August 1st marks nineteen years since EXOR Studios was officially founded. We are not usually big on anniversaries like these, but something unexpected happened earlier this month. On July 10th, a modder named m8nkey.bsp put up a new file on GameBanana. It was a brand-new map for D.I.P.R.I.P., EXOR Studios’ first big release. The map’s description opens with the words: start your engines! Fitting, as this was the project that actually started the engine of EXOR Studios' operations, which continue to this day. Let us tell you about m8nkey’s mod and how it all came to be.
The EXOR Studios A-Team - seven mad men who left their 9-to-5 jobs to make pixels blow up.
Before we were a real studio, we were a modding team. For years, we created content for games we loved. EXOR officially formed in 2003, making mods for Half-Life and then Half-Life 2, learning the Source engine the same way everyone else learned back in the day - by pulling somebody else’s game apart to see how it works. In 2007, we decided to put everything on the line. We quit our jobs and officially registered EXOR Studios as a real company. Sounds proud and mighty, but it was far from what we are today. We used one of our founders' flats (in which he lived at the same time) as an office, our own PCs as workstations, and an old shoebox as a case for our server. The project that we brought into that flat was D.I.P.R.I.P.
The "release" trailer that we made for the official Steam release of D.I.P.R.I.P.
D.I.P.R.I.P. was a total conversion of Half-Life 2, turning our beloved FPS into a vehicular combat game set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Abandoned city centers, supermarkets, refineries, and military bases became battlefields in people’s fight for uncontaminated water and supplies. In D.I.P.R.I.P., you drove heavily modified vehicles (based mostly on cars we used to see on the streets of our own city) armed with machine guns, missiles, and mortars. Your goal was to survive and make sure that your enemies did not. The game featured three play modes: deathmatch, team deathmatch, and a capture-the-flag mode, which we named Uranium Run. None of that was Half-Life 2 - we took the ‘total conversion’ part literally. We kept the engine, and rebuilt everything else.
The block of flats in the background is based on the typical building you could see in our neighborhood. The texture was made with a real photo we took. You can see a lot of our hometown in the game!
To build D.I.P.R.I.P.’s post-apocalyptic world, we took inspiration from our own neighborhood. We walked around, photographing buildings, street signs, benches, billboards and anything else we found remotely useful. We used the photos to build our own models and texture them. In a way, the ruins people were fighting over were the same streets we lived on. We weren’t sentimental about them, either - we made sure to make the world as destructible as possible, in true EXOR fashion. That wasn’t the main point of the game, but it felt right - which is our way of doing things to this day.
unReal supermarket - its real-world counterpart kept us supplied with instant ramen noodles.
Even though the world in D.I.P.R.I.P. was grim, we did not keep a completely straight face all the time. We made sure to make it uniquely ours. The hypermarket you fight through is branded ‘unReal’ - a parody of a store chain that was present in Poland at that time, and a subtle nod to our other favorite game - Unreal (duh! - we were young). We advertised ‘delicious and moist’ EXOR Pizza on billboards around town, an homage to the credits song of Portal, which was very fresh on our minds at that time. Portal released only a couple of months before the first official release of D.I.P.R.I.P. on Steam, which happened in 2008 in an unprecedented turn of events.
As indicated by the billboard, we really liked Valve games. Having an opportunity to directly work with them was a nerd equivalent of meeting your favorite rockstar.
In October 2008, Valve did something nobody really expected - they began distributing mods via their own platform: Steam. This was groundbreaking, as back then you had to download a zip file from a semi-shady website, install the files yourself, and hope the game still worked. This was a revolution. Doug Lombardi, the director of marketing at Valve, called it ‘the beginning of a new level of support for the mod community’ and cited the user base that would immediately gain access to the published mods - it was fifteen million users. Let us remind you, our server was still in a shoebox. We were jumping for joy. Valve chose to start this ‘new age’ with five mods. Age of Chivalry, Insurgency, Synergy, Zombie Panic! and D.I.P.R.I.P.
This is what a regular day in our "office" looked like. This is where we shipped our first Steam product.
The launch day itself was exciting, and much different than what it is today. There was no polished UI and documented processes. No SteamPipe to give you direct access to uploads, or self-service patching. Everything had to be done by hand and had that cool indie feeling. To give you an idea of how early that was, our Steam developer account number is 54. We were the 54th developer on Steam, and we did a good job on our first release. D.I.P.R.I.P. still sits at a Very Positive rating today! It is still available and still free for everyone who owns any Source engine game.
We even managed to get a paper version of PC Gamer to write an article about D.I.P.R.I.P.
Shipping on Steam taught us several things that a modding team otherwise doesn’t get to learn. How to hit a release date, how to patch a live game, how to read feedback from players, and how to support your community. A couple of months later, we decided to do it all over again and release Zombie Driver, which took what we learned about vehicular combat and environmental destruction in D.I.P.R.I.P. and turned it into a brand-new game. Somehow, it sold more than a million copies and ensured EXOR Studios' survival for years to come. We used that time to build our own engine, which let us make even more games we would want to play ourselves. We followed Zombie Driver up with X-Morph: Defense in 2017. This time, we welded a twin-stick shooter and tower defense together in an entirely destructible world. Later, in 2021, we gave you an entire planet to burn down in The Riftbreaker. All of these games carry the D.I.P.R.I.P. legacy nineteen years later.
A lot has changed since D.I.P.R.I.P. We are still based in Szczecin, the same city we photographed for wall textures. We started as a group of seven and grew to fourteen - still small enough to keep a flat structure and make sure everyone is on the same page. We now have some heavy-hitting projects under our belt, all thanks to Valve deciding that our mod deserves the same shelf space as some of the best games of all time. This is unreal, especially given that m8nkey published a new map for D.I.P.R.I.P. in 2026. However, it all makes sense if you dive a little deeper.
This map, published in 2021 by Kyle Blackmon, was instrumental to m8nkey's 2026 map.
The previously published map for D.I.P.R.I.P. dates back to 2021. It was called diprip_orange, and Kyle Blackmon made it. Kyle described it as something he had done just to learn the basics of making a D.I.P.R.I.P. map. He shipped the .vmf file alongside it so anyone who wanted could open it up and build their own version. Nearly five years later, somebody did: Kyle Blackmon is in the credits of m8nkey’s new map too, under ‘technical design’. m8nkey himself is listed as the level designer, next to the junior level designer, BoltTheSuperDog45. They also received valuable technical support from r4tb0y. Four people, joining forces to make a map for a game that is old enough to get a driver's license in most countries. Insane.
The mod that inspired us to write all this. m8nkeyball.
m8nkey has been around for some time. He knows his way around old tools, which is how he was able to complete this feat in the first place. He had been circling this game for years and posting about it on Mapcore long before any of this happened. He also knew that D.I.P.R.I.P. was turning nineteen, which is why this timing is not coincidental. It’s a gift to the community, and we think it is sweet. BoltTheSuperDog45 is also an enthusiast of the game, adamant in his view that D.I.P.R.I.P. should be ported to a newer version of the Source engine so that he can keep working on it in a less hostile environment (old Source debugging tools require Windows 7 to work properly, since it is a DirectX 9 environment). He has 109 Source engine games, which shows his level of passion for modding and learning.
Here's what the map looks like!
This strangely resembles our own story. Back in 2003, we were the ones deconstructing other people’s games to learn the craft. Many years later, people are doing the same thing, this time taking our work as Source (intended) material.
Thank you to everyone who made it possible to move our server from an old shoebox to a real case.
Nineteen down. Many more to go. We’re building new things. We will let you know when they are ready.
START. YOUR. ENGINES.
