We all know Garry's Mod (opens in new tab), the groundbreaking physics sandbox mod for Valve's Source Engine. first introduced in 2004 and released by Valve as a standalone game in 2006, Garry's Mod has sold over 18 million copies, all for the steady price of $10.

Before Garry's Mod, however, there was JBMod (Steam page (opens in new tab)), the first ever mod for the Source Engine. This mod was created to enable physical guns (or physics guns). The physics gun is a tool culled from "Half-Life 2" that works like the gravity gun, allowing players to pick up and manipulate items using a blue ray of light.

As sometimes happens with mod projects, work on JBMod by its creator, JB55 (JackBox55), did not last long before other modders took over, but Garry Newman used JBMod as a source of inspiration, experimented with his own mods that spawned manhacks and created rocket launchers that fired melons. Soon Garry's Mod (then known as GMod) added things like physguns and the ability to rope and weld objects together, eventually leading to the famous sandbox map gm_construct as a physical playground.

Despite initial criticism that Garry's Mod was too similar to JBMod, players began flocking to Newman's sandbox; modders who had been working on JBMod could not keep up with Garry's Mod's increased functionality and eventually stopped development altogether. Development eventually stopped altogether. [As PCGamesN (open in new tab) discovered, JBMod finally appeared on Steam (open in new tab) 18 years later." For the first release on Steam, the original 2004 mod has been replaced with a more modern engine. Stay tuned for more updates! As always, JBMod 0.6 will be released soon." says the mod's Steam page, but there appears to be no official involvement from the original authors of JBMod.

I briefly tested JBMod today, and it has a sandbox map with an item spawn station and physgun, which enables console commands to spawn items, load maps from the currently installed Source Engine game, and I can also load a map from a currently installed Source Engine game. It's not much, especially compared to Garry's Mod, as it only gives a quick glimpse of how the mod works or a nostalgic one for those who played with it back in 2004. Still, it's never not fun to let physical objects fly around, even though it says "Not Recommended" after the "Find a Server" and "Create a Server" options.

In response to the mod finally appearing on Steam after so many years, Newman says that JBMod was not only the inspiration for Garry's Mod, but also provided a lot of motivation to keep working on it:

"When I was making the gmod When we were making it, we were actually scared of jbmod," Newman said on Twitter. "They always claimed they were going to do a huge release that would make us redundant. This is one of the reasons we worked so long and hard to move it forward so we wouldn't get caught.

He needn't have worried: Garry's Mod is one of the most played games on Steam, and now that JBMod is also on Steam, it's hard to imagine it being any more threatening.