With Half-Life ties and funding from Valve, this 2000 FPS never made it to Steam

For FPS game fans of a certain vintage, the name Gunman Chronicles may spark an old memory in your brain. Built on the Half-Life engine, and published by the same company, Sierra Studios, it also featured some surprising involvement from Valve. Despite that link, the game, released in 2000, has never made its way to any official PC storefronts, including Steam. Now, in a new interview, the project lead on Gunman Chronicles has revealed how his team of developers ended up getting shipped out to Valve HQ to finish the game, and why it was ultimately an "anticlimactic" launch for what was a pretty ambitious shooter.

Gunman Chronicles is remembered fondly by some for a couple of reasons. The first was its customizable weapons system, which allowed you to adapt guns to make them perform differently. It's not quite Call of Duty's gunsmith system, but it was a pretty cool innovation back in the day. The second is its bizarre array of enemies - one minute you'll be dodging massive dinosaurs, then the next you'll be up against aliens. While of course nowhere near as big a revelation and phenomenon as Half-Life, it certainly shares some similarities.

It's already well-documented that Valve was involved in the project too, helping the team at Rewolf Software get the game over the line with funding and even office space at its Seattle HQ. But while flicking through the latest PCGamer Magazine, I spotted an interview with the head of Rewolf, Herbert Flower, and he's lifted the lid on what it was like working alongside the company.

After assembling a group of modders, scattered around the world, Flower found himself running out of cash to get Gunman Chronicles finished. One dev took the initiative to contact Valve, seeing as the game was running on the Half-Life engine, and asked the company to "save us."

This resulted in Valve shipping everyone working on the game - "which included modders from Italy, Ukraine, and Germany" - to Seattle, Flower says in the interview. Initially set to be there for a short spell, they ended up staying in an office space provided to them by Gabe Newell for around two and half months, after he gave the team more time to get the game shipped. An injection of $20,000, and the assistance of a Valve QA tester, also helped push things along. Flower says that even though they referred to him as "the game Nazi," the QA tester "was the most valuable thing we ever had from Valve, I'll tell you what, aside from the free caffeine upstairs."

Despite working closely with Newell during this time, Flower admits the pair didn't exactly get on. "It's not like we hated each other. It's like two people with bad breath. We're like 'OK, can't wait to get out of the room with this guy.'"

While I'm sure there are countless developers that'd be extremely keen to make their game within Valve's walls today, the experience for Flower and his team wasn't as great as you might imagine.

He believes that, despite Valve handing publishing duties to Sierra, it still took an extremely large cut from Gunman Chronicles' sales - Flower claims the team received only 11% of the earnings after Sierra had also taken its slice of the pie. The less-than-lucrative returns, coupled with some serious exhaustion among the team, "threw water on the flame of my soul," he says.

The game's launch ended up feeling "anticlimactic," despite Gunman Chronicles' potential. "There was no big party. We were burned out, and the team kind of just faded off as they [went] home. [We were] dropping people off at the airport, good friends I might keep in touch with, but never see in person again," Flower says.

While the vast majority of projects Valve has had involvement with are available on Steam today, Gunman Chronicles is a mysterious outlier. I was hopeful, when I saw this interview, that I'd find the reason why, but Flower says he doesn't know for sure why it's not available on Valve's storefront. His best guess is a row over rights following Sierra's absorption into Vivendi, which in turn eventually merged with Activision Blizzard.

Despite being built on the foundations of one of the best PC games ever made, making some bold swings for a game of that time, and selling decently well, the critical reception for Gunman Chronicles is something that still irks Flowers to this day. "When you see reviews and they're like, 'Oh, this game is too much like Half-Life!' And you're like, 'What, the best game that you ever rated? Too much like that, huh?'" A valid point, to be fair to him.

Given its huge success and financial stability today thanks to Steam, the offer of assistance, resources, and guidance from Valve is an offer I'm sure many studios aspire to receive. That's what makes Flower's story all the more intriguing. If seeing Gunman Chronicles' name appear on your feed has got you feeling all nostalgic, take a look at our best old games list. Or if turning a T-rex into Swiss cheese sounds like your idea of fun, our best dinosaur games guide has a few options for you.

Do you have any wild anecdotes about games from decades past? Come and share them in the PCGamesN Discord - we'd love to hear them.