Valve’s two-hour documentary is packed with fascinating information about the studio and the 20-year-old Half-Life 2.

The soon-to-be-released Half-Life 2: Raising the Bar art book (we wrote about it before) and the big Half-Life 2 beta leak from 2003 have already revealed some concepts from Valve. Among the leak’s files were designs for an icebreaker ship that would have made a small underwater trip to an underwater base. This was also featured in Half-Life 2: Episode 3, but didn’t come to fruition.

According to Marc Laidlaw, the game’s writer, Valve experimented with a lot of things in the first two years, and a lot of the storylines that were originally implemented didn’t really connect to Black Mesa. One of the ideas was that several alien species would invade Earth. According to David Speyrer, an engineer, three species were planned. The warrior, insect, and spy species were planned. There was also a Prague-like city that was close enough to what eventually became City 17. According to the art book, Prague, Sofia, and Paris inspired the city, but it was more like City 40 and City 49. These were also dominated by aliens, and visiting them would have been redundant. However, the three cities, three races principle would have made sense…

“I remember we were really ambitious in the beginning. I remember we were designing, what, four cities at one point? Prague, Jerusalem, Chicago, Los Angeles, I think. We had an Arctic base, an underwater base, an icebreaker ship, a plane sequence that crashed into a skyscraper that we cut right after 9/11. We had several Combine bases in the wasteland, we had the Air Exchange where they took the atmosphere from Earth, we had a train depot, and so on. We really obviously had to scale back what we were trying to do, but it’s okay to go a little crazy in the beginning,” said level designer David Riller.

According to Speyrer, this large scale was due to the second game syndrome. They wanted to top the performance of the first game, so they came up with some impractical ideas. After a tour on a real icebreaker, they realized how difficult it would be to make combat fun in such a confined space, so they scrapped the idea. Laidlaw explained that many of these early concepts were abandoned because Valve’s Gabe Newell kept asking, “How can this be Half-Life? He suggests that the only way they made Half-Life 2 in its final form was by bringing back the scientists from the first game, because that tied the sequel directly to the first game.

Valve was in a lawsuit with Vivendi at the time. They owned Sierra Entertainment, so they published the first Half-Life, and they owned the IP. Only the publisher crossed the line when they started selling Counter-Strike in Asia without Valve’s knowledge, which started as a Half-Life game. Vivendi used a lot of dirty tricks to get the IP out of Valve’s hands (even pulling Newell’s then-wife into the lawsuit). The lawsuit dragged on for years, and Newell nearly declared personal bankruptcy to keep Valve alive. Scott Lynch, who had previously run Sierra, was Valve’s chief operating officer, and he was constantly working to make deals to keep Valve alive (and Lynch’s wife was also involved in the lawsuit)…

“I started working on a deal with a major publisher for Counter-Strike 2. So we’re ready to sign. We’re really kind of running on fumes at this point. And then we get a call and they’re like “yeah, we changed our mind, we’re not doing the deal. I remember one conversation with Gabe, he was like ‘so how fucked are we? And I was like “well we’re kind of screwed. We can probably reformat everything we do, but that means we’re laying people off, and we still had the huge uncertainty of what was going to happen with the lawsuit. I immediately started chasing another publisher and we were able to make a deal with another publisher for Counter-Strike 2. When we got the deal done, Gabe was really into knives at that point, and as a gift for the parties, he made a knife that said Counter-Strike 2 on it,” Lynch said. The deal was done sometime in May 2003, and the publisher may have been Electronic Arts, as they distributed the retail copies of Half-Life 2…

The case ended in April 2005, and Valve won: Vivendi was no longer allowed to distribute Valve games, and the IPs in question all went to Gaben. What Lynch thinks of as Counter-Strike 2 was probably 2004’s Counter-Strike: Source, where Valve and Turtle Rock worked together on the Source engine. It was first bundled with Half-Life 2 before being released as a standalone: “So the deal structure was, after we ship Half-Life 2, if you decide that you don’t want to keep moving forward then you can just decide to terminate the deal and we’ll pay the money back. That ended up happening. So… maybe a good choice, because it took us a long time to ship Counter-Strike 2. Through some more depositions Vivendi figured out that we’d gotten this new infusion of capital, and kind of lost their mind trying to figure out how did that happen? Because clearly part of their strategy was running us out of money,” Lynch added.

So Vivendi has essentially started World War 3 against Valve. “It’s not a legal strategy. It’s basically trying to intimidate you, saying ‘not only are we going to take all this money from the company, we’re going to bankrupt you. Publishers in the industry at that time were used to being able to bully developers, right? So this was as much about asserting power as it was about optimizing a financial outcome,” Newell said of the lawsuit.

Newell even listed his own home and admitted that they were all in because they had very little money left. He also admitted that he was a little weird because he was not stressed: “So I don’t think it was super stressful for me, right, I mean it didn’t really bother me. I was diving in South Africa recently and a shark tried to bite me a couple of times and the people around me were way more freaked out than I was. I was like ‘oh, a shark is trying to bite me, I should get away from the shark,’ whereas other people were like [high-pitched voice] ‘oh, a shark! It’s trying to bite somebody! I think that’s just the way I’m wired. I don’t think it’s something that speaks to my character or anything, it’s like I just don’t seem to get particularly excited about risk, which probably means that sometimes I take more risks than most healthy people would. Which can be a positive thing, or you can wreck a bunch of other people’s lives by being in the neighborhood of your risk indifference,” Newell added.

So you can really say he’s got balls…

Source: PCGamer