Thoughts on Half-Life 2 – 20th anniversary

Half-Life, as a series, has always been incredibly formative to not merely what I find enjoyable in games but also in how I view games as an artform and medium. The combination of gameplay, design, and heavy reliance upon environmental storytelling gives them a feeling of timelessness that keeps them enjoyable more than twenty years later.

They are, at their core, beautifully crafted first-person shooters. They’re also built to tell their story through a linear fashion, with a heavy focus on letting the environment tell the story rather than through exposition. I’ve always loved that aspect of them because it means there are very few cuts from gameplay and very few moments where you, the player, have control taken from you to tell that story. It makes those moments poignant and heavy, pushing those feelings of powerlessness and tearing from you your agency. It makes those moments feel painful and beyond your control, leaving you to feel trapped and tense.

What I find, whenever I venture into those games once more, is a delightful satisfaction within them. There’s a familiarity to the games, of course. The music alone sends me back to when I first played them. Then the sounds start, and I hear the environments set within and I’m right back there, swinging a crowbar down a dark corridor, listening for the chittering of a headcrab or babbling of a vortigaunt. Each enemy being unique in profile and sound, letting me mentally prepare for the coming battle through subtle (and sometimes not subtle) cues.

Half-Life 2 came out toward the middle of my junior year in high school. I picked up the large collector’s edition in black which included an XL shirt that was destined to never fit my small frame. I brought it home, installed it, and set up Steam for the first time. My account tells when that happened, 17 November, 2004, the day after release. I came in with a new system in preparation for the game. An AMD Athlon 64 3200+ and an ATI Radeon X700 Pro. I remember being blown away by how realistic the characters and their movements were, with easily readable emotions strengthened by their delightful voice cast that included so many veteran actors like Robert Culp, Robert Guillaume, Louis Gossett Jr, Michelle Forbes, Jim French, Harry S Robins, Michael Shapiro, and Merle Dandridge. The combination of their skills with the skills of the animators and artists at Valve resulted in some of the most realistic and compelling characters in video games.

Half-Life 2 was a tech marvel. The character models and animations were a massive leap forward of course but were hardly the only massive shift. The other area that it really pushed the envelope was with physics. The sheer interactivity of objects in the world, and the ability to lob them willy nilly with the gravity gun made for tremendous fun and replayability. That would eventually lead rise to mods like Garry’s Mod that built their entire premise around physics interaction in a way that was impossible before. Enemy AI was also a leap forward, with them sneaking and working together to try and dispatch the player.

All the while it had tremendous scalability even with older hardware. I remember running it on my older system at the time, a Pentium 4 2.533GHz and a Radeon 9800 Pro. Not a slouch but easily showing its age at the time when technology was blasting forward at an incredible rate. I was able to run it at 1024x768 quite capably on that system and 1280x1024 on my main computer. That it looked as good as it did whilst performant enough to bring a fun experience was almost as wild to see as the game itself.

And, I’ve kept playing through them over time. Each time I build a new computer some of the first games I play are Half-Life and Half-Life 2. I know any system today is more than capable of running them flawlessly but it’s always a fun excuse to run through them once more. It’s also a fun excuse to see how endlessly adaptable GoldSRC and Source are for hardware. They run at 4K flawlessly. They run in ultrawide aplomb, even more so now with the 20^th anniversary update and its update specifically for ultrawide monitors.

It's also a practical question given the ongoing popularity of both engines for developing mods and games today. That said, most games use newer variants of the Source Engine (such as Black Mesa). But the sheer usability and ease for people to get into those engines tells of how robust they are. They provide powerful platforms, albeit with some dust along the way given their age. Something that Valve are incredibly capable of developing is a powerful game engine that scales incredibly well.

I’m not sure where gaming is headed over the next 20 years. But it has been remarkable to see how Half-Life games have always helped to push technology, and gaming as an artform, forward with each release. They also age more gracefully than their contemporaries, with games newer than them feeling to age far worse in less time. There is a certain timelessness with Half-Life. The games are simply great to play over and over. And their draw is incredible, leading to countless passion projects like Black Mesa and the upcoming Half-Life 2 RTX remix. I think they have acted as a high point for people, developers, to aim for with their own projects. That doesn’t mean in shooters, but across all genres and designs. Games where they push boundaries and ignite passion within gamers. Games that leave us in awe and enthusiastic about the medium. All from people who find that fire inside that leads them to raise the bar.