Why is the G-Man smiling? Maybe he's happy because of all the money that has been made by the commercial version of Garry's Mod, the Source Engine-based sandbox game that started life as a small but innovative Half-Life 2 mod. Garry's Mod, created by UK-based Garry Newman, finally turned into a full fledged downloadable commercial title just over two years ago via Valve's Steam service (it still requires at least one Source Engine game be installed to work).

On his personal blog site, Newman reflected on the very recent two year anniversary of the commercial version of Garry's Mod (it was launched on Steam Nov. 29, 2006), saying, "The popularity took me and Valve by surprise. As soon as it went on sale the Steam servers were temporary knocked out, due to the demand. On the first day it sold 5,729 copies. Wowzer." But even Newman admits he was not prepared for the game continuing to sell well even to this day. Newman states, "...over the next 2 years it went on to sell 312,541 copies. Which has totally knocked my socks off."

Since each copy of Garry's Mod sells online for $9.99 that means the game has generated over $3 million in revenue since it became a commercial product. That's pretty impressive for a game that has gotten little publicity outside the game community. Newman thanks both Valve and Team Garry for their work on on Garry's Mod in his blog post, adding, "And it's my hope that it has inspired other people to do stuff. I mean, I'm a fool like you, I've just got more experience in pretending I'm not, and I did it.. So why can't you."