This version of the game from Gearbox Software is from September 2000 (yes, this was the same team that worked on this role back then, later known for Brothers In Arms and later the Borderlands IP…).

And this time it’s for the SEGA Dreamcast! As in the case of another news item today (Grand Theft Auto III…), it is SEGA’s last desktop console that is linked to this prototype. The Dreamcast version of the game was canceled after the Japanese company decided to stop production of the hardware at the beginning of 2001 (thus sealing the fate of the Dreamcast port of Half-Life, but this was also later leaked on the Internet, so it was immortalized, and Valve didn’t complain).

In the prototype of Half-Life: Blue Shift, for example, we can see that G-Man had the iconic “white door” here before it appeared in Half-Life 2, and it’s perhaps understandable that this version omitted the final chapter, as the final battle of the game is rushed, to say the least, with a single Houndeye and three Hecu enemies to fight. The design of the heads was realistic at first and then cut back from there, while the opposite was done for the guards. The Houndeyes are quite “chunky” and there may be more interesting things to see in this prototype. All we can say is that there are some notable changes!

You can download the September 2000 version of Half-Life: Blue Shift at the link below, and there’s also a PC mod, so if you want to experience what the unfinished Blue Shift looked like in the Steam version, you might want to do that as well. But let’s not do that this year. There’s still a bit of the year left, but it’s worth turning it off for today. Happy New Year!

Source: SEGA Dreamcast Info Games Preservation