Garry’s Mod’s Spiritual Sequel – Sandbox – Now Available for Everyone

The internet owes a debt to Garry’s Mod. Without it, we wouldn’t have Prop Hunt, Trouble in Terrorist Town, and the countless machinima that flooded YouTube in the late 2000s. Garry’s Mod is this user-generated tool that stands tall above Minecraft, Roblox, and Dreams as the best way to create and share anything you can think of. That could change, though, as Garry’s Mod’s successor Sandpit just opened the floodgates to even more players and creators. So if you’ve ever wanted to make a game, now’s your chance.

From the creator of Rust and Garry’s Mod, Facepunch Studios, Sandbox (stylized as s&box) is part video game, part creative toolkit. Much like Roblox, players can create any game mode they can imagine and share it for free on a user-generated content (UGC) marketplace. Using the C# programming language and Valve’s built-in Source 2 engine, anyone can create any game mode they want, and that’s the point.

So it’s kind of a sandbox game, and in some ways it’s not. Since Sandbox was revealed in 2017, you can create whatever you want in the tool, but Garry’s Mod, a spiritual sequel, intentionally downplays its connection to Valve’s previous games like Counter-Strike, Portal, and Half-Life. You’re no longer porting content from those games to create machinima or game modes. It’s all original.

To that end, earlier this year, Valve took down a fan version of Team Fortress 2 via DMCA because developer Amper Software was using TF2 assets while attempting to recreate the shooter in Source 2.

Creator Garry Newman previously established Sandbox as a first-come, first-served experience, as Facepunch explicitly gave aspiring developers a first-come first-served opportunity, but now the creative tool is open to everyone. This could be a watershed moment for Sandbox, as even more people come in, create game modes, and share their creations for the growing community to engage with.

While the Sandbox invite system is gone, it’s important to note that Facepunch claims that “access can be revoked at any time,” but anyone can easily access the game creation tool these days.

Just click this link and log in with your Steam account to access Sandbox. The initial download is 4.99 GB, and depending on what you want to do or play, even more space will be needed.

Be sure to check out all the best free Steam games available on Sandbox. If you feel like going back in time, there are also tons of great old games there.

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