13 Years Later, Does Anybody Care About Half-Life?

Many new studios opened during the first-person shooter boom to grab a little bit of the pie baked by Doom and Quake, but Valve was something different.

Founders Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington had 20 years at Microsoft between them and plenty of money for a hefty safety net when they ventured out on their own in 1996.

It took two years to get Half-Life on shelves.

It was originally scheduled to release in 1997, but Valve held the game—its first commercial product—back for an entire year for extensive playtesting and tweaking.

Newell wanted to create something that was significantly richer and deeper than any other FPS on the market.

It had to be something with a compelling storyline that could compete with movies and novels.

The end result was an instant classic, a game that pushed the medium forward in a bold leap that would usher in a new era in first-person shooters.

Six years later, Half-Life 2 did it again.

Using the company’s new Source engine, the sequel cost $40 million to develop and pushed a new set of envelopes.

Narrative was now expected in first-person shooters, so Newell and company decided to work on something different: physics.

With the introduction of the Gravity Gun, players could now manipulate environmental objects in a way that wasn’t shooting and blowing them up.

Coupled with a much grander story and improved graphics, it was unsurprisingly the most lauded release of 2004.

Instead of a full-fledged sequel to Half-Life 2, Valve released Half-Life 2: Episode 1 in 2006, followed by Episode 2 a year later.

These short games, each around four to six hours, were presented as stopgaps before the next big leap of Half-Life 3.

The company had robust tools, fan demand, and a hefty budget, so it wanted to make the most of the new Source engine.

Both Episodes were popular, successful games, but as time went by and those short experiences were all fans saw aside from cosmetic upgrades and ports, public opinion started to turn.

So where was Half-Life 3? That’s a very good question.

We were supposed to get Half-Life 2: Episode 3 by Christmas 2007, followed at some undefined point by the next full sequel.

Neither of those things happened.

Over the years, there were a number of real and fake leaks from Valve, as well as pranks played by unscrupulous hoaxsters.

These teases and lies got people thinking an announcement had to be forthcoming, but the company unequivocally denied there was any news to share.

Gabe Newell’s design philosophy for the first two games is instructive.

He wanted the first game to be a quantum jump forward from the other FPSes of the era, and the sequel to be the same.

But the pace of hardware and software development is faster than ever before, making it difficult to truly stay ahead of the curve.

Valve knows that—the company has ventured into hardware itself.

It tried the short-lived Steam Machine platform to allow people to play PC games on their TVs.

It also partnered with HTC to build a virtual reality platform.

Money was also an issue.

Over the last few decades, the market for single-player adventures has contracted significantly.

The era of “games as a service,” where new content is continually doled out and players spend additional money beyond the game’s purchase price, transformed the way developers and publishers work.

Valve took full advantage of that with Team Fortress 2 and DOTA 2, two products that have given the company healthy, continuous revenue streams.

Both are multiplayer, are free to play but have a thriving market in cosmetic items, and have built a rock-solid player base that looks to remain stable well into the future.

Those games are like the bus—it’s not spectacular, but it’s always running.

Half-Life 3 is a moon shot in comparison, a huge risk that could lead to even huger rewards.

Which leads us to ask...

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from observing Valve for the last two decades, it’s that you can never count it out.

The company’s reputation for secrecy has shocked the world before, with the announcement of the Valve Index VR headset one of the most recent.

So even though there’s no external buzz about Half-Life 3, that doesn’t mean gears aren’t turning inside.

However, Valve’s notorious self-organizing management structure might be the biggest obstacle to completing Half-Life 3.

Unlike nearly every other company on Earth, Valve employees work in a virtually flat structure with no hierarchical oversight.

Instead, employees are expected to find projects they believe they can contribute to and self-organize into teams.

That philosophy lends itself well to incremental improvement on existing software, but maybe not so much on something as massive as a genre-defining AAA game.

In the early days, the entire team was focused on a single product, and was able to use Newell’s financial padding to extend development until it was completed.

Now Valve is a many-headed hydra, responsible not only for game development but also managing the largest retail platform for PC gaming in the world, with nearly 100 million active Steam users.

It’s not surprising that serving this many masters has brought focus away from the franchise that made the company famous.

In 2017, an anonymous (but vetted) Valve developer told Game Informer that there was “no such thing as Half-Life 3.” That statement has been contradicted by other former Valve employees, most notably Marc Laidlaw, the lead writer of the first two games.

After leaving the company in 2016, he posted “Epistle 3” on his blog, which many believe was a thinly disguised version of the story for the in-development game.

You have to think that people were working in some way on the sequel, but nothing was ever completed enough to announce to the public.

What’s interesting about Half-Life: Alyx, though, is that initial reports have the game clocking in at around 15 hours to play from start to finish.

That’s about as long as each of the other mainline Half-Life games.

So even though it’s not a sequel in name, it certainly does the job of advancing the long-abandoned narrative.

When I wrote this last week, Half-Life: Alyx wasn't even in the top 10 wishlisted games on Steam; it's now sitting at No.

10.

You can chalk some of that up to it requiring a VR headset to play, but it just doesn’t feel...

huge, like we thought a new Half-Life would.

The release and critical reception of the first Half-Life instantly cemented Valve as one of the most trusted developers in the game industry.

It could have blown it, but instead managed to do even better with the sequel.

In the early 2000s, “what Valve was up to” became a major topic in the games press.

Speculation on Half-Life 3 resulted in millions of page views, but with each hoax and denial, that interest waned ever further.

The launch of Steam in 2003 might have also contributed to that.

Valve’s distribution platform, originally created to push patches for its games to users and minimize downtime, opened up to third-party developers in 2005 and led the charge for digital game sales.

Steam now sells over $1 billion in games every year.

What this means for the company—aside from huge profits—is that Valve is in your house, every time you boot your PC.

There’s no distance in a weird way.

Instead of the mystique of an isolated group of geniuses laboring away on the next great FPS, Valve was now like a utility company, dependably delivering content to your door.

The relationship that gamers have come to expect with developers has also changed dramatically.

Staffers at all sorts of companies post publicly on Twitter and communicate with fans in numerous ways to build hype early on in the cycle.

Valve’s notorious Chinese wall with the public makes that impossible.

We let Steam into our houses, but we have no clue what Valve’s doing in theirs, and the company seems deeply disinterested in the standard industry pre-release hype process.

Finally, many of the key personnel behind the original Half-Life games have left the company.

Gabe’s still there, of course, but it’s like a band with only the lead singer remaining.

At the end of the day, the Half-Life phenomenon was tied to a specific time, as first-person shooters were coming to prominence as one of the most successful gaming genres.

Now that the rest of the world has caught up to what Valve was doing, we might not need them to lead the way any longer.

In some ways, it feels like Alyx is just an excuse for the company to sell more Index VR headsets, a “killer app” for a system that costs $999 in its own right.

While this strategy might be completely fair, for those of us who grew up with Half-Life, it seems sort of cheap.

But who knows! We haven’t played Alyx, and maybe it’s got what it takes to revitalize the genre one more time. 

Many new studios opened during the first-person shooter boom to grab a little bit of the pie baked by Doom and Quake, but Valve was something different.

Founders Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington had 20 years at Microsoft between them and plenty of money for a hefty safety net when they ventured out on their own in 1996.

It took two years to get Half-Life on shelves.

It was originally scheduled to release in 1997, but Valve held the game—its first commercial product—back for an entire year for extensive playtesting and tweaking.

Newell wanted to create something that was significantly richer and deeper than any other FPS on the market.

It had to be something with a compelling storyline that could compete with movies and novels.

The end result was an instant classic, a game that pushed the medium forward in a bold leap that would usher in a new era in first-person shooters.

Six years later, Half-Life 2 did it again.

Using the company’s new Source engine, the sequel cost $40 million to develop and pushed a new set of envelopes.

Narrative was now expected in first-person shooters, so Newell and company decided to work on something different: physics.

With the introduction of the Gravity Gun, players could now manipulate environmental objects in a way that wasn’t shooting and blowing them up.

Coupled with a much grander story and improved graphics, it was unsurprisingly the most lauded release of 2004.

Instead of a full-fledged sequel to Half-Life 2, Valve released Half-Life 2: Episode 1 in 2006, followed by Episode 2 a year later.

These short games, each around four to six hours, were presented as stopgaps before the next big leap of Half-Life 3.

The company had robust tools, fan demand, and a hefty budget, so it wanted to make the most of the new Source engine.

Both Episodes were popular, successful games, but as time went by and those short experiences were all fans saw aside from cosmetic upgrades and ports, public opinion started to turn.

So where was Half-Life 3? That’s a very good question.

We were supposed to get Half-Life 2: Episode 3 by Christmas 2007, followed at some undefined point by the next full sequel.

Neither of those things happened.

Over the years, there were a number of real and fake leaks from Valve, as well as pranks played by unscrupulous hoaxsters.

These teases and lies got people thinking an announcement had to be forthcoming, but the company unequivocally denied there was any news to share.

Gabe Newell’s design philosophy for the first two games is instructive.

He wanted the first game to be a quantum jump forward from the other FPSes of the era, and the sequel to be the same.

But the pace of hardware and software development is faster than ever before, making it difficult to truly stay ahead of the curve.

Valve knows that—the company has ventured into hardware itself.

It tried the short-lived Steam Machine platform to allow people to play PC games on their TVs.

It also partnered with HTC to build a virtual reality platform.

Money was also an issue.

Over the last few decades, the market for single-player adventures has contracted significantly.

The era of “games as a service,” where new content is continually doled out and players spend additional money beyond the game’s purchase price, transformed the way developers and publishers work.

Valve took full advantage of that with Team Fortress 2 and DOTA 2, two products that have given the company healthy, continuous revenue streams.

Both are multiplayer, are free to play but have a thriving market in cosmetic items, and have built a rock-solid player base that looks to remain stable well into the future.

Those games are like the bus—it’s not spectacular, but it’s always running.

Half-Life 3 is a moon shot in comparison, a huge risk that could lead to even huger rewards.

Which leads us to ask...

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from observing Valve for the last two decades, it’s that you can never count it out.

The company’s reputation for secrecy has shocked the world before, with the announcement of the Valve Index VR headset one of the most recent.

So even though there’s no external buzz about Half-Life 3, that doesn’t mean gears aren’t turning inside.

However, Valve’s notorious self-organizing management structure might be the biggest obstacle to completing Half-Life 3.

Unlike nearly every other company on Earth, Valve employees work in a virtually flat structure with no hierarchical oversight.

Instead, employees are expected to find projects they believe they can contribute to and self-organize into teams.

That philosophy lends itself well to incremental improvement on existing software, but maybe not so much on something as massive as a genre-defining AAA game.

In the early days, the entire team was focused on a single product, and was able to use Newell’s financial padding to extend development until it was completed.

Now Valve is a many-headed hydra, responsible not only for game development but also managing the largest retail platform for PC gaming in the world, with nearly 100 million active Steam users.

It’s not surprising that serving this many masters has brought focus away from the franchise that made the company famous.

In 2017, an anonymous (but vetted) Valve developer told Game Informer that there was “no such thing as Half-Life 3.” That statement has been contradicted by other former Valve employees, most notably Marc Laidlaw, the lead writer of the first two games.

After leaving the company in 2016, he posted “Epistle 3” on his blog, which many believe was a thinly disguised version of the story for the in-development game.

You have to think that people were working in some way on the sequel, but nothing was ever completed enough to announce to the public.

What’s interesting about Half-Life: Alyx, though, is that initial reports have the game clocking in at around 15 hours to play from start to finish.

That’s about as long as each of the other mainline Half-Life games.

So even though it’s not a sequel in name, it certainly does the job of advancing the long-abandoned narrative.

When I wrote this last week, Half-Life: Alyx wasn't even in the top 10 wishlisted games on Steam; it's now sitting at No.

10.

You can chalk some of that up to it requiring a VR headset to play, but it just doesn’t feel...

huge, like we thought a new Half-Life would.

The release and critical reception of the first Half-Life instantly cemented Valve as one of the most trusted developers in the game industry.

It could have blown it, but instead managed to do even better with the sequel.

In the early 2000s, “what Valve was up to” became a major topic in the games press.

Speculation on Half-Life 3 resulted in millions of page views, but with each hoax and denial, that interest waned ever further.

The launch of Steam in 2003 might have also contributed to that.

Valve’s distribution platform, originally created to push patches for its games to users and minimize downtime, opened up to third-party developers in 2005 and led the charge for digital game sales.

Steam now sells over $1 billion in games every year.

What this means for the company—aside from huge profits—is that Valve is in your house, every time you boot your PC.

There’s no distance in a weird way.

Instead of the mystique of an isolated group of geniuses laboring away on the next great FPS, Valve was now like a utility company, dependably delivering content to your door.

The relationship that gamers have come to expect with developers has also changed dramatically.

Staffers at all sorts of companies post publicly on Twitter and communicate with fans in numerous ways to build hype early on in the cycle.

Valve’s notorious Chinese wall with the public makes that impossible.

We let Steam into our houses, but we have no clue what Valve’s doing in theirs, and the company seems deeply disinterested in the standard industry pre-release hype process.

Finally, many of the key personnel behind the original Half-Life games have left the company.

Gabe’s still there, of course, but it’s like a band with only the lead singer remaining.

At the end of the day, the Half-Life phenomenon was tied to a specific time, as first-person shooters were coming to prominence as one of the most successful gaming genres.

Now that the rest of the world has caught up to what Valve was doing, we might not need them to lead the way any longer.

In some ways, it feels like Alyx is just an excuse for the company to sell more Index VR headsets, a “killer app” for a system that costs $999 in its own right.

While this strategy might be completely fair, for those of us who grew up with Half-Life, it seems sort of cheap.

But who knows! We haven’t played Alyx, and maybe it’s got what it takes to revitalize the genre one more time.