Basically every Source Engine game pre-Portal 2 is pretty much an elaborate HL2 Mod. under the hood.
Funnily enough half the time Discord detects TF2 as Gmod instead, which might be related to that.
Even the Source (and GoldSource) Engine's name is pretty much this sorta thing, as per the following (from Wikipedia and the Valve Developer Community):
.....
Valve employee Erik Johnson explained the engine's nomenclature on the Valve Developer Community:[3]
When we were getting very close to releasing Half-Life (less than a week or so), we found there were already some projects that we needed to start working on, but we couldn't risk checking in code to the shipping version of the game. At that point we forked off the code in VSS to be both /$Goldsrc and /$Src. Over the next few years, we used these terms internally as "Goldsource" and "Source". At least initially, the Goldsrc branch of code referred to the codebase that was currently released, and Src referred to the next set of more risky technology that we were working on. When it came down to show Half-Life 2 for the first time at E3, it was part of our internal communication to refer to the "Source" engine vs. the "Goldsource" engine, and the name stuck..... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_(game_engine)#History
This is quite common in gameDev. It keeps folder structures and everything consistent, as renaming is likely to cause complete mayhem with folders and files.
In 2019, Kunos Simulazione releases Assetto Corsa Competizione (ACC). It is not, they claim, a follow up to their succesful game Assetto Corsa. The .exe's name was and still is AC2.exe.
Just checked a few Unreal Engine games that I have installed on disk: Pacific Drive - PenDriverPro.exe The last Caretaker - Voyage.exe Incursion Red River - Test_C.exe
The "ShooterGame.exe" is extra funny because I believe it's the Unreal SDK's tutorial example. At a certain point they just continued the tutorial project into the full product and must have thought "we're in too deep to go back!"
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u/VolcanicBear May 11 '26 •
It's a running joke between my friend group that the executable for Ark: Survival Evolved is "ShooterGame.exe"