Clips from what I'm playing 😼🚋 Jazztronauts — Plunder the Steam Workshop for money

Jazztronauts doesn’t have a page on the Steam Store. Instead, it lives on the Steam Workshop!

Quick facts:

It’s a full game mode for Garry’s Mod
Genre: Uh, first-person collectathon?
Number of players: Singleplayer and online co-op

Getting Jazzed Up

Jazztronauts is a deeply meta kind of game that takes full advantage of its Garry’s Mod base: it uses the Gmod workshop as its playground and the story takes place within it as a “Source engine multiverse” of sorts. I find it’s a great experience in online co-op with friends.

The story starts off with you playing normal Gmod. However, while playing some unremarkable Half-Life 2-styled map, a band of interdimensional cats show up, exploring the worlds of the Source engine. They recruit you to help with the mission: you’re going to help them gather junk from maps from all over the Gmod workshop. You will actually go out to real maps to steal props and level geometry!

Wait, otherworldly visitors that show up to offer you a job for a mysterious agenda? Am I back in Black Mesa?

Joining the Band

Once you join the cats, they take you to the Bar Samsara, their hideout between maps. You chat with them to get to know them better and receive jobs from them to fetch certain quantities of certain objects.

The cats hang out at the Bar Samsara, an upscale art deco-style bar. The walls are covered with otherworldly vines and framed photos of various maps.

Sitting at the bar, the Pianist says, "Fuck. I don't really know what to do in that situation other than stab a motherfucker. Look, you handle acquisition and I'll figure out if there's a step two to this plan."

You go over to the giant TV and channel surf on the real Gmod workshop for a real map that you want to visit. These are maps people made for other game modes, like Sandbox, Prop Hunt, or Zombie Survival. In one rare case, I stumbled upon a map that was specifically designed for Jazztronauts, called jazz_artemis, uploaded a few days prior.

jazz_artemis on the workshop

Ridiculously giant CRT television displays a map full of coloured blocks called gm_digitalcircus

Once you find a map you want to raid, you call over a trolley to take you there and the map starts downloading. Panels all over the bar also display stats about the map. Hopefully it has a lot of props to steal! You get in the trolley and honk the horn repeatedly to tell your friends to hurry up and get in.

A streetcar trolley emerges from a tunnel. Screens next to the tunnel show stats about the destination.

Once you’re in the map, you pull out your prop snatcher baton and start ripping stuff out of the map. You remember to be on the lookout for any quest items you need to grab. When playing with friends, credit for stolen props is shared, so there’s no need to compete for props. When you snatch stuff, it’ll automatically be lifted off the map, leaving behind a pink crystal pattern to indicate what used to be there.

Using the prop snatcher to rip the walls off a house. Parts of the house and background are marked pink.

After a while of stealing potted plants and office windows, you’re satisfied with what you’ve gotten and the map is looking pretty pink. You pull out your keyfob and press the button to summon a trolley to take you back to the bar. This exit effect is absolutely amazing, with the trolley smashing through map geometry to get to you. It’s an impressively robust and seamless transition!

Now back at the bar, you head to the prop claim area to get paid. You pull the lever to unload your haul of stolen props for the cats. When playing with friends, all money earned to date is copied to each player, so late joiners automatically get caught up with money. You can then go see the Bartender to buy upgrades for your tools.

Several pine trees drop out of a Portal-style ceiling pipe as the Pianist watches grumpily. The sign on the drop pipe says, "As usual, my childhood sweetheart is after my trash!? So now I drive a tank to school everyday"

The tasks the cats assign you start off simple, like “find 15 barrels”, but the needed objects become more and more obscure: washing machines, live headcrabs, suspicious chemicals. Later quests get strange:

Quest: Kidnap Dr. Kleiner

Grooving in Maps

The variety of quest items means you’re going to have to explore far corners of the Gmod workshop for many kinds of maps to find your loot. Here are some examples of maps I found.

rp_newexton is a roleplay map where you pretend to live in a fictional Australian city. There are apartments, a shopping mall, a giant banana beside the highway, and even a working train that takes you to out of New Exton to the suburbs!

A Service NSW location by the quiet streets of New Exton

This map, whose name I don’t remember, has a turret that rapid fires rockets.

A blocky turret fires a stream of rockets down the corridor

vp_voidmall is a creepy, sprawling abandoned mall with phenomenal lighting. There’s also a playable story in this map if you were to play it properly. It was too powerful for Jazztronauts and crashed the game! However, it was too intriguing to pass on, so my friends and I explored the map in vanilla Gmod instead. This is no doubt the highest-quality map I’ve ever played from the Gmod workshop.

Inside a storage room with a sky-and-clouds wallpaper. A TV and a dismantled "Nowhere Mall" neon sign unevenly light the room.

Coda

Jazztronauts feels like a wild take on a story mode for Garry’s Mod itself, given its persistent story and its awareness of Garry’s Mod and its player culture. It has a special, meta perspective on the game it’s built on, reaching through the fourth wall but never getting smarmy or self-referential about it. This game certainly could only exist as a mod on top of the mountains of content made for Garry’s Mod.

Jazztronauts is an earnest love letter to the Source engine and celebrates all of the things fans have made for it over the years. In fact, this is at the core of their objectives: they want you to collect stuff so they can build an interactive Source engine museum! Learn about brushes, the intricacies of crouch-jumping, and surfing! Now this is edutainment.

Exhibits about features of the Source engine line the walls of the room. In the middle of the room is a short surf ramp.

Is the gameplay of Jazztronauts thin? Yes. One of the cats even says to your face that this is “fetch quest hell”. You run a long chain of fetch quests for objects that aren’t even guaranteed to appear in the maps you visit. How many maps do you think contain Dr. Kleiner?

Nonetheless, my friends and I enjoy playing; we care more about the journey than the destination. We get to share our reactions to all the interesting things we find, and some maps have stuck with us. Months on, we still talk about the memorable ones: maps with awesome atmosphere, humour, wacky ideas from novice mappers, and inventive interactive elements. Jazztronauts has taken us on trips to see more of the Garry’s Mod workshop than we’d normally bother to. (If you really want, you can open the console and directly load a map that you know has quest items.)

Jazztronauts is like some fever dream interpretation of what surfing the web looks like inside cyberspace. It’s like a StumbleUpon for Garry’s Mod.

Want to play Jazztronauts?

You’ll need:

To avoid map errors, make sure you have Counter-Strike: Source and Half-Life 2 installed. To avoid more map errors, you’ll probably have to install more Valve games, like Left 4 Dead 2 and Team Fortress 2.

If you’re playing with friends, make sure to always have the same person host the game because the save file is kept on their computer.

😺