gm_construct From Garry’s Mod Is The Eeriest Map In Gaming, And For Good Reason

Selling over a whopping 20 million copies, Garry’s Mod has been one of the most influential and popular pieces of media to have ever been released. Going crazy while building intense constructs with friends, or just casually taking a break and exploring the plethora of Role-playing and multi-player servers for which the title is famous.

Valve has always pushed out titles that end up changing the entire gaming industry, and mostly it is for the better. Garry’s Mod is no exception to this concept as it ended up shaking up the entire industry right to its core. Safe to say Valve is pretty much the only Publisher to consistently accomplish this.

Although the game has no real objective, Garry’s Mod works on a sandbox system, where the only real thing you can do is manipulate the system and see how far you can push it. But with games this big, it is only natural that offputting theories and videos flood the market, and trends push other trends so far that it feels like a feature. In the case of Garry’s Mod, what ensued would be years of creepypasta and YouTubers flourishing this topic.

While some players may have logged into gm_construct only once or twice in their lives, some players most certainly spent hours making a different build, or just wanted to mess around. But being on a map this vast and this ‘flat’ starts to get on some people’s nerves.

The thing is, whenever you roam these ‘source maps,‘ there is always a feeling of dread. In a game where you can spawn literally anything you want in whatever way imaginable, having a map such as this was such an amazing design feature, that Valve most certainly got the intended effect it was hoping for.

When in Garry’s Mod, players tend to notice the eeriness in the air. This could be due to the ambiance that the sound design takes as noise is a very contributing factor to fear. Literally, every time I log in, I spawn NPCs so that I have some entity to accompany me in a world where nothing truly exists.

When you hop on gm_construct, you won’t feel the dread all of a sudden, rather new players would want to run around spawn a few zombies, and shoot the ever-living hell out of them. The moment you start exploring the assets and inspect the ever-static building on the map, that is when you start feeling like this place isn’t the best to stick around in.

The buildings in gm_construct are confusing, to say the least. Huge skyscrapers that seem like they could house a city are actually hollow inside. On first inspection, players may feel like this was to inspire the players to make something inside of these hollow spaces. But after seeing every building like this, it felt… different.

Let us take a look at another example of a game where the ambiance quite literally killed a few people, Lavender Town from Pokemon. Lavender Town was a level in an old Pokemon game, and it was a pretty normal level, but the music, the music was haunting. This is the effect of sound design in games, and how Garry’s Mod not incorporating any makes it all the more terrifying at times.

This is what gm_construct is today, a playground filled with imagination and a few creepy occurrences. But what were the originations of this awe-inspiring map? Well, gm_construct_3 is the oldest version available, and back then it was pretty normal. A plane surface with a few walls, and yea, that’s basically the gist of it.

After this gm_construct went through a huge plethora of versions and changes until it finally settles itself into what it is today, one amazing experience, granted you have the imagination and maybe a few good friends to mess around with.

After countless versions of the same game again and again, at one point there was a version that was proclaimed as the scariest by many players. The map titled gm_bigcity is a place of open buildings and dark easter eggs. Definitely, the place to take the family for a nice vacation.

All I am really talking about is the horror and creepiness that the maps were renowned for, but what about the actual reasons it was made for? the actual intended use for gm_construct? Well, a few users shared their remarks on what they did, and they are pretty imaginative and fun, to say the least.

A user while playing gm_bigcity stated,

“I spent about 150 hours on this map alone, and for the most part, I did have a lot of fun on it. I would, for the most part, make stories from the NPC battles, epic tales of people fighting these monolithic entities and them holding their own, and a lot of other stuff was just testing mods I download from the workshop. That’s what I did on the game for a good long while. Some of the NPC stories would get just insane.“

Many content creators and map makers knew the potential of a map such as these and decided to make new experiences centered around massive empty maps, only this time with a twist, a PNG image of an entity chasing you. The Nextbots era became huge and is yet to die down. These concepts kept evolving, and if any other thing resembles this concept, it is probably only the lucid backrooms.

From the long and resilient history that gm_construct went through, to the insane and intense levels of fan service that the map has acquired, it is safe to say that going forward, this concept will evolve to new heights, and the history and legend of these maps and Garry’s Mod, in general, will never be forgotten.