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Merry Christmas, from deep-hell.com.

A hallway hovers over an abyss, crackles in 3D geometry caricatures of concrete and rebar show nothing but a black void that theoretically goes on forever. A set of doors so flat as to be a road-runner esque painting on a canyon wall separate us from wherever, the slightest touch screeches everything to a hault.

The new world is a grey-box floating over the same void, ticking along as it details a list of necessary textures and MP3’s and server settings that have to be downloaded before we can make it to the next map. Everything stops, and my cooperative partner and I get distracted by the fact that it’s 2021 and Steam is telling us it’s gonna take 30 fucking minutes to download an MP3 file so I can play a map named ghost_house_manse.

We decide to take another tram ride instead, closing our little box world and shuffling off elsewhere. Please keep your limbs inside the train at all times. The content we’re about to see isn’t designed with sensibility in mind. Do not attempt to open the doors until the train has come to a complete stop at the station platform.

We shuffle off to an Angel Island, just like Sonic The Hedgehog but turned into a nightmare maze where the music halts to a bitter silence immediately. Standing in our way is a recreation of one of the stages from Sonic 3 reduced to an approximation of an obstacle course. I am about a decade from being regularly skilled at the kind of precision platforming that these Half-Life maps required.

The next detour is in Hell Itself, or I guess I could say Tricks and Traps from Doom II complete with all of the requisite sound effects and music. Just absolutely stuffed to the brim with hundreds of enemies to account that there are two, sometimes four, of us shooting our ways through Doom in Half-Life in Sven Co Op.

Sven Co Op wasn’t designed to give players a way to play through the campaign of the original Half-Life. It was that kind of craft job where someone found out it was fun to play videogames with other people. All of the missions and campaigns came later – the purest essence of the game is still some of the maps where you’re in a box canyon killing waves and waves of enemies.

Sven Co-Op is still around, servers will suddenly lurch to life as soon as you spend enough time on one. Maps still break just like they did in 2001 and later, and the most you can do is be bothered enough to restart them. Maps still employ the amateur techniques of keeping players where they need to be going – impossible jumping puzzles, meat grinder rooms meant to kill you instantly and enemies that have HP numbering in the thousands.

Our train cart hits a stall. My partner and I see the letters “loz1” and know that it can only mean one thing. The glory of the Half-Life engine was at one point just how singularly all-encompassing it was for multiple communities. Here we are in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time rendered lovingly in the gold-source engine.

We tell ourselves we’re really here to see the often crass and sometimes hilarious ways the Half-Life engine has to be engineered to push up against Legend of Zelda mechanics in away that makes them attempt a handshake that must sound like two blocks of wood awkwardly clopping against each other.

It’s fully unrestrained from itself. A bunch of people smoking cigarettes and just vibing – high school students making gigantic campaign maps and burning out and never touching the engine again. Map descriptions on websites that are so critical of themselves you wonder if the author was okay – or if they ever even played Half-Life again. Sven Co-Op is a lively rascal of a game, where picking a map or a server in 2021 is like pulling a handcrank and trying to see what the slot machine spits out afterwards. It is, more than often, something that has a tendency to immediately break or kill me. There are about a billion (or less) maps that give alternate takes than even Blue Shift does on the regular Half-Life format.

We joke about The Metaverse already existing, somewhere drifting between abandoned campaign maps and the fraying electrical cables of the GoldSrc engine making themselves apparent with buzzing and sparking. It’s always been here, hasn’t it?

Sven Co–Op is just as much part of the Metaverse, that ill defined-pasture where the grass is always green and the fences are never high enough we can’t jump over them. We’re always told that the next big movement in social media will be places where the personal and the communal brush up against each other.

Can it be boiled down and reduced anymore? Can we really keep building fences around it? There’s more than enough stuff out there to dip your fingers into and realize that kind of expression has been there. I don’t know exactly if Sven Co-Op is the answer, or anything like it.

Pound for pound, I know there’s more expression in the person who gives up summer after summer or spring break after spring break (or service industry holiday season) on making sure their greatest storytelling dreams are recognized at the tip of a Pistol held by someone snug tight in a Hazard Suit.
I know in my heart that my dreams are out in a pitch black void, beyond the boundaries of some tram cart. I know I will have to build that tram cart myself, that it wont deliver itself to the station at the hand of someone who wants it to happen.

God, I know all of the meaning in life comes like some sort of hindsight.