Half-Life: 25th Anniversary Documentary [video]

One thing I have found extremely interesting was how Valve hit the jackpot with many early hires.

It was literally people that often didn't even have a CS or let alone gaming background and yet so many of them proved to be relentlessly resourceful, creative and hard working.

The guy who wrote most of the HL code wasn't even a developer and at the time was studying to become a lawyer or accountant iirc.

I can't but think that timing, founders but also straight up luck played an absolutely crucial factor.

Because technically, they didn't. As they say in the documentary, the version of the game that they made after the first year or so was bad, and they acknowledged it, and they changed their processes and introduced the "cabal" - so they basically paid that first year to gather experience. And what's important, their publisher Sierra was okay with it.

I don't see that happening today, to be honest, in "AAA" titles at least. Budgets have gone through the roof, and the publisher won't give you a plan B, they will force the developer to duct-tape what they have and ship it no matter what. And the game can always be patched later, right?

The problem is with these "AAA" games. I've spent a dozen years having great fun with perfectly enjoyable and memorable 7/10 games. Nowadays a 7/10 is a death sentence for a gaming studio. The industry is poisoned.

"Poisoned"? Or just more competitive? If you thought Half-Life was a "7/10" back in the day, what would you play instead? Quake? Unreal Tournament? Both were mainly multi-player games and not really a direct alternative.

Other games that released in 1998:

- Ocarina of Time

- Final Fantasy VII

- Baldur's Gate

- Starcraft

- Metal Gear Solid

- Resident Evil 2

- Pokemon Yellow

If only it was as competitive as 2023, in which some of the top games were:

- A Zelda game

- A Final Fantasy game

- A Resident Evil remake

- A Baldur's Gate game

He is talking about first-person shooters.

If you had a taste for a certain kind of game in the late 90s you didn't have many choices that were done by a full studio and polished. Most of the games you listed had the same "problem" of being unparalleled at the time.

Now you have a lot of clones of the same idea, plus so many of the classics are still replayable or remastered and rereleased. A good-but-not-great game has many substitutes with a similar scope and feel.

Unreal, Quake 2, Jedi Knight, System Shock 2, SiN, Blood 2, Hexen 2, Rainbow Six, Turok 1 & 2. There were a number of great FPS games available at the time.

I did enjoy most of those games, but wouldn’t use them as examples of equivalents of Half-Life. Some did some things better than Half-Life but others were worse in every category and were superseded (e.g. Unreal.) Great list of memories!

In 1998 we still called them Doom clones. Goldeneye didn't even use conventional twin-stick aiming. There's a reason there weren't many. How many non-Nintendo 3D platformers are there today?

We were calling them first-person shooters by the mid 90s (though I also remember ___ clone.) Interesting recent thread about it on another forum: https://forum.quartertothree.com/t/our-favorite-old-magazine...

1998 was a great year for gaming... as a N64 and PC gamer (voodoo2 graphics)

Unreal Tournament didn't exist yet, and both Quake 1 and 2 were very much single-player focused games.

laughs in quakeworld

There were plenty of single player FPS games then. And I don't think anyone was arguing that Half-Life was an example of a 7/10 game. Quake 2 and Unreal were both games with great single player campaigns when Half-Life came out, Unreal Tournament and Quake 3 didn't come out until the following year. Dark Forces II Jedi Knight is another good example.

Thief, Sin, Shogo, Delta Force and Rainbox Six were 1998, and if you go out to 1999 there's system shock 2. 1997 had some classics also like Dark Forces II though they're more of the doom clone variety like Blood.

You know, I was wrong on this. I had forgotten how many games were available around that time. Plenty of competition was available in that space around when Half-Life was released.

Somehow audiences will respect effort vs resources as long as there is community outreach and the price makes sense.

There are a lot of 5/10 games that are successful on Steam because the devs set the right expectations for the experience.

Recently Vampire Survivors comes to mind. Definitely a 6/10, but something about the balance of no-effort art and masterful game tuning makes it VERY sticky.

Vampire Survivors comes to mind. Definitely a 6/10

That's fighting talk round my way!

There's something they've got incredibly right between the no-thinking gameplay and the gradual progression through the various secrets and unlocks. I thought I'd grown tired of it after finishing the base game and not being bothered about gold farming, but I bought the DLC the other week and I was instantly hooked again.

Same thing with Dead Cells and Slay the Spire. Many similar games but very few of them managed to imitate the delicate balance of carrot and stick.

Everything about Vampire Survivors made sense to me upon learning that it was developed by an Italian guy who used to work on slot machines. It also reinforced that I've been right to avoid casinos my whole life.

I get that the art was a no-effort import, but everything else about that damn game is a good illustration of something that only seems simple because it's exceedingly well done.

no-effort art

In fairness, isn't is specifically meant to look like a ported Italian game with laughably incorrect translations?

Goat Simulator is not a good or deep game, but I definitely got my $3 or whatever I paid out of it. It’s just mindless fun.

The criteria has changed I feel, a 7/10 in the 90s/00s probably meant it had some good ideas, a highly creative setting, an innovative tech or gameplay mechanic so the end product, while 7/10 because one of the parts just didn't hit the mark or it was just very buggy, the actual game was still enjoyable.

The modern AAA mentality has stripped too much of it down to formulas they consider working or "best practices" (e.g the "UbiSoft Towers" phenomenon) or they're literally shaping the whole game to try and force a specific business model that is more important than shipping good content (Bungie Destiny 2).

Difference is when a game built with that ideology doesn't hit the mark it ends up just being insanely dull and has no spark to keep you going or win you over. Instead of Flawed But Fun you get Competent But Boring.

I don't know if you can even say competent at this point. So many "AAA" games with their army of developers still launch with performance issues and bugs. If massive teams should be good at one thing, it is making a polished and well running product. But that doesn't seem to be the case. Devs cried for years to get the ability to make their own custom shaders. Now that DX and Vulkan allow it, we find they didn't know what they were asking for and every AAA game suffers from massive shader compilation issues. A problem that never existed when it was left up to AMD and Nvidia. You also don't see this problem in indie games because they never have the bandwidth to even consider writing their own shaders. And that's just one example.

In hindsight, we spent a lot of time on said 7/10 games, and they were just fine.

But it was a different time, mainly in terms of what was available, how much time you had, and how much time a game took.

Most games we had were copied shareware games from diskettes; on occasion a CD with loads of shareware games, and on rare occasions someone had a copy of the full version of a game like Doom.

But nowadays a lot of games - AAA and indie both - are at least 40 hour games, if not (a lot) more; Assassin's Creed Valhalla takes 123 hours to "do everything" (platinum); I've got over 300 hours in Factorio and about half that in Kerbal Space Program; FFXVI took me 60 hours to finish, I still have outstanding sidequests, and that one doesn't even have that many side activities or time sinks.

And then there's the "live services" (or MMOs if they have a multiplayer aspect, or MMORPGs if it's WoW or FFXIV) which are designed to have great / tight gameplay loops but effectively infinite game. I've got a lot of hours in FFXIV and they keep adding Stuff to it. If I had infinite time there's a few side activities in it that cost just as much time to "finish" as the base game's stories.

I see it as overspecialisation. When GTA 6 costs 10 years and a billion dollars, it needs to be an unmatched hit. But what if it's just bad on a conceptual level? More money can create more models, textures and 'content' but it can't create fun. For GTA 3, it would have been a setback for a year. For GTA 6, it could be fatal.

I remember reading Bullfrog would take the engine from their last game and build a prototype to play to see if it was any fun. Then they'd throw it away and start over.

I suggest trying the new Robocop: Rogue City game. It is pretty much a perfect encapsulation of a 7/10 or AA type of a game, where it is just fun, solid, well done, has quite a great amount of soul in it. But isn’t aiming to be some do-it-all open world AAA michael bay type of an affair.

One of the most enjoyable games this year for me, and it says a lot (given how many amazing games of all kinds we got this year). And yet, it isn’t overly ambitious. Just overall, that’s pretty much the exact type of a game that you are talking about, which I’ve noticed we had an almost complete drought of over the past decade.

Sadly today 9/10 just means the game is actually finished upon release.

Reading the Factorio blogs shows their progression from "developer" to "game developer" to "top-tier game developers" - it took years.

You could likely do the same today, but the key would be finding someone (like Gabe) to fund it whilst it got off the ground.

With all due respect to the Factorio devs (it is one of my favorite games of all time and I credit them with essentially creating the genre), have they made even one other game?

number of games made does not correlate with game-making skills. They aren't coupled, anyway. It is probably much more correlated with game design skills, but that's not the context, here.

Their skill in honing the game and becoming a respected game development company are what are in question, and while not an AAA studio, they are recognized as a company that knows how to highly optimize their game.

They deserve as much respect as any other game developer, in my mind. Their approach is different than other game studios, and that alone is testament to their abilities to both make a game and run a business. They're doing things their own way, focusing on the one game (at least as far as we know) and they are still simply "killing it" and I mean that in the very best way.

I imagine you will see similar things with Icefrog, in their tenure as the custodian of DotA map in Warcraft 3. Balancing a competitive game is something that even Blizzard struggle with.

(well, Icefrog isn't burdened by the need for monetization.)

I don't see that happening today, to be honest, in "AAA" titles at least.

Thanks for adding that caveat; it's an unfair comparison IMO to compare the well-selling games of 25 years ago with AAA games of today. Half-Life was built by a team of about 80 people according to a quick Google, and there wasn't the ecosystem of tooling, resources and outsourcing that we have today, versus hundreds if not thousands of people (if you include outsourcing / engines / etc) for AAA titles today. And the modern day game devs will have enjoyed a relevant education, whereas back then those educations didn't exist yet. Notably, John Carmack did a lot of ground work in translating math into 3D video game engines; he was behind Wolfenstein, then Doom, then Quake, and the Quake engine was used as the basis for Half-Life's.

Anyway, 80 people is pretty substantial even at the time; for comparison, indie hits like Hades had ~20 people working on it, Hollow Knight's Team Cherry has just 3 employees (but they used Unity so they didn't have to do much engine programming, and the ports to various consoles was outsourced); Wube (Factorio) has had a few dozen people working on it. "indie" hit Kingdom Come: Deliverance had like 240 people working on it.

Anyway, 80 people is pretty substantial even at the time; for comparison, indie hits like Hades had ~20 people working on it

I wouldn’t call Hades an indie hit in the classic sense. Bastion was an indie hit, but by Hades supergiant had releases 3 acclaimed games.

That’s not to detract from the well deserved success of Hades, but SG was damn well established by then.

Past success is a weird way to define "indie". The term is usually used to distinguish smaller teams from their bigger AA/AAA counterparts, and I think most people still consider Supergiant an indie studio.

Exactly. Indie doesn't come from the word new, it comes from the word independent. Are you a team detached from the traditional large players in the industry. Yes? Then you're indie.

Sierra is an interesting company. In the video game industry has very few well known female game designers, and that was even more true back then. Yet the adventure game genre had several - Roberta Williams, Lori Cole, Jane Jensen, and Christy Marx (not as well known, but her games are well regarded), all of whom worked for Sierra. One has to wonder if Roberta Williams being co-owner of the company (and the designer of the first graphical adventure game) is one of the reasons for this.

Another interesting story is when Ken Williams (Roberta Williams husband, the other co-owner of the company) hired middle-aged retired police officer Jim Walls to design the Police Quest adventure games (he designed the first three). Ken apparently was talking to his hairdresser about his idea for a police adventure game, when she mentioned that Walls, her husband, might be an interesting person to talk to.

If you're the only one willing to tap into a talent pool, you get to pump that resource as much as you want.

So if Sierra is the only company really willing to hire female game designers, they really get to take all the best.

I don't think others were not willing to hire female designers; some Infocom games from that time also had female authors. I think it's more to do with the time they started. Somewhere during the 80s the 'white male nerd' stereotype became a self-reinforcing thing which scared a lot of women away from everything computer-related. Also, I don't consider Sierra games 'the best designed'. Some of their games have lots of 'personality' and they were first with many innovations, but it's clear everyone was still figuring out how to design games at the time.

Today they ship in early access, which is a better approach since it opens you up to a ton of feedback. The most recent, and successful, example being Baldurs Gate 3.

I think time and trust is so critical. I remember a talk by the people who made FoundationDB about their approach to testing. They spend a year just creating a variant of C++ that allowed them to control concurrent execution order and build a framework to simulate/mock network, disc access etc. It's incredible work and AFAIK more than paid for itself. Yet, at most places it would be impossible to get a year-long testing effort of that scale funded or really any engineering effort that produces nothing shippable. All too often you might get 3 months and after 2, a urgent product request comes up and the work sits and rots away till it's useless and nobody gets back to it

They knew Michael Abrash from working at Microsoft who went to id, told them to "you should use our engine". They went to id and walked out with the quake engine, and some advice from Romero.

Sometimes it really helps who you know, and there is always some element of luck in making it. Having a great team certainly made that game what it was. It was interesting how they balance realism and fun.

Its always interesting how things get made.

That coupled with the fact that the talent pool and tooling for game development were limited. Having id at your back was a superpower (which is arguably still true today when you compare their tech to other engines).

DYKG recently did a video about Ken Sugimori (the Pokemon guy). He is an overly harsh critic of his own skills, but I think there is a kernel of truth in this insight:

"It's kind of embarrassing to admit actually - but [video games were] a brand new industry back then, and standards were lower than in other fields..."

https://youtu.be/SVFnYLTsxdc&t=18m30s

There is a video somewhere where gaben is really self destructive about how half life 2 turned out and I think it's why we don't see half life 3 or any other new games - I think he's overly critical about his work. Watching this 25th documentary really felt like the team had a nostalgia trip making it and fond memories of the game. I wonder if the spark is gone with that teams weird dynamic.

As someone who just got the OLED Steam Deck the spark is not gone!! Valve is still the same company, they’re just succeeding in very different ways.

I think this is the benefit of not being a public company. They’ve pivoted over and over and over. They’re still in the same space (video games) and the breadth of the areas they’re in are immense!

Yeah, this. They don't have a ton of releases, but their batting average is insane. I can think of only one really notable failure (Artifact). So many of their other releases have been industry changing in many different ways.

It helps a lot that they self publish. Many cant afford to do that but Valve is flush with cash from Steam in a similar way to how Apple is propped up by the App Store. That allows them to pick and choose what they do and only release products they are confident will do well.

And who could forget their 2010 masterpiece, Alien Swarm. To this day I believe they only created it as an exercise. It's also free.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/630/Alien_Swarm/

That’s quite sad in a way; Half Life 2 is still an incredibly influential and beloved game 20 years later.

Or is that maybe why? The weight of expectation is too great to live up to

The follow up Episodes One and Two are fantastic.

And the leaked storyline for Episode Three looking really strong as well.

I hold out hope that the Crowbar Collective (the group that remade Half-Life with the Source engine and called it Black Mesa) have been secretly working on implementing the Episode Three storyline in Source. Though, now that Source2 is out who knows? This is all my speculation anyway.

They did release a new HL game after those: HL:Alyx (VR only though) it was critically acclaimed.

Turned out? Like as in bad? I remember playing it when it came out and couldn't believe graphics had gotten that advanced. The gravity gun? That blew my mind. Both the games were amazing experiences for me even though I didn't get to play them in full until years later. I'd like another game to help me understand the lore better.

Half Life 2 was not only mind-blowing, but also my introduction to a relatively newfangled thing called Steam that I was NOT a fan of at first (DRM-wise). Through the years I acquired 2800+ games on the platform, as a sort of digital hoarder with the hope of at least trying every game I purchased (often in bundles/sales) as an exclusive PC player - before I got too old or too dead. I just don't see that happening anymore... Just not enough time left but to sample.

Back to HL2 - it's the 2nd game I've ever finished twice (FF VII being the other), still love the story, the very cool physics gun, the incredible dystopian narrative and setting, and it holds up today wonderfully 19 years later.

It's a shame we'll likely never see an HL3. There are so many talented development firms they could outsource it to, with current engines like UE5, it would be fantastic with the proper writers. Maybe even the original ones. Alright, done gushing here.

I think part of it is that games (like films, novels, albums, etc) are intense, grueling creative efforts. I think many young dev teams go in pretty naive and strike gold, and assume it was hard because it was new. Then they make another and realize, nope it’s just hard every time. I think it would be very difficult to sign on to each new project after years of 70 hour weeks. What’s the point of success if you can’t enjoy your time after?

He said he didn't think much about his past work and he is hardwired to keep his eyes on the future.

I’m sure all these people were talented, but it reinforces my own belief that the most important things are passion and focus. I feel like the tech world fixates on 10x programmers like Carmack, but motivated people can pull off amazing things.

I think for most hiring, regardless of industry, the secret is searching for passion, focus, (I would add) ability/willingness to learn new skills, and a positive attitude toward other humans.

Specific job skills can be taught or learned. If you have the right attitude, positive outlook, and are inherently someone who learns things, you can be very successful in most jobs.

Too often, hiring filters for specific job skills/credentials. Because these are supposed to be a proxy for the softer skills. It's not as effective, but much easier to deploy at scale, I think.

There are a lot of people who are loathe to admit this, because they draw a lot of their self-worth from their expertise and the success derived from it. To say that most people, with the right attitude, could perform just as well is anathema. They get and keep jobs, but their behavior is often toxic and keeps teams from success. In extreme cases, they may jealously guard their domain and undermine coworkers.

On the flip-side, there are a lot of people dealing with trauma of one kind of another. Outwardly, they may seem to be negative or acerbic or closed-minded, when, internally, they are trying mightily to get their passion and earnestness to break through a wall of their own bitterness or anxiety.

I don't know that recruiting or management have reliable methods of dealing with either pro-socially.

I have built some truly awesome teams and besides a base level of knowledge, the only thing I care about is attitude. Another huge factor is passions, I always ask what they do outside of work. If you are passionate about something you know how to focus and care about the details. This strategy has been very successful for me.

Carmack the pizza guy. He did not have any computer science education at a formal institute.

Well, he did go to University of Missouri for a year (not sure if he took compsci or?)

they fixate on the Carmack's but forgot that the Romero's are important too !

"they fixate on the Carmack's but forgot that the Romero's are important too !"

Very true -- You can create an amazing game engine (carmack) but it wont sell unless you have talented people pushing it capabilities (romero)

From memory, referring to Doom and Quake 1, Romero built the level editor for said games. Quake, I believe, was created on NextStep machines. Romero (and others) were also the ideas of creating the world.

Carmack was the giant whose shoulders a lot of games - including Half-Life - stood on; I'd say he's a 100x or 1000x even, but then, engine developers are usually unknown and underrated. The work he did and what the Unreal engine now does is not to be underestimated.

engine developers are usually unknown and underrated

As a testament to their (the original id software team that had both Johns) great efforts and legacy, they pretty much invented the concept of a game engine to start with. At that time, most games were written as a one and done type of a package deal.

Given that the team wanted to push the technical edge with the games consistently, they wanted to have some reusable/modifiable core that they could use across multiple projects, have visual level editors, etc., they converged on “accidentally” creating a game engine and coining that term. I forgot which game was the one that led to the creation of it for them, iirc it was one of the earlier Commander Keen games, but my memory might be failing me here. They didn’t even have the goal of creating a game engine, they just ended up getting there and then realizing what they did as they were trying to build their reusable “toolset.”

Similar with goldeneye team, I think only one team member had done game Dev before (or something like that).

Goldeneye was developed by Rare, who had been in existence for 10 years by the time Goldeneye was released. I'd be really surprised if they had landed the rights to a big IP and then turned a bunch of newbies loose on it.

The 90s were a very different time my friend, prepare to be really surprised!

https://youtu.be/3AEvEIYzMbU?si=S5NDh1874vsE72Kl?t=8m28s

This is video is a wider retrospective about the game that I think is worth watching, but I linked to a clip in it from a GDC talk given by the games director. Where he states himself that only he and one other goldeneye 007 team member “had ever made a game before”

WOW ok I stand 100% corrected

Thanks for that, exactly what I was meaning!

They been around a lot longer than that as "ultimate play the game" :)

I feel the 90s is a missed opportunity for someone like myself. If I was just a few years older... I could have been one of those "programmers" given opportunities.

Building games today is a different beast, comparable to making a movie.

He's correct. Martin Hollis was game director and had worked on one game before, cant remember if he was the only one that had worked on a game before or if they had one more, the rest of the team had never worked on a game. He thought it was one of their strengths as they came up with stuff that seasoned developers would never have tried.

Here's his GDC postmortem presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1Fx18cppZk

That struck me, too. They really took a chance on so much staff, without any real proof that they'd be able to deliver. My impression was that this was a lot more common then than now. These days, you have to be capable of work a level or two above what's needed for shipping, presumably because management and timelines are so warped that you'll be rushed and overworked and still have to deliver. People starting out or shifting careers don't have anything like this kind of backing; you go it alone and hope that you're developing the skills necessary to get hired.

Diamonds in the rough with a hunger for more. Kudos to the founders recognizing this.

Some of them had experience in map making and modding though, correct? I don't know if Dario Casali had a CS degree at the time or if he does now, but he was making Doom maps and contributed to Final Doom prior to being hired at Valve. I think he had economics degree at the time. He recently did a play through of HL with him giving commentary and realy fascinated, definitely watch that. He talks about how a bunch of them didn't really know how to make a game and somehow they did it.

That doesn't take away from a bunch of inexperienced people making an awesome game though. That was hard to do I'm sure. I couldn't even dream of accomplishing that.

They hit the jackpot or, a reasonably motivated developer, under a cool project to keep them engaged and a nurturing environment with peers in the same situation is on high chance of flourishing?

Valve however did not acknowledge the 17th anniversary of the Half Life 2 episode 3 announcement.

They did. Check the Steam Autumn Sale header, on the far left.

the three lamps?

Unless GP would care to point out what you're supposed to be looking for, I think you're being trolled into poring over the image looking for something that isn't there.

It is definitely there as indicated above.

https://imgur.com/a/lpiPtS2

“It” wasn’t pointed out at all in the original post. Just “look on the far left” with no indication of what.

I’m not convinced this 3/E means anything. If they’re making HL3 or HL2:Ep3 then we’ll find out soon enough. Many people have tried to read the tea leaves by scouring textures and images in GTA V over the years, and every time they’ve been made to look stupid. If there’s an announcement to be made around HL, Valve won’t hide it in a Steam sale banner

It's obviously someone at Valve having fun, unlike y'all down this comment chain.

"Remember that game we promised then never oficially canceled and instead gaslit you over and still refuse to talk about? Funny, right?"

That happens to games all the time. This is one very unique grudge to hold. I'd be happy that Alyx happened at all. Valve could never live up to expectations for Episode 3 / Half Life 3 anyway.

You missed the joke. It's been so long now since HL2 that the joke is to find any implication of "3" (or even work back to three via vague associations between random things) and say "HL3 Confirmed!".

Any vague reference to three is confirmation of an imminent HL3 announcement/release, it's a running joke.

Finally, confirmation of HL 3!

Not sure if they're being serious, but there's what looks like a "3" on a distant air-con unit, next to left-most tree. If your viewport is narrow you might not see it [0]

[0] https://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steam/clusters/sale_autum...

Holy smokes. What a find. Half Life 3 confirmed!

I wonder who did that art, I'd love to hire them for something similar.

HL3 soon then!

The three? That's not episode 3, its Half Life 3, Left 4 Dead 3, Portal 3, Team Fortress 3, CS3, Dota 3, all confirmed.

Recently tried to re-play HL2. Found it was highly motion sickness inducing, possibly due to unnaturally fast change in perspective when turning. Had to give up very soon. Newer games tend to fare better in that respect.

possibly due to unnaturally fast change in perspective when turning

Couldn't you just move the mouse slower so the turning is slower? Or lower the mouse sensitivity?

As a person who almost can't play any 3D first-perspective (shooter, action) games due to serious motion sickness, I'd say a slower cursor doesn't really make much difference. If you're not used to it (due to being different from your desktop environment), it probably would make it worse.

To me, the biggest factors to (worse) sickness are

1. Narrow FOV: usually the bigger the FOV, the better. But when it starts to have too much of "fisheye" effect, it can be detrimental.

2. How "fluent" your character moves -- if you have to stop/decelerate constantly (for any reason: interact with objects, clash with walls, sharp turns), it induces sickness very quickly.

Third perspective games are typically much better, but if it's in a confined space (like in a room) for extended time, it's as bad as FPS.

The best FPS I've played in term of having close to no motion sickness is Overwatch. Apex Legends is pretty good in this regard too.

Any Valve title is a vomit festa.

Portal 1 is the game that made me realize I get motion sickness from first person games. It really caught me by surprise. Amazing game though, 10/10 would do it again.

Play the native N64 port, it's hilariously fun

What makes the n64 port differently fun compared to the other versions ?

N64 graphics, and the use of the N64 controller.

Interesting, I have never had any problem with Source-based games. The worst offender for me was Talos Principle and Far Cry 4 due to the headbob effect which couldnt be turned off (why?!).

I find that full screen makes the problem worse. Playing windowed makes me feel less motion sick.

Did you try playing with the FOV settings?, I've heard from other people with similar problems that increasing them can help a lot.

So, this begs a rather obvious question. What makes that team different? Is it the talent, the leadership, the focus on product?

As a long time JavaScript developer I honestly believe, and I really mean this, that maybe 4% of the people employed primarily doing JavaScript work actually know what they are doing. Just 4%.

It seems at the beginning many of the early Valve team had a lot of passion but almost no real experience in that kind of code or product. They got a massive springboard with the Quake code and then figured out the rest. They didn't stagnate on the Quake code, but wildly modified it to fit their needs. Most JavaScript people are not capable of this. They just stagnate at their favorite framework and then just spin around code style and process.

What differentiates that early Valve team from all these various JavaScript teams? It clearly isn't education or professional maturity.

Most developers probably don't care and just want to get paid. Beyond that, I imagine you're not usually empowered to make big changes unless you're relatively senior, and even if you decide to be the kind of developer that's always striving towards self improvement your job is unlikely to reward you for your skill development. I think there's just a lot of diminishing returns.

Have you ever tried playing a competitive multiplayer game? There's people that will play games for thousands of hours without ever improving.

Sometimes I think people encounter bottlenecks and they're not sure how to overcome them.

Most developers probably don't care and just want to get paid. Beyond that, I imagine you're not usually empowered to make big changes unless you're relatively senior, and even if you decide to be the kind of developer that's always striving towards self improvement your job is unlikely to reward you for your skill development.

Bingo. I got a release coming up, I just need to ship this -- ain't got no time for fancy stuff, and higher-ups don't want fancy or flourish, just make it work. And even if there is room for trying something new, it probably doesn't matter if the users DGAF about the new feature.

maybe 4% of the people employed primarily doing JavaScript work actually know what they are doing. Just 4%.

Because it's JavaScript. It's a language specifically designed for people who don't care about how anything actually works.

To me it seems like their passion drove them to learn as much as they could. They knew enough to get the job done, but not enough to know that they "couldn't do" the things they wanted to do.

More experienced devs may have thrown out a lot of the ideas the Half Life team ended up implementing as "too time consuming" or "practically impossible". Valve's devs at the time weren't experienced enough to make those assumptions, so they just worked their asses off to figure out how to do it.

Valve did have a few key people (not to mention complete access to the best 3D engine source code at the time) who really did know what they were doing.

Keep in mind that building video game levels, models, animations and such back then was dramatically simpler than it is now.

One person did all the texture work for the whole game. One person did all the sound effects and music, and also coded the DSP engine to add real-time sound manipulation based on the environment.

You can do a lot with a few very talented people who are willing to guide a whole bunch of smart, eager and motivated folks.. which I think is what happened at Valve.

There are lots of reasons why Half-life was a success. You shouldn't discount stupid luck, as well. Their first iteration was awful, as mentioned in the YouTube video. They essentially had to start over with a "cabal" and pull the game together with the good scraps of work they had already done.

Here's a more detailed article on the cabal process (starting on page 2):

https://web.archive.org/web/20210823181232/https://www.gamas...

From 1999 and much more detailed than the video.

Now, game development is inherently waterfall. You work for years and built up to this huge release. Nowadays you might have some agile processes embedded into milestones, etc. But fundamentally it's all leading to a huge waterfall.

That's important. Because what agile does, today, is that it turns autonomous developers into cogs of a large machine. But Valve's "cabal" was entirely free to do whatever they felt best. Gabe Newell probably had final say and input, but ultimately the group had flexibility. The developers had full system awareness. They weren't pulling Jira tickets off a board like a blind man in the elephant parable[1]. They knew how the pieces fit because they put them there. And if the pieces weren't fitting, they had the authority to make them fit.

Perhaps more interesting is how the story of Half-life can be viewed through The Mythical Man-Month[2]

When designing a new kind of system, a team will design a throw-away system (whether it intends to or not). This system acts as a "pilot plan" that reveals techniques that will subsequently cause a complete redesign of the system.

Their cabal has a bit of overlap with the "surgical team" concept and usage of formal documents. The rest of the employees did nothing while this group operated. Thus, they reduced manpower that actually allowed them to move forward. Slow is Smooth, Smooth is Fast (from the US Navy Seals). Most companies do the opposite. They crank up the number of employees to hit deadlines, which creates more bugs and more work.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month

I think it's at least five elements:

1. Hacker-tinkerer culture, where you want to build new things that haven't been built on new hardware for fundamentally non-commercial reasons. This could be called Carmack-style hacker culture in my mind, which produced Quake.

2. Genuinely extensive programming expertise.

3. Not partaking in the current and quite toxic VC-funded game development culture, where funding dictates rushed deliverables (through schedules, and the constant race to attract funding with demos). It's feature factory or die in a lot of VC-funded scale-ups.

4. Lucky circumstances - knowing someone who could get you Quake source on "just have it, we'll work something out eventually" terms back then was exceptionally lucky. Quake was very far ahead of it's time. Most companies that produce such work now would work very hard to make sure no one else gets it. And that goes back to the hacker culture of just building cool things to share with people that was more common in games then.

5. Time - the games industry was young, before Quake there were no proper 6 DoF generalist 3D game engines, so it was an auspicious time for game development.

I'm a game developer and I am a bit old school, so I'm not the best person to speculate on why JavaScript programmers seem less able to build cool tech. But I have seen many young people approach programming differently now, probably because it has become a lot more commodified. The mindset of a "clock-in clock-out" programmer wasn't common in game circles in the 90s and 00s. Also, there was much less focus on using "correct" idioms and beautiful code as the end goal in hacker circles, and a lot more focus on building something that others haven't built before and working out the details later. Moreover, business viability was rarely the first thing you would think about and work backwards from when you worked on a game project. Business success was a byproduct of building cool games.

If you would remember game trailers from early 00s, like Half-Life 2 (since we are talking about Valve), you would pick up that they show off cool tech like physics simulation, which is quite janky and imperfect. Carmack also has spoken many times about how in his early games (pre-Quake) the graphics would initially be quite bad and he would be worried about getting everything fixed in time. Cool over safe, cool over perfect, and showing off cool things that were not polished was normal.

Nowadays, things are different in some ways. The game development has become methodical and focused on the exploitation of passion for money in a repeatable way. You get as many features as you can for marketing (you only need to have them, they can be whatever quality, it's only for the Steam page and trailer). You cut all the awesome new things as they are a risky waste of money, you instead funnel all the passion into velocity for delivering that bundle of features as quickly as possible for as cheap as possible, and that's it. If you can strike a deal with a nice IP, that will make the game sell a lot more. So will striking a deal with a publisher with deep pockets for marketing. But the "do cool things" hacker culture is gone in AAA and blockbuster games. It's now relegated to indies where quite a lot of janky but incredibly cool games are made. But they have a funding access problem as their business is too risky for most publishers and VCs. And that's probably why we don't see many new and big id and Valve-type companies anymore.

Although with VR, there are some companies that I believe could be like that. And they attract senior talent quite well. With the right management and timing, I think we could see another Valve in VR. Even Carmack played a big role in VR until recently, before he moved on to the next new thing in tech. Being on the precipice of new tech is important for people of that culture.

I was heavily involved with the australian team fortress (quake 1 version) community in the late 90s and 'bro' (Robin Walker) and John Cook were gods to us, regularly involved in the RMIT/Melbourne Lan scene and online even when back then mostly it was 28.8/33.6k modems with a few LPBS on East coast uni isdns.

The struggle for them to move on from qwtf to 'tf2' was probably for the best as a lot of the lessons they learned in the wilderness there helped when they were taken on by value and worked on HL2.

Also find it somewhat amusing was that TF2 was originally going to be a much more 'realistic' modern miltary shooter before the scope creep killed it.

Also find it somewhat amusing was that TF2 was originally going to be a much more 'realistic' modern miltary shooter before the scope creep killed it.

Instead we got Counterstrike. I'm not complaining as CS:Source is one of those games that I spent hours upon hours honing my skill.

To be clear, CS was developed independently of TF, and had a different genealogy as it were. Certainly some developer crossover later on, but probably more by people wanting to work on it instead of being told to.

I don't understand this comment. The original Counter-Strike mod came out around the same time as TF got ported to HL. Unlike TF, CS had pretty much consistent releases of some kind from CS up to 1.6 to Condition Zero and then Source and Go. I don't think there was any salvaging of TF stuff into CS.

I was in the same scene (Clan PlanetFortress FTW). Robin and those guys saved us from the annoying cheaters that were exploiting the old qw code. I was so excited for them when they got hired by Valve to make TFC and then HL2.

Clanpnp/ftb myself. Still remember some of the server IPs by muscle memory.

I have seen some early draft designs for a WW2 themed shooter that might have been part of that early TF2 concept. Then Day of Defeat came along and fit the bill nicely.

I hope we'll get a screen adaptation of HL/HL:OpFor/HL2, at least as good as HBO's "The Last Of Us" (I loved it, and haven't even played that game).

ill bet after the game of thrones debacle nobody wants to take on IP that doesn't have a conclusion already written.

I swear I recall Martin stating that he had given the show-runners a conclusion to put in the show, but they bin'd it.

The conclusion was a dumpster fire for so many issues, and it wasn't for lack of original content to derive from I'd argue.

And yet the books remain unwritten

Given how long it took for him to write the others, are you surprised?

I recalled correctly, he provided the showrunners with context, but they went largely ignored.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2019/05/11/george-rr-...

Marc Laidlaw, who worked on the game's story of Half-life and Half-life 2, published a script online [1] that could have been the outline of the plot of Episode 3. That could be sufficient for a serie.

[1]: https://combineoverwiki.net/wiki/Epistle_3

I read this some years back when it came out. Pretty weak I think, suffering from the same loss of sense of place that most stories get once they start doing time and space meta jumping

“Lateness is a for a little while, suck is forever” is a good quote

It is a good quote, but does it apply as much in this day and age? There is at least one game that sucked at launch and now seems to be generally accepted to be good after months of work post-launch (I'm thinking of No Man's Sky, but maybe Cyberpunk 2077 is another one).

The quote still applies to NMS, or CP2007, because they failed to live up to the hype on release and that really left a stain on their legacy. It's fair to rejoinder that, well the games are pretty great now; but I think Gabe's meaning is really about how, from a business perspective, your product does not live up to its potential and this can have longtail business consequences.

In a way, studios have hyper-focused on pre-ordering in order to get around this. Games are now investments that eventually get fixed and "live up to" their cost, instead of a polished finished product. Studios and publishers now focus on pre-ordering over finishing.

If you have a sufficiently large amount of hype, day 1 sales can give you enough runway for a redemption arc. NMS and CP2077 were two of the most hyped games in history and they barely managed it though, so I’m not sure it applies to the general case.

I believe there's a Myanmoto quote of exactly the same effect.

Apparently there's no evidence that the quote belongs to Miyamoto. This know your meme article has some historic references for it. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/a-delayed-game-is-eventually-...

Reminded me of Ralph Cifaretto's exchange with Paulie at a sit-down over a some money it was owed to Paulie:

- (Paulie) "You're late!"

- (Ralphie) "Well, tomorrow I can be on-time, but you'll be stupid forever"

Valve has video distribution service on Steam, why put up this documentary on Youtube, of all the places?

Can you stream videos on steam? I thought you had to download the whole file?

Now I'm not sure, their wording is a bit unclear: "Click Watch to add {video_title} to your account. The streaming version will be added to your Videos Library instantly. Complete the download wizard to install the downloaded version."

Is this available on Steam? I can't seem to find it on there. Or is this just the message you get when adding videos to your account on Steam?

Significantly higher reach. I use steam every day and didn't know its used for video distribution.

Loved the documentary. I played the hell out of that game back in the day. There’s a renaissance of Half-Life Deathmatch too (short-lived, no doubt) if anyone wants a hit of nostalgia. Valve even released a couple of the concept art character models, some gameplay tweaks, and some new maps. New content for a 25 year old game.

Also FYI, Half-Life and HL2 are currently both very playable in VR. Half-Life even runs natively on the Quest 2.

Mmm love deathmatch. Thanks for the tip.

Oh wow really? I may need to borrow my kids' Quest 2 to give this a go.

See also Dario Casali's Half Life 25yr anniversary playthrough: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLk5gaNp4x_AVIJviyHueH...

Each video tends to start with a couple of minutes dedicated to story telling. One of the videos I found most interesting was the last one about multiplayer maps because Dario had a lot to say about designing the maps.

Dario’s descriptions of the working conditions are pretty brutal in this series. Relentless 12-16 hour days, arguments in emails, demotivating management. I grew up with a fairytale idea of what working at Valve must have been like - a brilliant environment of smart people doing their best work. Although I’m still sure that’s true, I don’t think I’d be willing to make the sacrifices these developers did for the sake of a video game. Astonishing

Game Dev in the 90s into the 00s seems absolutely wild.

This other recent documentary about NHL 94 is also fascinating. Explains why the game felt and played differently than any other sports game at the time. https://youtube.com/watch?v=NRFT3iQx1BY&si=k4Boaw4onAWNPy1P

This is produced by same crew as the Half-Life doc. SecretTape who produced HL doc is the for-hire arm of NoClip.

Sad reminder of the crunch, even when the result turns out to be a success. Hours like that pushed me out of modding and into boring old business software.

Yep. Web development provides a more pleasant, if perhaps less exciting, way of life than gamedev. And you can still do gamedev in your spare time (you have spare time!)

Excellent documentary. I suggest looking into the first part of Black Mesa [1] as well after the anniversary documentary, which is the remake of the original Half Life in source engine. The modders pick talk a lot about the stuff that the original developers talked about, and what challenges they faced in re-creating it.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_TcAxAKCAI

Watched it yesterday, game development is so wild. Especially this one, basically everybody were just amateur and passionate with little to no background in programming or even gaming.

Also demystify how it's done, almost none of the HL goodness where there at the beginning: the intro, gman, xen, crabs, music, etc. And were just made up along the way.

This finally resolves my unanswered question of why the music file in Blue Shift was called "prospero01.mp3" !

Recent and related:

Half-Life 25th Anniversary Update - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38307889 - Nov 2023 (258 comments)

It was a really cool documentary with that they actually got the other co-founder of valve on it.