Half-Life: Uplink Extended Redux mod

Half-Life: Uplink Extended is my personal remaster of the original Uplink, also known as the Half-Life demo.

I'm very nostalgic for Half-Life: Uplink as it was my very first Half-Life experience, and it instantly grabbed me, playing through it multiple times a day. The atmosphere of the dome control room and the container yard outside just stuck with me.
At some point I got my hands on the full version of Half-Life and played nothing else for months. Then I found out that you can make your own levels for Half-Life with Worldcraft. So I started messing with, couldn't figure the dang thing out. I had no internet connection back then so I couldn't look for help.

Eventually, I got the gist of the editor and was able to put something together. "So how do I play my map then? I have to compile it? How do I do that? I couldn't figure out how to compile maps for months so I just kept building stuff in Worldcraft without actually playing my creations.
Then I finally got an Internet connection through dial-up. Yes.
I discovered tons of other Half-Life maps, mods and fan sites including the now defunct Valve Editing Resource Center (VERC) and its mapping forums hosted on Chatbear. Good stuff.
Thanks to all the tutorials out there, I was finally able to compile a map successfully. You wouldn't believe the joy I got out of that.

Years later I wanted to make something serious, something big, like an actual mod. I was still very nostalgic for the original Uplink and as I got more experienced with mapping, I started to notice things about the Uplink levels that only mappers will notice, just mapping inconsistencies, lazy work and little mapping mistakes done by Valve when they made Uplink. "I can fix that". So I started work on rebuilding the original Uplink maps from scratch by decompiling the Uplink bsp's and using those as references and guide lines.

Remember the Gargantua at the end of Uplink? You don't get the fight him, the demo just ends as you drop into the room with him. What a let down. So I thought, why not extend that part and have the player fight the Gargantua? That's when I came up with the title Uplink Extended. It didn't end there. Sure, fighting the Gargantua is fun and all but then what? Should the mod continue after the Gargantua battle? Heck yes.

October 21, 2006, release day.
Half-Life: Uplink Extended was released on the Half-Life mapping site The Whole Half-Life. I was quite happy with the final result and it received good reviews.

Time went on and I released one or two small maintenance updates/patches to iron out some minor glitches and quirks my players had reported since its initial release. After that I deemed the mod finished and complete.

A couple of years later I found out that there were a couple of Let's Plays and walkthrough video's of Uplink Extended on Youtube, and after watching these, I realised I never actually made a proper ending for Uplink Extended, it just ends in an elevator shortly after the Gargantua battle with the word 'To be continued...' It never continued. What was I thinking?

So, maybe I should pick this up again and include a proper endgame this time? Not only that but also give more meaning to the word 'extended'. Let's make that our keyword here, extended...

And so, Half-Life: Uplink Extended Redux was born. This is going to be a new release, as in a completely new mod, seperate from my old Uplink Extended which will be renamed to Uplink Extended Legacy.

Half-Life: Uplink Extended Redux will see the light of day in hopefully the not so distant future.