Half-Life

Steam News · Aug 27

Almost 20 years later, Arkane's founder says he understands why Valve cancelled the Ravenholm game that never was: 'It all came down to the economics'

One of the quiet tragedies of Valve's game library is a standalone Ravenholm game that never came to fruition—it was being worked on by Arkane Studios in the late 2000s, and it would've probably been pretty damn good if Valve had the moolah to make it. Over a decade later, an entire hour of footage would drop online, with reports stating that around 10 levels had been fleshed out prior... Read mor...

Steam News · Aug 1

I was excited for this Quake port of Half-Life until I discovered the creator's wild AI conspiracy theories

Students of first-person shooter history will likely know that the technology Half-Life runs on—GoldSrc—is a heavily modified version of the Quake engine. It's one of many, many branches of id-tech's ancient technological tree. Indeed, you'll still find tiny fragments of Quake code in Valve's modern successor to GoldSrc—Source 2... Read more.

Steam News · Jun 8

A developer got the original Half-Life running on a 2007 Nokia N95 at a respectable 30 fps, plus it even works with a mouse and keyboard

We knew when we gave the original Half-Life a 97% way back in 1998 that it was something special that gamers would be playing years from then. But I don't think we ever thought someone would play it on a Nokia phone at 30 FPS, with mouse and keyboard support. Oh, technology can be a wonderful thing... Read more.

Steam News · May 19

Half-Life owes its existence to one of the game industry's most formative figures—no, not Gabe Newell, the other guy

Gabe Newell is widely regarded as the big name (and the big brain) behind Valve, and thus Half-Life and all that has sprung forth from it. But Valve, Half-Life, and the gamers who love it owe something of an unspoken debt to another man, a foundational games industry titan himself, who despite having no despite having no history or experience in the FPS field immediately saw the potential of Half-...

Steam News · May 18

"That lore terrifies me": Ex-Valve writer Chet Faliszek isn't interested in writing a Half-Life 3, as he wouldn't touch a sequel "with with a 10-foot pole"

Stop it. Stop trying to make him do it. He won't. He will not do it. He's been very clear with you. Yes, you, seemingly random commenter who's suggested that making Half-Life 3 would be a piece of cake. Former Valve writer Chet Faliszek doesn't reckon it would be. The mythical sequel's also not something he'd be interested in penning, because he's not a fan of having to deal with a tonne of establ...

Steam News · May 9

This very normal Half-Life mod lets you play as 'queen of spacetime' Max Caulfield, and it's convinced me that the next Life is Strange should be a full-on boomer shooter

I've always thought Half-Life didn't have enough teenagers in it. I mean, what's an underground research facility for if not navigating the relationship challenges of adolescence? It is, frankly, shocking that Valve so flagrantly neglected this demographic in its depiction of alien invasions and military coverups. I demand justice! I demand action! I demand Max Caulfield!.. Read more.

Steam News · May 5

Elon Musk considered calling OpenAI 'Freeman' because of the bonkers rationale that the Half-Life protagonist represented 'what we are essentially trying to achieve'

The ongoing legal fight between OpenAI co-founders Elon Musk and Sam Altman has seen the release of a treasure-trove of internal documentation from the firm's earliest years. One minor theme has been the presence of Gabe Newell, who gave the company over $20 million and was the sole member of its "informal advisory board" in 2018: he later personally emailed Musk to try and get Hideo Kojima a tour...

Steam News · Apr 11

You can finally rescue Half-Life's guards and scientists thanks to this mod inspired by Lemmings

It always bugged me that you couldn't save the scientists in Half-Life. You'd be trundling through some grey corridor in the bowels of Black Mesa, with one or two or maybe even three lab coat wearing boffins behind you, when they'd suddenly stop for no obvious reason, announcing: "This is as far as I go!" You may not have noticed, Poindexter, but there's an alien invasion happening, and sticking a...

Steam News · Mar 14

22 years later, this classic Half-Life zombie survival mod shambles onto Steam with all new features

Before Valve reinvented cooperative gaming with Left 4 Dead, there was Zombie Panic! A mod for the original Half-Life, Zombie Panic! pitted groups of players against a single, player-controlled brain-muncher. Which doesn't sound all that challenging, except that any survivors killed by the zombie would rise again as zombies themselves, slowly turning the tide against survivors until there was only...

Steam News · Mar 13

Beloved Half-Life zombie mod finally comes to Steam 22 years after it debuted

Are any of you old enough (or Half-Life-obsessed enough) to remember Zombie Panic? One of the original, Infected-style PvP experiences that no doubt inspired similar modes in the likes of Halo and Call of Duty, it put a team of single-life, gun-toting survivors against a rival team of zombies with unlimited respawns. Should a survivor die, they become a zombie and join the other team. While a Sour...