Half-Life 2 is now 20 years old

Back in ‘03, Valve hit the unsuspecting E3 audience with what I believe remains the greatest presentation in the history of video games. Yes, the ’03 E3 also featured the magnificent Halo 2 presentation, but I am talking about the gameplay and tech reveal of Half-Life 2.

If you know what I’m talking about, you’re likely getting goosebumps right now. If you don’t, that’s fine — you’re still in time to get blown away by this marvel.

And, if you don’t have the 20 minutes needed to witness some of the most revolutionary
gameplay reveals ever, then I only ask you to focus on the very first seconds of the presentation above.

It begins by showing the G-Man’s model from the original Half-Life, which gets someone in the audience to blurt, “he looks like hell.” The poor fool fell to one of the classic blunders, as the video swaps the G-Man’s original model for the one that would be used in Half-Life 2.

At that time, the G-Man wasn’t the spookiest entity in gaming just because his model featured the most lifelike looks in the biz, but also because of what made him work. Behind those alienating blue eyes, there was the most complex facial animation system ever put into a game.

Though the model’s graphics don’t remain as visually impressive in this day, the facial expressions of the characters in Half-Life 2 do remain a thing of beauty. That would be the highlight of any presentation, but the remaining 19 minutes of the presentation is a crescendo of never-before-seen gameplay topping never-before-seen gameplay. Even those fake E3 presentations of the PS3 era that tried to pass incredible pre-rendered cutscenes as actual gameplay had little on this.

With what had been shown alone, you could already expect Half-Life 2 to immediately earn a barrage of Game Of The Year awards by the time of its intended release date. But, the history of Half-Life 2’s development ended up proving as eventful as the game itself.

In a completely unexpected turn of events — by early ’00s standards, at least — a hacker got his hands on Half-Life 2’s source code and laid the still unfinished game bare for everyone to see. Valve went dark on the game for a year to come back with something even cooler than the coolest thing in the world they’d previously shown to us.

It was one hell of a tall order, but they more than cleared the task when they finally released Half-Life 2 on November 16, 2024. The final product was even better than everyone had anticipated, much better than it needed to be to make everyone forget about the delay.

I mean it wholeheartedly when I recommend you go play Half-Life 2 today, whether you’re a fan or a newcomer, as it still features one of the best single-player campaigns in the history of gaming. Half-Life 2: Deathmatch is pretty damn fun as well.

Half-Life 2 expands far beyond the game itself, as with it, we got the Source engine. It graced us with beloved titles such as Portal 2, Team Fortress 2, Garry’s Mod, and Counter-Strike: Source. If none of that means anything to you, that’s probably because you’re too young to remember, so I’ll just point out that Half-Life 2 is also responsible for Skibidi Toilet.

What’s next for Half-Life 2?

The future of this classic looks bright, as Valve has just announced a bunch of awesome updates to preserve the game and commemorate it’s anniversary.

From today on, you’ll be able to experience the original Half-Life 2 campaign with improved graphics, fixes for very resilient bugs, developer commentary, in-game Steam workshop support, and in-game recording.

And, if you’re a true fan, you can finally watch the first pre-beta test footage of what Half-Life 2 would come to be.

Absolutely worth waiting over 20 years for, right?

You can now play Half-Life 2 in its original and still glorious format through Steam, and if that’s somehow not good enough, you’ll soon be able to experience it in RTX mode as well.