Half-Life 2 is 10 years old

One of the most legendary games of the studio Valve was released November 16, 2004

After six years of development and several shifts in the release date, the game with a budget of 40 million dollars hit the shelves and created a real sensation.

The unanimous opinion of critics about the success was not prevented even by a hacker attack , as a result of which the public was surprised to learn about the little deception of a large corporate executive. The fact is that at the exhibition E3 was shown a technical demo version of the game . The expectations from the illustration of the possibilities were so great that the game even before the release received several awards.

Valve promised that the game would be ready by September 2003. This did not happen because of the next postponement. But on October 2, the web-based sources appeared on the Internet. Gabe Newell even asked the community for help in catching a hacker . Together with the source code, the 22-year-old German Axel Djembe, like millions of gamers, was eagerly awaiting release, dragged out of the company's corporate network and technical demonstration , which was deeply scripted. Almost everything that was shown at E3 was not the work of AI, but only a set of ready-made scenes.
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The leak nearly frustrated the development process, the cost of which cost one million a month. Designers seriously wondered if it would kill the company. But Valve survived and released the game, the innovations of which to this day are imitated by others.

Even with its beautiful for that era of graphics, it was very deeply optimized. Half-Life 2 officially came out on the original Xbox, and the technical characteristics of this console were extremely modest: a 733 MHz Pentium III variant, 64 MB RAM and a video processor similar in power to the GeForce 4 Ti4200. The game fits beautifully on many modern media centers, the insides of which are intended only for streaming pictures from a more powerful device.

Half-Life has made a number of innovations in the industry: it was one of the first seamless games, the gameplay of which began and ended without cutscenes. An illusion of presence in the real world arose, the boundaries of which were difficult to sense. This effect was created by a loving attitude to detail - even cockroaches have an artificial intellect : they are afraid of a sharp drop in light and other creatures and run to food by smell. Where is any simulator of dogs with interactive fish to the masterpiece of 1998.

And Half-Life 2 successfully took the baton of the founder of new products in the industry. The story's background is not told by kilobytes of text or dialogues, the user can draw conclusions about what happened as if he lives in a game situation. The eyes of the player stop in the right places skillful level-design.

Throwing objects and the damage caused by it today is not surprising, but this was not always the case. Thanks to the gravitational cannon, any sufficiently heavy or sharp object could become a weapon. Already in 2005, its analogue will appear in Doom 3: Resurrection of Evil. In addition to the real need to save the ammunition, in some locations of Half-Life 2 there were a lot of simple physical puzzles, competently diluting the monotonous scenes of chases and shootouts.

Breakthrough was and facial animation. In favor of it, even had to change the plot - an air exchange station was cut out, forcing the heroes to carry half of the game on their gas masks. But it was really worth it: now the characters at the expense of real emotions were people, not cartoon images.

The behavior of artificial intelligence, animation in general, and sound have become much better. Again, today it seems self-evident. But we do not consider the " Seven Samurai " from the standpoint of modern shooting techniques, we will always remember that Akira Kurosawa showed many methods for the first time.

In 2004, Half-Life 2 was named the game of the year 35 times. To date, approximately 12 million copies of the game have been sold. To this day, it remains one of the best-selling in history.


But not only in sales was the value of this product. The game was a great demonstration of the technical capabilities of the Source engine. In essence, the gravity gun was intended to illustrate an unprecedented level of interactivity. Best of all, the public's delight is characterized by a quiet “wow” when showing at E3 a particularly sophisticated fall of barrels .

The engine can be configured to render both cartoon scenes (Team Fortress 2) and photo-realistic graphics. Source is available on all modern consoles, the main three operating systems PC and Android. Since 2004, it has been updated only partially, adding to the network-based physics, automatic synchronization of lip movement, the effect of water flow, inverse kinematics of skeletal animation, many new parts: HDR, facial animation calculated on a video accelerator, support for multi-core, morph target animation and others.

Several dozen games (both from Valve and under license from other studios) and countless mods have been released and continue to be released on Source. And this is a clear indicator of the correctness of the principles laid down in the engine at the beginning of zero.

Now his second version of Source 2 is being prepared for release. Who knows if the work on Half-Life 3 is on, or is it just a rumor.