However, if you enable HEV suit functionality, you will drown just like in Half-Life 2.
  • Surreal Horror: The most popular use for Nextbot NPCs is to make them chase the player, killing them when in range. You can be chased by anything from the Slender Fortress bosses to Freddy Fazbear.
  • Surreal Humor:
    • Garry's Mod is frequently used as a medium for this. Google "RubberFruit", for instance.
    • Elevator: Source derives half of its humor from the fact that you will more often than not find a beach and a detective's office within two floors of each other. Inside an apartment complex.
  • Talk Like a Pirate: Similar to Minecraft's example, Pirate speech can be turned on via the language options.
  • Taken for Granite: Some of the scripted weapon like Midas Cannon and Petrification Beam SWEP can turns NPC into, you guess it, inanimate object.
  • Tank Goodness: The premise of the ACF (Armored Combat Framework) addon. Players build tanks, add armor panels, stick in ammo caches, give them guns and then duke it out.
  • Unspecified Apocalypse:
    • Something is implied to have happened in the various "void" maps that caused said maps to be covered in darkness. The most we get is from "gm_construct_void", which implies that some unknown entity "sent it into the void" but that's about it.
    • Downplayed. A zombie apocalypse is said to have happened in "gm_shambles", resulting in the entire "Shambles way" town where the map is set in being deserted... and that's it. We never find out why the zombie apocalypse happened, how bad it is, why there are no zombies in the map itself and if those corpses in the sewers belong to the zombies.
  • Vehicular Combat: The Armored Combat Framework 2 mod allows players to design their own vehicles from scratch, then fight them against other players using realistic weapons which take into account ballistic trajectories, penetration power, and sympathetic ammunition explosions. The mod also offers a huge selection of engines, transmissions, and differentials to power vehicles with more realism than standard GMod thrusters.
  • Villainous Breakdown: The Terminus Nextbot has a feature where if you manage to escape it three times, it enters an "enraged mode" where it chases you at top speed, turning at corners sharper and accelerating faster as it screams and roars at you.
  • Virtual Paper Doll: You can choose the model others see you as, from Squidward to Jar Jar Binks. Most RP servers have this, in some form or another and to varied extents.
    • As of the Garry's Mod 13 update, the player can now modify the color of their playermodel and the glow of their physics gun.
    • PAC 3 allows even more in-depth customization of your character by attaching props, effects, particles, etc. to your character's model.
    • Another mention is the Custom Pony Player Models.
  • Voluntary Shapeshifting: Parakeet's Pill Pack allows the player to turn into a large variety of NPCs and other characters. Some NPC bases also allow the player to "possess" an NPC, allowing the player to play as them and use their unique abilites.
  • Wanted Meter: A few add-ons featuring naturally spawning NPCs around the map like the The Background NPCs addon have them. In particular, the Background NPCs wanted meter can be filled by killing citizens or police officers. One to two stars guarantees the presence of the Police (by default, represented by Civil Protection), Three stars has the Special Forces (by default, represented by Combine Overwatch) come after you, and at four stars Reinforced Special Forces (by default, represented by the Shotgun Soldiers) will also join the fray. Installing the SNPC Helicopter [Enemy & Friend] addon will also add assault helicopters to the mix.
  • Welcome to Hell: One of the buildings in gm_bigcity_sh has "WELCOME TO HELL" in blood scribbled near the front door.
  • Wide-Open Sandbox: You're not gonna run out of stuff to do.
  • Wimp Fight: The most effort ever put into fight scenes in comedies usually involve welding invisible thrusters to the characters' limbs and holding down the ignition button. Justified, as it's meant to be funny, not serious, and it is indeed funny.
    • One of the best examples is Das Bo Schitt's "Billy Mays Vs. Vince Offer". It's hilariously epic due to the incredibly over-the-top slap-fights and body slams.
  • Wreaking Havok: Find GCombat, or Garry's Bombs, or any addon involving large amounts of explosives, and go wild with them.
  • You Nuke 'Em: In various mods such as gBombs 5, the player can detonate various nukes. Their explosions often kill everyone on the server multiple times over, and can even crash the game. The Davy Crockett from the M9K weapons mod takes this to the next level as a rocket launcher that can shoot nukes.
  • Zombie Apocalypse:
    • There are a multitude of mods that simulate one, most notably Bio Annihilation II and PlayerModel Zombies. How strong or dangerous the zombies actually are varies by mod.
    • gm_shambles takes place during a particularly eerie one, with the map itself being an evacuated small English town that is devoid of any life (undead or otherwise). Unlike most maps involving zombie apocalypses however, there are very few signs of struggle or ruin that only serve to unnerve the player even more.

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Pizza Tower cast screaming

In this GMod animation made by YouTuber LYON SPD, the Pizza Tower cast screams for a while after seeing the word "Boo".

How well does it match the trope?

4.39 (23 votes)

Example of:

Main / OverlyLongGag

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