Somehow it’s been twenty years since the release of one of the greatest games of all time, Half Life 2. Much like it’s predecessor, the game left a crater on gamers psyches all over the world, and after finishing Valve’s documentary (which you have to watch here), we couldn’t help but take a moment and commemorate the event.
It kicked off a unique place in time – the Frutiger Aero aesthetic was just taking shape. Movies like The Minority Report and The Matrix: Reloaded had just left strong impressions on a generation about to be fully immersed in the worlds of Deus Ex, Halo, and Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. Keep in mind, these are the same people absorbing the initial impact of records like Drukqs, White Pony and The Fragile as well, so really, a lot was happening.
(We don’t remember this trailer, but we do remember the absolute chokehold this iconic drum n bass track had on us at the time.)
But as funny as it sounds, Valve’s role in the haze of a post-9/11 world was only about to reveal itself, despite having already released one masterpiece, several expansions, and Counter Strike. Valve’s longest-lasting legacy isn’t Half Life 2, or how it set new benchmarks in graphics, physics, mods, and storytelling… it’s the installation process behind it.
Long reduced to a sequence of sexless blue and grey windows, DirectX driver checkpoints, and devastating load times, the installation process was just kind of the deal back then – we clicked where it told us to until we could play. But installations weren’t just a pain for gamers, they caused a lot of roadblocks for developers too, especially when it came to hardware.
Valve originally developed Steam to streamline their internal process for patches and transferring builds, but they got bigger ideas for the software’s application early in the process. Remote delivery systems for things like post-release patches were a budding reality at the time, it was kind of a luxury situation for those with hardline / DSL connections, which weren’t entirely common yet – most people had to rely on whatever they bought from a physical storefront or struggle through with a dialup connection.
(Much has changed with Steam’s user interface, but certainly for the better.)
Suffice it to say, Valve changed the game when they launched Steam in tandem with the release of Half Life 2. You could feel that things were changing, with Valve herding the masses into the age of direct-to-consumer possibility whether we were ready or not. Some would even say they’re doing it again with the handheld Steam Deck, which makes PC gaming functionally mobile, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
Allegedly, developing a game is easier than it’s ever been, and for the most part it’s said that publishing games is getting easier as well. Or at least, developers certainly have more options to consider. As another generation of tech and devices gather just around the corner, it’s actually dawning on us that there are people reading this that were born around the time Steam was launched, so we figured, “Hey kid, now that you’re old enough, here’s a brief recap of what you missed, because everything changed with Half Life 2, and we do mean everything.”
Let’s step briefly back into the early-aughts. Outside of buying a game off the shelf in a physical place like Best Buy, Office Max, or GameStop, renting games became possible as they were formatted to things like discs, decks, and cartridges during the 1990’s. If you didn’t want to buy a game without getting a real taste, renting was just as fast, and you could find just about any fifth generation console game (ie. Nintendo 64, Playstation, Sega Dreamcast) if you were in the right area. If they didn’t have it at the Blockbuster near you, they might have it at the Hollywood Video up the street, or maybe an indie place across town. Hell, by the early 2000’s you could even try your luck with Gamefly, a mail-order rental service similar to the original Netflix that was actually pretty amazing for its time. That’s how we first tried the Playstation 2 Half Life port, Half Life: Decay.
(Half Life: Decay is easily the most anomalous game in the series, but it’s worth the trip.)
However, you couldn’t use any of these methods to enjoy a game if it’s been banned in your country, which brings us to a different method of acquiring games that directly played into Half Life 2’s development, and ultimately the launch of Steam itself: good old fashioned piracy.
It was a big deal back then – if you were there you might remember the ads, because they didn’t age well. “You wouldn’t pirate a move…”, “you wouldn’t pirate a game…” Except for um… yeah, most of actually would. For instance, when dedicated Australian fans of the Grand Theft Auto franchise learned in 2001 that the third installment was to be banned from sale in their country, they turned to the same thing anyone else does in that situation… crime. Hundreds, if not thousands, of Australians torrented the game, a method of online pirating made popular by sites like Limewire and The Pirate Bay where people could host data streams that could be downloaded, and compiled after extraction. Essentially, it’s streaming to a friend, and therefore, illegal. We will say that one of the most interesting parts of torrents / P2P file sharing was that if you left your download active, it would become an upload and you would start seeding. This lightens the load of servers by tapping you in to stream the smaller components, and it made you feel like a badass. It also made it fairly likely that you’d catch a virus and/or a cease and desist request. Simpler times.
(We know we linked it above but still – if you’ve made it this far, you owe it to yourself to watch the doc.)
Bringing things back to the release of Half Life 2 in 2003, Valve was luckily able to leverage Steam’s benefits to the point of neutralizing similar situations for themselves, which was, of course, high on their priority list. According to the documentary, Valve was bleeding money from their struggles to separate from Vivendi, not to mention suffering from the effects of an infamous leak that had Gabe Newell himself considering whether or not he should put his house on the market. Valve’s clever, user-centric way of fighting back and getting past that gamut of pirates and publishers, was a revolution, and developers all over the world took notice. Indeed many of them had to participate in the changeover, as many of them just wanted to play the sequel to Half Life, but then realized “hey, we should probably try something like this.”
When we bought our copy on eBay, it had the Steam account info attached via sticky note. It felt new and intimidating at first, but by 2005 third-party developers were using Steam to publish their own games, and the new era was all but ushered in. Of course, Valve’s upheaval of the system didn’t stop there. From a user standpoint, the most obvious benefits of Steam were product availability and ease of use – you got to play the cool games on the new software and it was relatively easy. But you did have to maintain an online connection, and this was a tether that ended up being a kicker for people looking to preserve a simplified experience. That being said, enough people didn’t mind to the point that it eventually became the norm that, even on consoles, you’re constantly reminded to jack in and make sure everything is up to date. In society at large, being online is just a part of being alive.
(Even Nvidia knows what a big deal Half Life 2 was, and still is today.)
But from a developer standpoint, outside of a streamlined distribution deal, one benefit quickly became somewhat revolutionary in its own right: the early-access model. These days, it’s entirely normal for a game to spend a year in pre-release mode, if not more. It’s not always ideal, but think of it like when a restaurant says they are “soft launching.” Turns out, that’s not a euphemism – it’s what they say when everything looks ready to go, but they’re making sure it’s actually ready in a slightly pressurized environment. So while it’s technically not official, it is functional, but most importantly, invitees have the opportunity to provide important feedback for the final product. Wait, isn’t this what Quality Assurance is for?
Well, funny you should mention that – hiring a Quality Assurance team has always an option (if not a de facto requirement) in the AAA space, but the integrity of said QA seems to be in fairly rapid decline. There are a number of factors we could explore behind this decline, but we’re going to try to stay on target. Without events like E3 (when it was good), it stands to reason that a lazy or inexperienced QA team working with your product can be worse than having none at all. A solo developer might not have any other option than to control each aspect of their vision, and should you be so ballsy, Steam’s embrace of the early-access model actually provides sort of a win/win solution. Not only do players get a taste of the game they’re interested in, the game’s community is bolstered and developers get pointers from people actually interested in the game they’re creating, not just someone paid to make sure you have the right amount of polygons per collision while bored our of their skull.
Of course, this brings us to the other thing developers, professional and amateur alike, were really excited for: mods. We don’t want to go terribly overboard into the mod scene for HL2 because we’re actually doing an interview about one right now that will have a lot more details, but let’s just say that projects like Entropy: Zero, Swelter, and Echoes all show off different strengths of the Source engine, another rabbit hole we’ll have to save for the other article.
(If you’re curious about the potential of the Half Life mod community, check out Kardiner’s video above.)
Man it has been a while since we thought about Gary’s Mod. Anyway. So does all of this bring us up to speed?
Almost.
Ultimately, the launch of Steam revolutionized the marketplace, and the effects are still taking place today. Hell, they’ve even managed to make much of their competition pointless, just by letting them be themselves – we’re occasionally on Epic Games store because we’re learning some basic dev skills with Unreal Engine 5, but there’s nothing there we wouldn’t get from Steam first if we could help it. Why support the people that took Unreal Tournament from us? Did they think we’d forget? Anyway, sorry: beyond that, the pallid imitations of Steam from corporations like Ubisoft and EA are depressingly obvious – those are ploys for money making, not tools to deliver great games.
Like the Half Life series itself, Valve continually uses it’s resources to position itself as a force for innovation. They make stacks of cash as well of course, but what’s important is that they never quite sell out, even when they’re investing in something popular. For instance, to say VR was taking off a few years ago would have been an understatement, but Valve didn’t fire off a salvo of shit games to promote Steamlink – they took an incredible step forward by giving us Half Life: Alyx, which wasn’t just great but gave Half Life fans all over the world hope that maybe, just maybe, they’d don that hazard suit and crowbar one more time. It’s also one of the few cloud or stream-styled games from that era that felt like it was deeper than a tech demo, to the point that people still try to mod it for non-VR playability five years later.
(We still get goosebumps watching this trailer.)
Of course, nothing is perfect – Steam still has some kinks to work out. Most recently we saw a landmark case set a legal precedent for deceased account owners that ruled users own an account, but license the software to play the games, said games don’t qualify as personal property and therefore cannot be passed on as possessions in one’s will or posthumous estate. That’s grim as hell, but it’s also not something we would have even conceived. Perhaps the price of innovation itself is setting those kinds of precedents, but if that’s the case, Valve is ready and willing to pay it. If there’s any company in gaming that we begrudgingly trust to weigh what we want with what we need, it’s Valve… after all, the right developers in the wrong place can make all the difference in the world.
Despite comparisons to the G-man, we more often think of Gabe Newell and co like the Rick Ruben of games – even when we don’t love the results, they continually measure experience, expectations, and visions of the future on a scale that creative minds all over the world are still catching up to.
Okay now that we’ve typed it out that kind of makes us think of the G-man a little differently. Hmmm.
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