Valve presents a version of Half-Life 2 that we thought was lost… but Gabe Newell and his team have preserved the past!
At the Siggraph graphics conference in 2000, Valve released the Get Your Free TVs demo, 17 minutes of which can be seen below. It’s similar to the first part in some ways, but with some new features. We are somewhere between the GoldSrc and the Source engine, with a darker, more industrial art direction. As Valve mentioned in the art book Half-Life 2: Raising the Bar (more on that later), originally the Combine’s destruction of the Earth’s biosphere would have made the game feel more open and depressing, with green skies.
And the citizens of City 17 would have been wearing hazmat suits instead of cool denim overalls. Also, the architecture of the Breen and Combine would have been more sinister and intimidating… In the demo, we also see an early version of Barney and Alyx, and Dr. Kleiner is barely recognizable. There’s a snowy area with an early version of the Borealis, which would have been a major location in the unrealized third episode (which we wrote about recently). The ship also appeared in the Half-Life 2 beta.
Moving on to the art book, Half-Life 2 is celebrating its 20th birthday, and Valve is celebrating by re-releasing Half-Life 2: Raising the Bar, but in an expanded format. The full development history of the game will be presented, and never-before-seen concept art from the two episodes will be included. Failed ideas and experiments from the third episode are also included. So even if you bought the book in 2004, you might want to pick up the extended edition, which will be available sometime in 2025.
We’ve already written that Half-Life 2 and its two episodes are free (there’s still time to add them to your account on Steam before tomorrow night) and available in a bundle as a result of an update. Well, according to SteamDB, interest in Gordon Freeman’s adventure is at an all-time high. We’re not kidding: 56726 people are currently playing Half-Life 2. The all-time record? 56726 concurrent players… the game is breaking records. Even when The Orange Box was released in 2007, it didn’t have this many players!
Keep it up…
Source: PCGamer
