The year is 1999, the year before Half-Life, and the landmark of Valves history is released. But Valves founder and CEO, Gabe Newell, wants more. In June of that year, development started on a game - a game of which repercussions were felt around the world. The plot would go through hundreds of changes and little did they know, it would be five years before the game was released. Five months later, Goldsource, the engine that Half-Life 1 was created on, couldn’t handle the technological advancements that were being made. To fix this problem wouldn’t be simple. A whole new physics engine would have to be created, and Newell wanted this game to be a bestseller by Christmas of next year. In 2001, at the game conference “E3”, Newell showed a small trailer and demo of the new source engine. The gaming community is hyped. The next month, lead game developer, Marc Laidlaw, gives Gabe the bad news. He tells him the game won't be ready in time. It's janky, the story has plot holes, and there are too many bugs to count. Gabe tells them to worry about the bugs later and focus on the story. A year passes, game development is going strong, but then the unthinkable happens.
German hacker, Axel Gembe, has found a loophole; a way into Valves servers. He copies the files and before Valve even notices the event, known now as “The Beta Leak”, has taken place. The company is in disarray. People are worried that they are going to be fired or that the company will go bankrupt. Once Valve got back on its feet, the total cost in damages was 251 million dollars. After, people are at E3 again hoping for some good news. However, the news they got wasn't good at all. The game had been delayed by a whole year. Six months later, the game’s development was nearly finished with a new plot, characters, and physics, and graphics that are better than even present-day standards. Now only one in 50 Americans (rough estimate) knows what Half-Life is. It's been twenty years since the last Half-Life game, Half-Life 2 episode two. It left us on a cliffhanger. But, in May of 2020, Half-Life Alyx was released for Steam VR, getting the series running again.
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