Originally, ETC stood for Earthquake Test Centre, but now that’s been forgotten.
All that matters is that you find yourself in a BM-style base with aliens and army trying to kill you.
It’s clear that you need to find a way out.
In fact, there’s a working portal, if only you could reach it!
This was April 2016’s Classic of the Month mod.
Basic Details
- Title: ETC
- File Name: hl1-sp-etc.7z
- Original File Name: djetc.zip
- Size : 3.75MB
- Author: Dave Johnston
- Date Released: 07 October 1999
Download Options
Download to your HDD [3.75MB]
You can still use it with Gauge once you have downloaded it.
Installation Instructions
- Copy the etc folder into your Half-Life folder.
- Restart or start Steam.
- ETC should now be listed in your Library tab.
If you require more help, please visit the Help page.
Awards
Playthrough Videos
The playthrough below is part of the Classic of the Month Event, run by Don AKA Unq.
Screenshots
Click on the thumbnails below to open a 1024 pixel wide image.
WARNING: The screenshots contain spoilers.
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Reader Recommendations
Total Downloads
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6,833Overall
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344365 days
Meta Review Data
Statistics based on 10 comment(s) with meta review data.
Installed:
Using Gauge: Users
Manually: 10 Users
Time Taken:
Average: 1 Hours, 4 Mins
Shortest: 0 Hours, 38 Mins by Cardiomyopathy
Longest: 2 Hours, 5 Mins by fleetlord
Total Time Played: 10 Hours, 43 Mins
Using Gauge: Users
Manually: 10 Users
Time Taken:
Average: 1 Hours, 4 Mins
Shortest: 0 Hours, 38 Mins by Cardiomyopathy
Longest: 2 Hours, 5 Mins by fleetlord
Total Time Played: 10 Hours, 43 Mins
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Special Events
Jump to a review
Rating: 5/5 + Excellence Award
Good: Great texture usage; nice architecture; well combined Earth and Xen storylines.
Bad: Somewhat confusing in Xen; some scripted sequences didn’t ‘script.’
Review:
Both of these campaigns are linked together, as you can tell by the ending of the first one, and the beginning of the second. There wasn’t a real ‘storyline” spelled out on the webpage, but don’t worry, it explains itself during the game. If however, you get lost, and can’t understand, here is the story. The military wasn’t at BMRF to silence anyone, they were there for the exploitation of Xen. Xen was a new place to explore and possibly gain new information, and you must stop them. Thats the story. Anyway, the maps are terrific.
I mean the architecture on these is outstanding, as is the use of textures. Nothing is out-of-place or lined-up incorrectly. As for bugs, I found a few. First, I got confused in Xen. I just couldn’t figure out where to go, and Xenizens were coming out of the wall! Second, I came across what I believe were two scripted sequences that didn’t ‘script,” or run. The alien was in a weird position, and so was the grunt. But thats about it. Really a good modification, so go get it!
There’s a walkthrough available at the author’s website.
I just have to say this
few mods are this good 10/10
The author from this one and the sequel ETC 2 is already an old ” boy” in mapping for more than 12 years he has been working on games like doom, quake, half-life and even more. He worked also for companies include CS, CS condition-zero, TFC, James Bond 007 Nightfire and one hove the most popular CS map called Dust. David is still studying Software Engineering at Southampton University and should succeed his Degree in 2005.
Let’s talk about ETC, this one back in 99 was a quite well appreciated release (silver award at 10/4). In a simple but so efficient way it remember us the original game or even uplink. Design is really impressive too perfect, brushes work, texturing and most of all lighting creates the perfect atmosphere. Also looking to small cutscenes adds the necessary feeling to create a great add-on.
The progression is nearly forward and will make you pass from time to time other visited place you encounter before (that’s always great!), ammo and health being well spread all over the pack. Is there any problem? For me the ” biggest” problem is that there is no story behind and this really is being pointed out by the fact you sometime don’t know which direction you can take (would have certainly increase the total pak if there was more scripting to tell you what come next).
We could certainly also point that ambiance sound (if they were more use) would certainly increase the general atmosphere. After performing this new mission you will end it in a way there could be a possibility to create a sequel…which will be the case.
In Conclusion
if you have some regrets that you have been immersed for a long time in new modifications with a lot of new stuffs and you mind replaying the original game, this is the opportunity to get back the filling with a totally new scenery…nearly professional, a real must !
Playtime
1 hour 30 Minutes
Rating
This mod titled “ETC” is the same as the mod “etc ELE” with ETC II being the sequel. So the same mod it posted on the site under different titles and different authors, something is not right to say the least. The readme file for ETC and ETC II quotes author David Johnson with the readme file for ELE quoting Andrew Gunns has the author. I will see if the e-mail addresses are still good and try to get an answer to this one.
In the mean time reviewing ETC or/and ELE. A good mod set in the classic Black Mesa Complex with a nice balance of alien and /grunt combat. Not much in the way of new stuff and very keeping to the original Black Mesa layout and theme. I only had one problem that being an elevator sequence, one of the Grunts get stuck to the elevator and the only way to progress is to noclip through the elevator floor. The end was a bit weak and did not transport to ETC II which I found odd. This mod is well worth “A Play It Now” rating.
You should’ve tried crowbaring the grunt to pieces 😀 or reloading the save and try again until the grunt doesn’t get stuck.
I must admit I did not crowbar him, but hit him with every thing else, as for reloading, did that a lot without making any difference. However, I will go back and try the crowbar. The e-mail address in the readme file is dead.
Running with steam version of Half life seems to be a problem for me. I have the etc folder in the half life directory – how do I change the game version from the console? I’ve tried “gamedir etc” but it tells me to then restart in that game directory. Not sure how to do that…
I don’t know about using the gamedir command but there’s another way to play it. If you’re running Steam you have a valve folder in your Half-Life folder, right? Copy the ETD.wad and Pak0.pak files from the etc folder to the valve folder, start Half-Life, and type “map etc0a” in the console.
Classic mod, worth for playing, especially if you want to play E.T.C.2 too. Bug with a grunt in the elevator depends on using of the modified hgrunt.mdl (from any HD/SD pack). With original Valve’s model you will have no such problems.
Oooo, I was so close to a WOW recommendation. I can’t believe that Dave Johnston was only 16 when he made this – that’s amazing. He managed to do a fantastic job of making the base look real but also making it fun to play.
If it had one large showdown area then that would have tipped the scales. There is a central area, that we play “around and through” a few times, and that is itself a masterclass of small design, but I am a lover of much large areas.
Whilst it doesn’t have an explicit story, the level design details do a good enough job of covering that up.
I have no hesitation in recommending this mod to you and am excited about playing the second part.
Go play it NOW!
We start in the laboratory of Earthquake Test Centre. The situation is standard: failed test and the government decided to destroy the Centre, but Freeman is going to prevent this from happening.
The player cannot leave without the suit, and it’s done very well: the door closes and opens as if by chance, as a result of accidental equipment failures.
The design is very professional, top notch. There are some flaws, but they are minor: one time the crate hanged in the air after I broke the crate under it, there’s one vis compiler glitch, there’s one ventilation grate which breaks into wooden debris and there’s nothing behind it and after the final cutscene it’s possible to arrive and run around in the room which was shown in it.
We go through some computer centres, storages and tunnels which are built inside the mountain. The Centre is destroying, and there are locked doors on our way and the soldiers barricaded some passages.
The battles are intense because we don’t have much health and energy. But there are no difficulties.
There is a couple of nice little details: the blue lights with halos on the lower floor look very good and later the texture on the wall will change after the explosion. At this lower floor we will discover that the ETC also ran some experiments with teleportation, and these experiments led to alien invasion.
This mod looks so professional that we can’t even tell that this is a mod. It looks like a part of the game itself.
An instant classic in HL mods.
I didn’t enjoy this as much as I did when I first played it, probably due to how overplayed and boring it is on Sven Co-op and my growing hatred of ARnade spamming. If I did a review about 4 years ago this probably would have gotten a Personal Favourite.
This was designed perfectly. It captured Black Mesa well and was very solid without any bugs and very few areas of bad mapping. The stand out part of the mod by a mile. The gameplay was pretty good too although it was maybe a little too easy, it was tough in some areas however.
One part that did stand out as being poor was the area with a broken bridge over a big pool of acid which can be jumped. If I’m not meant to get there then I shouldn’t be allowed to get there. I went back and did the mod the normal way anyway.
A great mod and you will be missing out if you don’t play it.
I fully agree with this, it seems like an official expansion of Half-Life.
It’s pretty unlikely you’ll recognise Dave’s name because the only single-player map he’s released in the past was for Doom. On the strength of this release, however, I think it’s a name well worth looking out for in the future. ETC is not without its problems, of course, but it is an excellent achievement. It makes a nice change for an author to hone their skills in private before unleashing their creations upon us and ETC shows quite conclusively how superior this approach is.
As I played through, the overall impression of the levels was one of quality. Dave’s work may be far from the most original around but it is of an extremely high standard. There’s no sign of the bland empty areas that plague so many early releases, just perfect texturing, lighting and architecture. While there weren’t really many areas that I stopped to admire, what’s there is flawlessly executed throughout.
As I mentioned, ETC does suffer from being somewhat derivative, as with most third-party maps around. You really won’t do anything special as you play through and I don’t recall any original scenarios cropping up anywhere. However, it is still enjoyable. The combat gets quite hectic in places and I found it to be very well planned out, with the difficulty pitched almost perfectly. Health was perhaps slightly sparse but otherwise it played very nicely.
I think perhaps the biggest problem in ETC was that there wasn’t really any sense of direction. I really had no idea what the hell I was doing or where I was heading and it kind of felt like the author didn’t either. A storyline is far from essential in a good level but I still like to feel I’m going somewhere. Here I just seemed to wander around pretty aimlessly for a while, drop a few bad guys here and there, and then suddenly it was all over. Quite why this impression was more acute than in a lot of other levels I’m not sure but I suspect it’s a variation on Amdahl’s law: everything was constructed in such a professional manner that the fact that this feature was lacking became all the more noticeable.
What it really boils down to here is whether or not you can stomach some more of the same kind of thing that’s been appearing in Half-Life levels all along. You’ve played the original game, you’ve probably played Uplink and you may well have ploughed your way through most of the new maps that have appeared since. ETC essentially takes lots of good elements from everything that’s gone before and pieces them together in a highly accomplished manner.
Notes
This review is republished here by permission and was originally published Saturday, 7th August 1999 by Morgan.
This review was originally posted on the Ten Four Website, which is now offline. Permission has been granted to republish the full review and more details can be found on the About page.
Maybe I’m missing something here! Sure it looks and feels like classic BM but it just didn’t do it for me!
I can’t fault it on the look and feel but for me there was too much back tracking at times, an example being the bridge over the radioactive snot. Just activating the bridge meant a trek to the activation and then all the way back to cross it. The combat was OK but nothing special with the mod being fun in general but that said I didn’t enjoy it as much as the other reviews seem to suggest I should!
I’ll let others extol its praises as I won’t be one of them.
On the assumption that ETC2 is going to be next I’ve downloaded it but I’m not enjoying it so far.
I’m going to mostly agree with Bolx there: this was a fun mod, nicely mapped for the most part, but too much backtracking and easily-missed doors kind of took the edge off it for me.
It wasn’t bad in any way, just I completely missed the hall door by the little steam vent, and couldn’t figure out how to get up to the bridge after bringing it up. Once more it seems that sometimes these very early maps lack direction.
I was taken by surprise at the [spoiler]broken HEV charger![/spoiler], that was good.
Definitely worth a play, but it’s not in my top ten, that’s for sure.
I plyaed this one quite time ago, by the screenshoots I remember, it was a cool fun mod to play, nothing much than that, is cool and is actually amazing a 16 YO guy did it all, that’s a wow thing just by itself I wonder where this guy is now, maybe designing professionally I don’t know, so yep that’s it go on and play it!
I feel like in an unavoidable obligation to revise this one, due to I got confused with the title and I tought I was alredy played this one, but no, I did it untill now, and, overall it feels like really awsome a 16 YO kid did this, appart from that the layout and map built fells sometimes like rough between serious and amateurish, but I think that’s logical conssidering this was one of the firsts releases of the author, I think he is working on Valve now, please correct me if i’m wrong, and I think he was in the developing team of one fo the most played maps for Counter Strike Source ever, and i’m reffering to the classic Dust map, and it’s reinforcement Dust II, so that’s a cool detail by the way. Ok so back to the mod reviewing regarding the lights this mod is like 80% medium dark and 10% ok, and the rest 10% really dark in some areas, like u can see in the 28th screenshot where is the APC and the parking lot near the end.
But finally I think I don’t regret of give it a play it later conssidering the age of the developer when it was launched as many and me have said, and it has some good combat and mapping puzzles but involve my hated ennemy layout rule of: “go to point B-C return to A” again to proceed, altough in this mod that’s not an abussed element so it’s ok, but I rather preffer they dont make me do that as a gamer, I insist.
Solid pack here – this was Dave’s first Half-Life engine release, but he is really better known for his multiplayer maps, including casbah for TFC and of course de_dust, de_cbble, and de_dust2 for Counter-Strike. And he’s now a pro level designer apparently working for Splash Damage. ETC shows off his skills at a pretty young age.
I mostly enjoyed ETC. I think one of the only things that bothered me were the lack of a story or background, you’re just kind of there in a base trying to get out. Other than that, there’s one annoying backtracking section that has you go back 3 maps, and the lack of a big finale battle.
On general, ETC has a lot of polish. There’s good use of effects and some scripts that keep things alive and there’s moustaches. The balance is pretty good here, some tough battles are scattered about. As I mentioned above, it would have been nice to have a good solid finale battle to end with – the combat doesn’t really ramp up consistently here, but it’s still a good romp.
Definitely recommended, though.
sneaky tricks and great alien placement. you will like it so why don’t you play it. now I am off to play part II
Yet another classic, needless to explain it’s definitely worth playing if you like Mesa-style action.
Pro’s:
-Quite good mapping and lighting, but maybe a lil undetailed and monotonous sometimes
-Excellent combat action
-Very good balancing
-A few nice scripts
-Good playtime (~30-60 mins)
-No bugs
Con’s:
-No real story
-No real puzzles
-Open end (but there’s “ETC 2” !)
-Almost no atmosphere
-Mean enemy placement
Conclusion: Almost a “play it now” but quite many things are missing in my eyes, BUT don’t hesitate for playing at least “ETC2” which is even better in EVERY single way!
I love this one. Great level design, you can tell it’s well thought-out. There aren’t just straight-out lobbies and corridors, you go thru a room, maybe turn a valve up ahead and come back, it really makes it more entertaining. Combat is just right in my opinion, enemy placement is exellent, enough ammo, etc. (lol, etc.) This was going to be a “play it now” but the mustaches demanded otherwise. What am I talking about? Play the mod and you’ll see.
I thought this mod was fun to play in many aspects, but I found it too frustrating to be truly enjoyable. The autosaves were way too spaced apart considering there was action around every corner. It’s okay to do this, but put in more autosaves! I also found the fact that the button opened some obscure door without showing you it opening was a bit strange and unclear when trying to find out where to go. I also thought the placement of the magnum was a bit too easy to miss, as with some of the necessary health stations!
Having said all this though, the enemy placement was fun; this is a mod which gives you plenty of explosive weapons and plenty of use for them! Since all the enemies were balanced for all these explosives though, when you were out early, things became very tough. Give this mod a go if you have the time.
Forgot to say that I also thought the scripted earthquake sequences were very cool! One of the best things about the mod!
Started out very ominous, loved getting into the action fairly quick. Very well made mod, but not much story, instead relying on you knowing about the Half life universe. Easy level was actually easy.
Manually
Easy
2 Hours, 5 Minutes
This happens to be another unforgettable modding classic.
The story is that we find ourselves in the E.T.C., that stands for Earthquake Test Chamber. But now, it got messed up and your goal is to find a working portal that will get you out of here.
The combat is great, though in the moment with the 3 female assassins where there was no light and you didn’t have the revolver or the crossbow, I was really annoyed. But that’s only one moment.
The environment looks great and it makes you feel like you really are on an Earthquake Test Chamber.
This is simply great and should be played by every Half-Life fan.
Well, I think I’ve drawn the same conclusion as Morgan here on the topic of ETC, but through different reasoning. It’s not so much that ETC was too derivative by any standards; this level had its share of unique moments. The problem, I felt, was that ETC didn’t have the benefit of the life that a story/plot adds to a SP experience. Nonetheless the balance was great, the visuals were pleasing, and the earthquake effects just have to be experienced as they are the best in the business. I’ll say it again, get this one!
Notes
This second opinion review is republished here by permission and was originally published Thursday, 13th July, 2000 by Jiang.
This review was originally posted on the Ten Four Website, which is now offline. Permission has been granted to republish the full review and more details can be found on the About page.
ETC II is better, but anyway, not bad.
Manually
Medium
1 Hour, 15 Minutes
Really fun mod, loved it
Manually
Medium
2 Hours
I love this mod. I like the linear progression of the mod. There are some backtrackings in the middle part but they are easy to handle and not annoying. The combats are fun and not too hard.
Manually
Medium
1 Hour
I remember well this polished classic which stood out among the early HL1 singleplayer mods. Combat is somewhat scarce, and mostly with grunts, in a classic Black Mesa setting – but it’s attention to level design, sprinkling of scripted sequences and mustachioed Barneys was unparalleled at the time.
It’s a must-replay for me out of nostalgia reasons, but if you’re new to Half-Life in 2021 this map is very skippable.
Manually
Medium
45 Minutes
Superb level design, about 1 regular hl chapter in length, and it even has a fat mustache Barney!
Manually
Medium
45 Minutes
Well done!
Noticed how just how well done the level design is, nicely lit and detailed! Keeps a good pace and momentum. Fights are very fun and balanced. Decent length to, a decent length.
I would recommend, excited to play the sequel!
Manually
Medium
50 Minutes
*Decent length to, doesn’t drag.
sorry about that
The design of the levels are good, but the story is nowhere to be seen. The sequel pretty much takes the spot more than this one. But, if you wanna have a bit more ETC, then do the whole package instead of going straight into the ETC II
Manually
Medium
45 Minutes
ETC is good overall.
Manually
Hard
38 Minutes
This looks very familiar to me. It’s as if I have played this before. If I am not mistaken, Sven Co-op has this mod as well and I remember playing it on Misfire’s server. Anyway, let’s get to the review. The combat is challenging, but not too frustrating. The level design is okay but I hate some parts where you have to backtrack like the game doesn’t give me a hint on where to go. The story, it’s getting tedious as other mods, simply escape from the facility. It doesn’t matter if you’re in Black Mesa or Earthquake Test Center, the concept is the same as other. The mod itself feels so lifeless, almost lifeless. You run around and shoot enemies, that’s it. The friendly NPCs really don’t do much.
Recommended Difficulty: Easy; too many grenades in the level besides troops seem to be stronger than usual
There’s not real strategy here, try to shoot around corners, bounce grenades at walls, use grenade launcher on formed group of soldiers. Peek-out, hide techniques. Everything you learned to play like a pro. It’s quite hard this mod. I haven’t found any speacial trick for any combat situation since many enemies have a high tendency to rush on you. Save often, it’s my only recommendation. Good luck.
Manually
Hard
40 Minutes