I usually talk shit about Valve nowadays, but it’s hard to deny their games are (usually) very good and highly influential. And today (16th November) is the 20th anniversary of one of their greatest: Half-Life 2.

I have over 260 hours in Half-Life 2 and episodes. It would be more, but Valve removed the separate apps for the episodes, so I can’t see the playtime for those anymore. That’s probably more than most people who have played these games, I imagine. Most of that comes from Synergy, a Half-Life 2 mod that lets you play the games in online co-op, which I stumbled upon somehow in around 2012. For me, Synergy is where most of my emotional attachment of HL2 comes from. Not only is it just very fun to play and fuck around with, it got me into server hosting – not just game servers, but self-hosting things in general – and through it I met some friends who I still actively talk to and play with to this very day, and indeed will be playing Synergy with later. Although Synergy seems to be crumbling a bit1, it’s still fun to play.

The actual content of Synergy is Half-Life 2 though, and it’s difficult to say anything about that game that hasn’t already been said. It’s one of the greatest games of all time; if I were one to pick favourites, it’d definitely be up there. The game design and story are amazing. And naturally I have to appreciate its technical features: the Source engine was highly innovative for its time, and still looks amazing today. The openness of its SDK resulted in a dedicated community producing some quality mods and excellent memes.

Valve’s celebration of the anniversary has resulted in them revealing details about the development of HL2 and its episodes. The development of HL2 has always been of interest due to the 2003 leak - the sheer amount of cut content and its difference to the final game has resulted in a fairly large community around obsessing over and recreating it. Though I’m still yet to watch it, there’s an entire 2-hour documentary about HL2 and its episodes (including Episode 3, apparently!) and a few demos from conferences. Probably the most notable one is the SIGGRAPH 2000 demo, featuring “Get Your Free TVs!”, long regarded as the holy grail of Valve cut content, and something I’d never thought would be seen at all, nevermind from Valve themselves. There’s also recordings of the E3 2002 (which was never seen publicly; I suspect Valve actually dug up a period-appropriate version of the game and re-recorded it recently) and E3 2003 demos (which was), in their proper sequences.

There are also apparently plans for a re-released version of Raising the Bar, a book about the development of the game that’s now very old and difficult to buy. Absolutely something I want my hands on. The re-release will also apparently have more stuff including info about the Episodes. I very much look forward to it.

There is not much else I have to say really, but I though I ought to at least do a blog post on this and spew out some thoughts, since HL2 really does mean a lot to me. I dislike modern Valve overall… but it’s hard to undo the quality of their games, or the impacts they’ve had on my life.

  1. There is a development branch that’s frequently updated, but the default branch is several years old; and both have been broken by the HL2 anniversary update. ↩