Every once in a while I get a bit nostalgic for that early-to-mid 2000s era of computer gaming. Though less for major games like Unreal Tournament, and instead for those who have existing games but want to expand beyond what the vanilla multiplayer for Half-Life was.
For me, that was absolutely the norm around this time, playing the notable multiplayer mods like Counter-Strike and Team Fortress Classic alongside classics like The Specialists, Sven Co-op and Natural Selection. Of course, I was reminded of another multiplayer mod I was into, but has mostly fallen into obscurity in recent years.
This is Desert Crisis, a modification for Half-Life released around 2003-04. Done by a handful of amateur modders/mappers from the Half-Life mod scene, it’s a multiplayer mod that is very much “everything including the kitchen sink” in terms of design.
Two factions, the USA and the “United Peace-Keeping Organization,” an enemy faction built from various other countries after a decades-long global conflict, go and fight against each other with realistic firearms, melee weapons and space lasers. Think something like Action Half-Life or The Specialists with a bit of Unreal Tournament’s Assault mode mixed in.
It was pretty damn ambitious for what it was trying to do in 2003-04, especially with games like Half-Life 2 around the corner. There aren’t very many gameplay videos of it, since it was around before YouTube was really a thing, so have this action-packed low quality trailer uploaded from 2006 to get kind of a feel of what the mod was aiming for:
But I’m not really here to talk about the mod itself, though it could be an interesting topic on its own. No, I want to talk about the music of the mod.
In something you don’t really see often for a game mod, this mod does have an official “theme song” that plays in the menus when picking your team and loadout. Theme 1 is for the “USA” faction: A fairly simple chugging rock tune with fairly basic riffs and your go-to guitar solos. Theme 2 is for that rival “UP-KO” faction that’s a bit more Rammstein-esque in terms of style, with those chugging guitars.
But this is 2003. It’s a bit more wild west when it comes to community mods. This meant that in addition to the official Desert Crisis theme songs, there was copyrighted music up the wazoo. And boy, they’re definitely the playlist of someone who probably watched a lot of action movies and loved the hell out of Aphex Twin.
Richard D. James, best known as Aphex Twin, but also known for doing a bunch of collaborations and side projects, is featured frequently here. “AFX 118” from his Caustic Window side project is featured as one of the menu tracks alongside its appearance in the trailer I linked earlier.
Other selections include “Xtal” from his classic Selected Ambient Works 85-92 album, “Come to Daddy (Pappy Mix)” from the EP of the same name, as well as “Reg,” a goofy little ditty from the album Expert Knob Twiddlers, a collaboration between James and Mike “μ-Ziq” Paradinas. The music picked here is so varied, and it can be jarring going from the calm nature of “Xtal” to the absolute chaotic noise of “Come to Daddy (Pappy Mix).”
When doing research for this, I was initially put off at how many songs in here were by James and his many side projects, but over time I’ve found that impressive for a guy to basically have so many different ideas and creations that don’t pigeonhole him into one singular genre. It’s great.
Though it’s not just Aphex Twin that’s featured on here. Amon Tobin gets a few tracks here as well, such as “Sordid” and the hard-to-find online song “Four Ton Mantis”. This was very likely my earliest exposure to Amon Tobin’s work, a few years before I heard his amazing score while playing Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory.
Juno Reactor – likely chosen because of their contributions to the Matrix sequels might’ve gotten more attention to their past work – have two songs in here as well, “Ice Cube” and “Feel the Universe (Koxbox + Ian Ion remix)”. It’s good stuff. I remember “Ice Cube” being one of my favorite tunes from when I played this back in the day.
You may notice there’s a lot of electronic and industrial musicians in here. But the selection goes a bit more beyond that. A good chunk of metal songs are in here too, like Rammstein’s “Buck Dich,” Isis’ “Constructing Towers” from their EP SGNL>05, there’s a tune called “Heat in beat” from the anime Bubblegum Crisis Tokyo 2040 that I thought was really damn good… even Apocalyptica’s 2003 cover of the classic “In the Hall of the Mountain King” are featured, so it’s definitely an all-over-the-place kind of soundtrack selection, likely due to the different musical tastes of the mod team.
There are some additional tracks in one map that are taken from the 1999 film The Boondock Saints. Alas, I have no idea where these Boondock Saints tracks come from. While composer Jeff Danna did make a soundtrack album for the sequel All Saints Day, the score for the original only exists in low-quality YouTube uploads from 2011. A good chunk of it seems to come from the Chappell Music Library, at least from what I could tell from said YouTube uploads having them claimed by Warner/Chappell over the years. I’ve posted the audio clips here for reference, if you know the actual source of these tracks, feel free to let me know in the comments.
Finally, to keep the theme of having outright bangers and complete WTF song choices, there’s Men Without Hats’ “The Safety Dance,” labeled here as saftey.wav (sic). Yep, by the early 2000s, people were still making fun of The Safety Dance.
Now I will make this clear that the artists in question did not give permission to use their songs in here. Again, it’s a mod, the mod scene for commercial games was a lot more wild west back then, etc. Copyright didn’t mean much, especially to what amounted to a free mod. I bet that’s why there isn’t many videos of this mod nowadays: they might’ve gotten copyright struck by YouTube over the years.
There’s something we take for granted nowadays, and that’s how someone putting music in a game mod like this could open folks to a new world of artists, albums and sounds they’ve never heard before. It can make an incredibly lasting impact on people. Some of these tunes, like the aforementioned “Heat in beat” I know from this mod more than the work they were originally made for. It’s definitely the defining moment of Desert Crisis to me, more than that customizable head option, something common today that seemed unexpected to pull off on the old GoldSource engine that Half-Life runs on.
This is why I love the late-90s, early 2000s era of computer game modding. The more scrappy nature of development, relying on the “throwing things at a wall and seeing what sticks” philosophy, how random the game mechanics can be, yet still feel cohesive; and of course, that flagrant disregard for copyright with the music. All for a passion project to hopefully get their foot in the door in proper game development. (Which I hope some folks did, this was back in the day when making a decent mod could likely get you noticed and hired for a big studio!)
You don’t see this as much today, what with companies like Bethesda curating what content be approved to be uploaded to their closed-off service, as well as the lack of modern professional mod tools to give people the sandbox needed to create stuff. Desert Crisis could still be made today on modern tech, and could probably still be a fun romp just as it was in 2003, but it probably wouldn’t be as good because you wouldn’t hear “The Safety Dance” greet you as you load into the map. It’s definitely of a time that rarely exists nowadays, that’s for sure.
Compared to some other Half-Life mods of the era, there isn’t as much of a community for this one. There might be a mostly inactive Discord server full of diehard fans, but this is definitely a mod that didn’t get as big as some of the ones I mentioned earlier. Also, it’s hard to really play nowadays unless you can properly coordinate a game night with folks. Also, with Valve updating Half-Life in 2023 to celebrate its 25th anniversary, Desert Crisis no longer works out of the box without having to do some modifications first. Thankfully the mod itself is not lost to time, you can download the last version, 1.5c, on Moddb, and maybe get a few of your pals to futz around a bit in it.
Anyway folks, thank y’all for letting me indulge in something that doesn’t really matter, but has become one of my recent hyperfixations once again. After all, I’ve written about how I discovered DJ Shadow thanks to the Half-Life mod Poke646, I figure this is a spiritual successor to that. Apologies for how esoteric this might be, unless y’all are okay with that.
MUSIC FROM THE HALF-LIFE MOD DESERT CRISIS, AS OF 1.5C (found in Half-Life/dcrisis/sound/music):
The ones linked are ones not available on YouTube (or are currently unknown), for the rest, see this playlist.
- 4tonmant: Amon Tobin – Four Ton Mantis
- afx118 (sic): Caustic Window – AFX 114*
- apochall: Apocalyptica – Hall of the Mountain King
- bgcheat: Opus-4 – Heat in beat (from Bubblegum Crisis Tokyo 2040)
- boon_beats: From The Boondock Saints (actual song unknown)
- boon_church1: From The Boondock Saints (actual song unknown)
- boon_church2: From The Boondock Saints (actual song unknown)
- boon_vent: From The Boondock Saints (actual song unknown)
- cometodaddy: Aphex Twin – Come to Daddy (Pappy Mix)*
- crisis1: (composer unknown) – Desert Crisis theme
- isistwr: ISIS – Constructing Towers (SGNL>05 version)
- jreactor: Juno Reactor – Feel the Universe (Koxbox + Ian Ion remix)
- junoice: Juno Reactor – Ice Cube
- lordscwd: Lords of Acid – Scrood bi U
- newcrisis: (composer unknown) – Desert Crisis theme 2
- rammbuck: Rammstein – Buck Dich
- reg: Mike & Rich – Reg*
- saftey (sic): Men Without Hats – The Safety Dance
- sordid: Amon Tobin – Sordid
- xtal: Aphex Twin – Xtal*
* indicates a song from Richard D. James (aka Aphex Twin) or the dozen of other side projects he did.
This was available to Patreon subscribers a few days early. Wanna be one of the few to see me blab about this kind of stuff? Well walljump over to my Patreon, just $1 will get you early access to this and other interesting stuffs.
Leave a Reply