Trivia / Half-Life

• Breakthrough Hit: This game put Valve Software on the map as one of the premiere game studios.
• Creator Backlash: Valve seems to have this attitude towards Half-Life: Source. After the 25th Anniversary update for the original release, the company officially declared it the "Definitive edition", then limited the visibility of Source (hid it from the Steam store, but still allowed it to be bought if one is directly linked to the URL). They then went on to imply that the main reason it wasn't pulled from Steam completely was that the "Source Engine community" still used the assets from it.
• Dueling Works: The game was released in 1998, a year with powerful releases such as SiN (which came out two weeks earlier), Blood II: The Chosen (which came out the day after), Starsiege: Tribes and Unreal, among other titles solely in the FPS field. Although Valve feared the former would crush them, neither of those titles stood a chance, and became the overall Game of the Year.
• Hostility on the Set: Dario Casali's developer commentary details some flare-ups during the game's production, when the company was new, didn't know each other, and had little experience shipping a game. It was fairly common to complain and insult each other over company-wide emails. In one instance, an "unnamed CEO"^note  accompanied by a picture of Gabe Newell played "Residue Processing" and complained to the entire company that the level designers didn't know how to build levels wide enough to accommodate enemy pathfinding, even though Casali had been instructed that "Residue Processing" wasn't supposed to have any enemies in it. After getting into a heated exchange over email, Casali said the best advice he'd ever been taught was to wait 24 hours before sending a grievance email.
• Model Dissonance: Modders know about a tool called Half-Life Model Viewer. It enables you to view any model in the game. Doing that you'll soon discover that every weapon's view model^note the one you see yourself holding is not only incomplete^note missing the parts that aren't onscreen but also widens towards the front to make them look more perspective-authentic.
• Refitted for Sequel:
  • Female scientists were planned, with a story bit involving one betraying Gordon and sending soldiers after him. They were cut due to memory limitations of the limited hardware in 1998, though the base idea would later be realized in Half-Life 2 with Dr. Mossman - who, in a Development Gag, presents herself as a rival to Gordon who he never knew existed.
  • An idea for Xen was that Gordon would end up causing a Vortigaunt revolt, winning them over as allies. While the revolt was cut, the base idea would later be used in Half-Life 2.
  • Dr Gina Cross was, at one point, intended to be Gordon's spouse and a playable character, with the player choosing between her or Gordon at the start of the game. The character you didn't choose would be an NPC you would encounter and interact with throughout the game, but Valve considered the idea unfeasible at the time and Gina was recycled into the holographic instructor for the Hazard Course, then later became a playable character in Decay.
  • Valve planned several multiplayer gamemodes beyond Deathmatch, but was forced to cut them due to time constraints. This video shows remnants of a cut cooperative mode left in the "Subtransit" multiplayer map. A cooperative mode would finally be realized with Half-Life: Decay.
• Throw It In!: According to the 25th Anniversary documentary, the G-Man came about this way. One of the set dressing pieces created for "Anomalous Materials" was a scientist talking to a businessman with a briefcase. Someone pointed out that this businessman looked creepy, and it was suggested that they make him the overarching big bad of the story.
• Troubled Production: As covered by The Final Hours of Half-Life and the 25th Anniversary documentary, the game became so ambitious that Valve was forced to cancel other projects to focus their efforts. Initially given a release date of November 1997, Valve pushed it back a full year after getting negative feedback from playtesters, with the setpiece design coming from the team placing every possible idea in a demo level out of desperation. 1998 was a year of brutal crunch development as the game was effectively rebuilt from the ground up, with developers pulling all-nighters on the regular and relying on internal committees named "cabals" to manage design aspects. Roughly two months before the release, the source code control system of Valve "exploded", resulting in a catastrophic loss of data and forcing the team to recover game code from various employee computers to complete development.
• Vaporware: A Mac (that is classic Mac OS, not Mac OS X) version was planned, developed, and close to releasing in 1999 when Valve suddenly pulled the plug. A Mac version wouldn't see release until an OS X port was released in 2013, but it most likely uses none of the code from the original port attempt.
• What Could Have Been: It has its own page.
• Working Title: Quiver, which is a double Shout-Out to The Mist^note The game's tone and plot owe much to it, by Valve's admission and Quake.^note Half-Life was built on a modified Quake engine

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