Half-Life 2 At Twenty

An upgraded version of Half-Life 2 has been made available to… I was going to say celebrate the twentieth anniversary but perhaps observe is a better term.

In any case, you can’t beat the price, which is free.

The reason I say observe instead of celebrate is that at the end of day, the Half-Life series is up there with A Song of Ice and Fire, as a sprawling saga that will never be finished.

As a story, it is literally an epic fail.

As a game, the Half-Life series rewrote the rule book with each new release. The problem was they’d bet the company each time. That’s not a stable business plan. On top of that Valve’s new support service, Steam Powered was showing potential far beyond supporting their own products. Team Fortress and DOTA were revealing income streams a lot more steady than the build a great game and release it, model. They will never admit it but I suspect the big reason we never got Half-Life 3 was that Valve was the first company to realize the old model of monetization had been superseded.

The last few minutes of this documentary show some of the test footage from the scrapped Half-Life 3 project. A lot of it features the Borealis introduced in Portal 2 and revealed in the Half-Life Chapters. The Ice Gun looks unforgivably amazing.

Anyway, if you ever wanted to be blue-balled by a story that will never be finished, it’s free now.

Here’s the documentary.