Frictional/Grip's Earlier Work [UNBIRTH/FIEND,etc] + General game dev history thread

[DonnJuann]

I was doing some digging today for nostalgia's sake (I used to dig for information on game devs I liked a couple years back). And I remembered these two games that Thomas Grip had worked on. One was a 2D topdown game, and another was a 3D game I barely remembered, I also remembered the Penumbra Tech Demo, wich is still up for download even though half the links seem to be dead. (You can still get it tho)

After reading a bit on Frictional's English Wikipedia page I found out those games where: FIEND(2001,GripDesign) and UNBRITH(Unreleased,2001). There was also a game called ENERGETIC(2005,GripDesign).

I looked up Unbirth and I found a thread here iirc linking to a lil page on the game, the same page I had visited all those years ago while digging for the first time. Sadly, the only downloads for the alpha test build of the game are GamersHell and another torrent site. Both dead (the GamersHell one doesnt let you download it, and the torrent, well, without seeders/peers/allthatjazz it doesn't move an inch.)



I was hoping someone here could offer a download (approved by mods/members of Frictional ofc) just for the historical value. Sounds dumb but this stuff fascinates me. I would love to discuss the game too, concept art, etc.

Feel free to post about other dev's whose history interests you. I used to be really into Valve's history.

[Yuhaney]

Unbirth indeed seems to have vanished, but GamersHell says it had 1 download today. I am guessing it is still available there somehow?

Since you asked about history, I have something little. While messing with Fiend years ago, I found out some Half-Life themed test levels but I cannot remember where they are located at and how I was able to play them. Thomas confirmed that he made them, so they are "official".

For those interested, all of the games mentioned have their own dedicated sites.
Here are the links:

Energetic
Fiend
Penumbra
Unbirth

[DonnJuann]

Unbirth indeed seems to have vanished, but GamersHell says it had 1 download today. I am guessing it is still available there somehow?

Since you asked about history, I have something little. While messing with Fiend years ago, I found out some Half-Life themed test levels but I cannot remember where they are located at and how I was able to play them. Thomas confirmed that he made them, so they are "official".

For those interested, all of the games mentioned have their own dedicated sites.
Here are the links:

Energetic
Fiend
Penumbra
Unbirth

Thank you for providing links, I forgot. Yeah I don't know about that one download, it's a mystery.

Also damn, that's interesting, and oldschool. Anything Half-Life modding related or early Valve related just takes me WAYY back.

[Bad Sector]

I was also looking for Unbirth, but it seems GamersHell deleted the file and there are no seeders in the GameUpdates.org. However after some google-fu i found the GameUpdates.org version in a Russian site. The file matches with the torrent in GameUpdates.org - placing it at the directory where the torrent would download marks it as completed and allows me to seed it (so the piece hashes match, meaning it wasn't tampered with).

As i cannot really seed it and this isn't really a reliable method, i decided to upload it to archive.org (together with some pieces of the site, although archive.org most likely already have those, but for convenience) to ensure it'll be preserved in the future. You can download it from here:

https://archive.org/details/unbirth_alpha