Ah... So that's why it's free.

They're working with the creator of one mod, there doesn't seem to be anything untowards here

Like they did with the last remaster.

Every recent remaster that saw passionate and committed modders called up and paid to canonise their contributions have been all the better for it. Aspyr releases come to mind.

It's also why we have portal... It was originally a mod of half life 2

Bethesda: Nice fixes! Now do it again for the nth re-release.

Thats funny... They have no idea they even exist. They cant see it over their moon-sized ego.

Team fortress 2 as well

Really? Didn't know that one...

No they know they exist. Remember when they started to charge for otherwise free mods?

One of the mods I used for this game was the auto loot one that grabs anything within a certain radius and type so you don’t steal from people who’ll get mad. It definitely showcases my hoarding problem in games

The original Team Fortress was a mod of HL1. TF2 was built on the Source engine directly by Valve, so it technically was never a mod, but it has its roots in the original mod.

No it wasn't. Narbacular Drop used the same level editor, but only certain level features work because the actual game is an entirely different custom engine. Tag, the game that Portal 2's gels come from, was also a custom engine.

Both games were senior projects at a game design school near Valve, which is how they found them.

Sort of. Team Fortress was a Quake mod. Valve hired the team to port it to Half Life.

One layer of more complex - the original Team Fortress was quake, but there was an intermediate version (team fortress classic) developed by Valve as a mod to Half Life - then there was TF1.5, which was a standalone repack of the HL mod, then came TF2 developed on Source

Yeah - after quake, it was released as an in-house half-life mod by the quake TF dev team (Team fortress classic). Then it was a standalone repack of the HL assets (TF1.5), and then the ground-up Source version that is TF2

It's funny that source engine was so bad it inspired a whole generation of better engines

But you have to admit without half life portal wouldn't exist...how much of the engine we can debate but it needed half life to exist

Mods? Where are the rest?

The level editor was used out of convenience. There are other level formats they could have used instead.

Portal is a great example of Valve supporting education, not the mod scene.