Underhell is an Episodic Story Line Single Player Modification for Half Life 2.
It is a community project, gathering content with permissions from different authors.
The mod has been in development since 2005, and has evolved many times before reaching a stable concept.
In Underhell, you incarnate Jake Hawkfield, a Special Weapons and Tactics Operative, who recently got married and moved in with his beloved wife.
But soon after those happy events, his beloved wife dies in mysterious circumstances, only leaving clues that lead to believe in a suicide.
Jake falls apart, and only his best friend, mentor and boss Frank is here to help him get over his grief.
The mod begins with a wake up call from Frank, ordering Jake to come down to the station. An armed group of elite soldiers have taken contol of a hospital and all it’s personnel.
But Jake will soon realize that it is not a common Hostage Situation…
History of Underhell
The first idea of making Underhell came out in early 2005, the mod emerged from DOTD CSS game type, which is about playing with a few players on a human side team, against over 40 bots in the other team, with knives only, since at the time Left 4 Dead did not exist, and there was no zombie mods, this was the best way for players to experience Coop survival close to a zombie game.
I was playing this with SeriousK, an old friend, and we thought about making a COOP mod with this idea, inside a huge underground prison facility, where the objective would be to survive and escape, and where each floor would have a Checkpoint where dead players would come back to life.
Which is exactly what Left 4 Dead is now, but at the time, it did not exist yet.
The Team grew over time, and we had reached over 20 members throughout the development, and not much content was created. Ultimately, I ended up working alone on the project.
Prologue was originally designed as a very short introduction to the gameplay mechanics and characters, I suppose I got carried away…
Many people thought it died many times in the past, because I remained silent from long periods of time, I have adopted a rather peculiar “Don’t say anything unless you have something to say” method, which results in rare, but substantial updates..
As long as I have the capacity to work on the game, I will, even if it takes my whole life to finish it…
Inspirations and Influences
As you can read from the Credits, you can see a lot of games and movies in there, but one of the most obvious that people have been calling numerous times is F.E.A.R by Monolith studios. Now if you keep track and read around, you will see that Underhell was in development since 2005, if you see the “Underhell Trailer 3″ video, with “Her” chasing the player in the house, you will see that this video was uploaded in 2007, but at this period we announced the mod, it had been in development for over 2 years…
The original idea of having a female haunting the Main Character came from the japanese movie JU-ON, after F.E.A.R was released it gave us a new Souce of Inspiration.
The very first idea of the mod, as explained in History of Underhell was to make a Multiplayer Zombie survival game, that would have been similar to what Left 4 Dead is now, but focused in one location, an Underground Base. The second idea was to add 2 other enemies, a Huge Boss similar to Nemesis in Resident Evil 3, that would arrive randomly, and leave once taken enough damage, and that all players would finally kill as an End Boss at the end of the game.
