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10 Years of Half-Life
intenscia writes "After 10 years of Half-Life and dealing with its silent protagonist Gordon Freeman, ModDB looks back at everything that Valve made possible with the release of its first game. The freedom and flexibility the Gldsource platform gave modders resulted in a plethora of user-generated content such as Counter-Strike and Team Fortress. In this article they take a brief look at the mods that made the jump to retail as well as the top non-commercial mods that have become perennial classics."
Planet Half-Life used the occasion to look back at the history of Valve. Valve is celebrating by offering the original Half-Life for less than a dollar on Steam.
Not trying to be smarmy or anything, but is there anyone out there who hasn't played this already? Didn't it sell like 400 million copies? Looks like they stand to pull in about $6 off the deal (yes I know that's not the point).
What I'm saying is just a testament to how incredibly awesome and groundbreaking this game was.
We figured out a long time ago that it's easier to elect seven judges than to elect 132 legislators.
20? How does that work?
I was newly married and this game kept me up to all hours. My wife would come into the basement at 3 am and reprimand me.
I've notices hl2 for original xbox used at gamestop and I hesitate to buy it. It may take over my nights again - and i have three kids now.
When a new Quake comes out, they open up the old engine. The original Half Life was OpenGL if I recall, and could be ported by the community to Mac, Linux, etc. etc. etc. Selling the game for $1 is a nice move. Opening the engine (a decade old engine that won't hurt Valve in the least) would be a better move.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Half-Life wasn't the first FPS game to capture my attention but it was the first to enthrall me to such a degree that I went out and bought the damn thing. Years of Counter-Strike, Natural Selection, Rocket Crowbar and other various interesting mods later, I'm damn glad I did. I garnered a metric fuckton of fun from that game and it feels like it's been a lot longer than 10 years since its release.
/salute
But then I guess that's what one can expect from a Valve game. Blizzard has a nice attitude: "when it's ready". Valve goes one further: "when it ready and only if it's fun". When HL2 was delayed by a year or so there was a lot of complaining... but nobody was complaining when that thing was released.
Here's to one of the best games ever released!
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, watch it -- I'm huge!
User-generated? I don't think so. The original TF mod for Quake was made by TFS, which was just a group of players at the outset, but they were hired by Valve. Team Fortress Classic was a Valve product.
This is the NFL, which stands for "Not For Long" if you keep making those bulls*** calls.
Quake 1 gave us Team Fortress, not Valve, not Half Life. (yes, Valve hired the dev team behind TF, but that doesn't mean they gave it to us originally)
A lot of people forget how generally unprecedented it was at the time for an action game to begin with half an hour of context and tone establishment instead of throwing you right into the fire.
Traveling through the massive subterranean tram network, checking in at the desk and grabbing your equipment to start what would have been a normal day's work... As the tension is slowly built, something goes wrong, and then aliens show up out of that, the effect is something vastly more profound than jumping into Quake and shooting stroggs straight off the bat.
Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
They should have done it EA way by making them freeware.
(EA released C&C and C&C:Red Alert as freeware at C&C 12th and 13th birthday)
...former Microsoft employees Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington, instrumental minds behind nearly three generations of the Windows operating system.
And I have nearly three eyes.
Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
> 10 Years of Half-Life
So Whole-Life is 20 years? Oh...
Last line of the summary?
Christ, I know people don't RTFA here, but man, you didn't even RTFS!
I read the user submitted summary, but I guess I missed the editor bits. Not to mention I had been skimming for the magic 98 number.
And is it my fault I only expect the editors to edit, not add more links? ;)
Don't say I didn't RTFA, I read about this before Slashdot posted it, straight from the horse's mouth, on Steam's News page. So forgive me for skimming when reading a second news item about it. :)
...
OK OK so I screwed up, but you don't have to be so mean about it. :(
I bought Half-Life "Game of the Year Edition" on sale at CompUSA for $9.99 in the spring of 1999. It has spoiled me. When I think of all the fun I've gotten out of that $10 over the past nine years (I still play CS and DoD) it is just staggering. I'll venture out on a limb and say that was the best $10 I have ever spent.
Carbon 14 appears to have a less flighty fanbase.
Well it certainly revolutionized jumping.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
I remember playing it when it first came out and the bloody three tentacles and having to crawl around and toss grenades to distract the thing. Still have my unreal (gorgeous levels and I think the first game with decent AI for the baddies but really rubbish story and the series went dead with II) and quake II (kill lots of things, get key, open door, shoot boss much like the first one except with an actual boss at the end) discs from that time too but the original HL was the game that stood out simply because of the tight scripted story that made the game interesting. Didn't hurt that they developed the multiple PoVs with the other games, something I really wish they'd do with HL2.
Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
If you haven't played it already, take a look at Minerva. You can get it from its own website or even as featured mod on Steam.
I bet there are a fair number who bought the game and still haven't played it, and an even larger number who bought the game and just played the single player story for a few minutes.
:).
What did they play instead? Counter-Strike...
Must be thousands of kids in cybercafes who just click the "Play Counter-Strike" shortcut on the desktop and don't even realize that Half-Life has a single player game
Havent checked, but is the dow lower now than 10 years ago?
Talk about rewind.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Sorry but I find that just a little hard to believe. There's been a system in place since Steam was released to clear up any sort of problem that could arise from a stolen account or stolen CD key.
Just as a related aside, a month ago I purchased Day of Defeat: Source for cheap at a local store, only to find out after entering the CD key that it was "already taken". I contacted VALVe's Steam support system, emailed a picture of the box and scan of the CD key insert, and was up and running within 24 hours.
..but the original TF was a Valve product from day one. It even came on the original disc. You know, the software version where the guided RPG had not yet been nerfed. The version where I dominated _any_ map by just standing on a RPG ammo spawn point with a good view of the level and killed everything in sight or just out of sight. Sadly, they 'fixed' this in the very first patch :(
Well, that's nice, but adventure games had told a story in game, without cut scenes for years. I don't think that, say, any of the 2d King's Quest games or old Lucas adventures stopped to give you a pre-rendered movie to advance the plot.
In 3D? Well, Ultima Underworld 1 and 2 managed to advance the plot just fine without cut-scenes, and if first person 3D.
So let's not go pretending that HL invented it all. HL just brought to FPS what every other game had already been doing for a decade.
Which is mildly ironic, because the rise of the FPS and the near-extinction of adventure games was merely because most publishers had discovered they can get away with not having much scripting in a FPS. The deluge of Doom clones wasn't because nobody had invented storytelling yet, but because they discovered they can get away with skipping that in these newangled FPS games. (Newfangled for that time, anyway.) Scripting and animating for such in-game story telling were rising, but it looked like people will buy a FPS even if you don't bothered with any of that, so publishers gave us just that then. The deluge of such plain arcade shooters was just because they were _cheap_.
HL did do us the service of (A) setting the gamers' expectations high for the new genre too, and (B) proving that you can still make money even so, but otherwise there was nothing revolutionary about it. It just brought back some things that Adventure games had had for years. Yes, some of them in 3D and/or first person.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I agree. Probably the best game ever made. But it's HL's birthday, not Zelda's. Don't ruin it's party!
Lies..
I bought HL2 solely to try the mods (specifically Insurgency; NOT CS:S) .. same reason I bought UT2004 (specifically for Red Orchestra, and some of the other UT2k4 mods) and UT2007 aka: UT3..
I think I put a total of 10 hours into both CS and CS:S over my entire life.
As for HL2, I've only gotten like an hour into it (the stage where you're escaping via sewers/aquaducts).. although it's a compelling scenario (semi-post-apocy distopia, hell ya!), the linear-story FPS as a whole has lost most of it's appeal to me.
----- The internet has given everyone the ability to have their voice heard equally as loud.. even if they shouldn't be
Wrong. The market size was actually still growing. The last King's Quest game, for example, actually sold more copies than any of its predecessors.
But the prices for all that scripting and animating in 3D were rising even faster. That same game I mentioned had cost 10 times more to make than the previous one. It sold more copies, but not 10 times more.
_That_ is what nearly killed adventures.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Actually that's the fun part: a FPS back then was _much_ cheaper to make than an adventure. You just needed to license a 3D engine, model a couple of enemies and weapon, have a guy make half a dozen maps, and you had your working FPS for a fraction of what it cost to make an adventure.
That's really what nearly killed adventures. FPS quite often sold less copies than the old adventures (not every FPS was Doom), but cost even less to make, so the chances of ending up with a profit were better.
It was only post-HL that we started expecting scripts and story, and interesting maps, and enemies that behave naturally, etc. That's the service I was claiming that HL did to us all.
And when costs to make a FPS rose too, well, you'll notice that people are making adventure games again these days :P
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
And I have nearly three eyes.
For very small values of three?
As a huge Half-Life one fan, I used to think the same way as you and it took me 18 months after the release of Half-Life 2 to relent and go buy it.
Compared to the obnoxious DRM on BioShock and other modern games (which I refuse to buy or play), Steam is the lesser of two evils for the following reasons:
1. Once installed on your PC, you can put your game disk back in the box for good.
2. You can copy your Steam folder to other PCs as it is and just run the games - any other game and you more than likely need to reinstall it so that certain registry keys are set up correctly.
The downside of Steam is that unlike Half-Life 1 which has a doddle for setting up LAN play, for Steam it's a bit hit-and-miss trying to use one game license for multiple machines on the same LAN (where there's no need to connect anything to the Internet) although you can get it to work. But otherwise, most of my buddies have their own Steam accounts so it really has little effect anyway - plus the number of freebie mods and levels more than makes up for the inconvenience.
I've never bought anything from Steam in the same way that I've never paid for a music download - I like a nice tangible shiny disk when I part with my money.
But Steam *really* isn't as bad as you're making out and if you liked Half-Life 1 then you're doing yourself a disservice by not trying out the stuff in The Orange Box...
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
...Duke Nukem Forever will be 1 year old - if it's ready...
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.