Early in Half-Life 2 a Combine policeman throws a drink can on the floor and orders the player to pick it up and put it in the bin. Edge thought that in that moment the player learned “everything they need to know about the world”: this time “the world is there to be grasped”. Valve’s sequel to Half-Life arrived in November 2004, more than a year after its announced date and six years after the first game. It was built on Valve’s own Source engine, and its physics made a tool out of every radiator, saw blade and filing cabinet. Edge gave it ten out of ten. It was also the game that made Steam compulsory, and many buyers spent its launch day waiting to be allowed to play.
Fast facts
- Developer: Valve, near Seattle.
- Publisher: Vivendi Universal Games in the shops (under its Sierra label); Valve on Steam. The Xbox version (2005) came through Electronic Arts.
- Released: 16 November 2004, for Windows PCs.
- Engine: Source, Valve’s own, with a physics engine derived from Havok.
- Writer: Marc Laidlaw.
- Setting: City 17, an eastern European city run by the alien Combine through a human administrator, Dr Breen.
- Sequels: Episode One (2006) and Episode Two (2007); Half-Life: Alyx (2020).
A world to be grasped
Edge put the game on its cover in June 2003. The story, it reported, picked up where the first game left off, with Gordon Freeman now in City 17 alongside Alyx Vance, “daughter of a scientist from the Black Mesa research facility”. What the magazine saw first was the physics. “Every object in the game has its own weight and mass”, and the player could use most of them. In a demonstration, Valve’s Jay Stelly picked up a metal grate to shield Freeman from an automatic gun turret, then threw it at the turret and knocked it over, so that “it continues firing, but now the bullets are harmlessly ricocheting off the floor”. The physics engine inside Source, Edge noted, was “derived from Havok”; Havok’s own staff listed Valve among their clients in the same year.
Source also tied sound and behaviour to surfaces. A texture tagged as metal made bullets “ricochet and ping”, a brick one made “a very different sound, with much more pronounced bullet holes”, and a barrel scraped along a tiled wall would spark and screech. The faces drew as much attention. Valve had researched “the elements that constitute human expression”, and Edge called its characters, with their lip-syncing and skeletal animation, “the most convincing, most impressively life-like characters Edge has witnessed in a game”.
The writer, Marc Laidlaw, later told Edge that the team had never pictured the world beyond Black Mesa as “a positive, nurturing environment”: “There was no point at which we didn’t see the universe as being essentially dark.” Satire and parody, he said, were “too limiting as a fundamental principle”. Valve dropped early ideas for a globe-trotting plot and kept the action in one unnamed eastern European country, and Viktor Antonov’s designs defined the look of the Combine’s architecture.
The gravity gun
The tool that made all this playable was the gravity gun. Edge’s review called it “the core tool, and it’s what makes Half-Life 2 simply sing with entertainment. It can be used to drag objects, pick them up and carry them about… Its second mode can be used to drop, throw or smash them away.” Early on it hurls “metal discs through the bodies of encroaching zombies”; later it rights an overturned buggy, dislodges sticky mines, or turns a filing cabinet into a shield. “Tearing a radiator from a wall and using it to swat a parasitic headcrab, while all the furniture in a room goes tumbling around you, is truly a gaming epiphany.” Computer Gaming World enjoyed the saw blades: the gravity gun “lets you pick up chain-saw blades and shoot them at enemies to slice them in half”.
It also marked a change in what game physics was for. Earlier games had shown physics off through ragdoll corpses; Edge wrote that “finally we have a game in which physics are more than just an excuse for ragdoll deaths”. Looking back in 2010, the magazine judged that physical manipulation of the world had been “an inevitability in the industry”, and that what other games found harder to copy was the rest: the characters, the setting and a story told without taking control away from the player.
Delays, a theft and a lawsuit
Valve had promised the game for 30 September 2003, and it missed the date. In the same weeks its code went missing, at a studio that Edge later reported was “already spending $1 million per month to complete the game”. On 19 September 2003, Computer Gaming World reported, a hacker had got into Valve’s development network and “made off with PC gaming’s biggest prize—the Half-Life 2 source code”. Gabe Newell confirmed it on a fan forum: “Yes, the source code that has been posted is the HL-2 source code.” He said that someone had installed keystroke recorders on Valve’s computers, probably through a hole in Microsoft’s Outlook Express, and asked fans to help trace the source. A freelance writer who assembled the leaked code found that “the E3 demo levels are present and mostly bug free”. A German hacker, Axel Gembe, later admitted breaking into Valve’s network; he was charged in Germany and given a probation sentence, though it was never shown that he was the one who put the code online.
The last obstacle was Valve’s own publisher. Valve had sued Vivendi Universal Games in August 2002 over the sale of its games to internet cafés, and by late 2004 Computer Gaming World reported that the finished game was “ready to ship” and being held up by the dispute, with Steam at the heart of it. The Valve entry tells how the case ended.
Launch day and Steam
Half-Life 2 was the first game that had to be activated through Steam, even when bought as a boxed copy in a shop. On launch day the servers could not cope. Edge’s columnist RedEye spent 35 minutes waiting to authenticate “super-smash Edge 10/10 Half-Life 2”; Computer Gaming World complained that the collector’s edition “takes all day to install because you need to log on to Valve’s overloaded servers even to play the single-player game”. Its readers described “the one- to two-hour, five- or six-step install process”. Valve also shut out about 20,000 Steam accounts that had used a cheat to download the game without paying. Newell later counted the launch as one of Steam’s “two painful periods”, when “we couldn’t handle the capacity” (see Steam).
Reviews
Edge gave the game ten out of ten. “Yes, it’s a linear shooter: a magnificent, breathtaking paragon of the form”, the review said, and “possibly the most exquisitely crafted action game of all time”. It praised the set pieces, from a strider “crashing through a building” to “a floating-barrel counterbalance puzzle”, and the characters: Freeman never speaks, which the others treat as a joke, while Alyx “laughs and shakes her head”.
Computer Gaming World’s editor-in-chief, Jeff Green, refused to review the game at Valve’s offices and waited for the box. He called it “a marvel of design, still one of the best games of 2004”, but not “the greatest Half-Life of all time, an honor I would still give to the first game”. The vehicle sections on an airboat and a scout car “drag on too long”, there were too many creatures from the first game, and the story ended with “a kind of ‘huh?’ moment”. His verdict: “Not the best game ever—or even the best Half-Life ever—but still a stunning achievement.” He took half a star off the score because of Steam, which he called “an obtrusive, user-hostile abomination”.
Sales and later versions
The game sold both in shops and on Steam, and Valve published only its retail figures. In December 2008 it said that Half-Life 2 had sold more than 6.5 million copies at retail in four years, not counting copies sold through Steam.
Valve moved to Electronic Arts after its settlement with Vivendi, and EA published the Xbox version in 2005. Computer Power User, which had made the PC game its game of 2004, found the physics on Xbox “excellent” but thought the version “pales in comparison to the PC”. The story then continued in episodes. Episode One (2006), sold by Valve on Steam and by EA in shops for £20, picked up in the ruins of City 17 under the crumbling Citadel; Edge admired how it “reinstates limits on where you go and what you see”. Episode Two (2007) came in The Orange Box with Portal and Team Fortress 2, which also brought Half-Life 2 to the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. In 2010 Edge was still writing about an “upcoming Episode Three”, but the next game in the series was Half-Life: Alyx (2020), made for virtual-reality headsets.
In November 2024, for the game’s 20th anniversary, Valve folded both episodes into Half-Life 2, added three and a half hours of developer commentary and Steam Workshop support, and released a documentary about the game’s making, covering, in Valve’s words, “Running out of money. Getting hacked, and an early version being leaked online. Being sued by our publisher. Trying to build Steam.”
Released source code
Valve publishes the game code of Half-Life 2, though not the Source engine itself, in its Source SDK 2013 repository on GitHub, opened in June 2013 and still updated. The code is licensed for non-commercial use under Valve’s Source 1 SDK Licence.
Sources
- “Half-Life 2”, Edge issue 124, June 2003, p. 48 onwards: cover feature (the September 30 release date, Alyx Vance, Jay Stelly’s turret demonstration, physics “derived from Havok”, material textures, facial animation, the Source toolkit).
- “The next step for physics”, Edge issue 121, March 2003: Valve among Havok’s long-term clients.
- Half-Life 2 review, Edge issue 143, December 2004, p. 102: the gravity gun, the drink can, the set pieces, “more than just an excuse for ragdoll deaths”, 10/10.
- RedEye column, Edge issue 144, January 2005: waiting 35 minutes to authenticate.
- “Blowing off Steam”, Computer Gaming World issue 246, holiday 2004, p. 34: the Valve–Vivendi dispute and the finished game “ready to ship”.
- Mark Asher, news report on the source-code theft, Computer Gaming World issue 234, January 2004: the 19 September break-in, keystroke recorders, Outlook Express, the leaked code’s E3 levels, Doug Lombardi on Steam accounts.
- News report, Edge issue 130, December 2003: the missed September date and Newell’s forum post (“Yes, the source code that has been posted is the HL-2 source code”).
- Jeff Green, Half-Life 2 review, Computer Gaming World issue 248, February 2005, pp. 78–79, and the editor’s note in the same issue (reviewing from the boxed copy); news pages in the same issue: “Getting Steamed” and the 20,000 disabled accounts.
- Jeff Green, “Still Steamed?”, editorial, Computer Gaming World issue 255, October 2005, p. 15: the half star and “an obtrusive, user-hostile abomination”.
- Retrospective feature, Edge issue 213, April 2010, pp. 69–75: $1 million a month, the missed date, Marc Laidlaw on the setting’s tone, Viktor Antonov, physics as “an inevitability in the industry”, the “upcoming Episode Three”; format list (360, PC, PS3, Xbox) and publisher (Valve/Sierra).
- News report on Valve and Electronic Arts, Edge issue 153, September 2005: EA to publish the Xbox version.
- Half-Life 2 (Xbox) review, Computer Power User volume 5 issue 12, December 2005.
- Half-Life 2: Episode One review, Edge issue 165, August 2006: price and publishers, the Citadel, “reinstates limits”.
- Patrick Klepek, “That Time A German Hacker Leaked Half-Life 2’s Source Code”, Kotaku, 16 October 2015 (web, secondary): Gembe’s admission, probation, and that his uploading the code was never proven. https://kotaku.com/that-time-a-german-hacker-leaked-half-life-2s-source-co-1737015166
- John Leyden, “Half Life hacker refused FBI sting bait”, The Register, 14 November 2008 (web, secondary): Gembe “charged with the Valve hack and sentenced to probation” in Germany. https://www.theregister.com/2008/11/14/half_life_sting/
- “Analysis: Valve’s Lifetime Retail Sales For Half-Life, Counter-Strike Franchises”, Game Developer, 3 December 2008, and “Valve releases Half-Life sales figures”, bit-tech, 4 December 2008 (web, secondary): 6.5 million at retail, excluding Steam. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/game-platforms/analysis-valve-s-lifetime-retail-sales-for-i-half-life-counter-strike-i-franchises and https://www.bit-tech.net/news/gaming/valve-releases-half-life-sales-figures/1/
- Valve, Half-Life 2 store page, Steam (web): release date 16 November 2004. https://store.steampowered.com/app/220/HalfLife_2/
- Valve, “Half-Life 2 20th Anniversary Update”, half-life.com, November 2024 (web). https://www.half-life.com/en/halflife2/20th
- Valve, source-sdk-2013 repository and README, GitHub (web). https://github.com/ValveSoftware/source-sdk-2013
- For Steam, the Vivendi case, The Orange Box and Half-Life: Alyx, see the Steam and Valve entries and their citations.