I remember signing up to Steam to claim the Half Life 2 serial number, wow, that was 20 years ago! Just released, a fan made mod continuing Half Life 2 Episode 2 story: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2215490/Project_Borealis_Prologue/ I also remember playing through whole of Halo 2 campaign in coop mode at friend's house, after playing Halo 1 extensively on PC the previous year. Wow, that's also 20 years old now! The Halo 2 E3 demo is now available to play: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3360515088&snr=2_9_100000_ They feel like 5 years ago instead of 20 years!
40 years! Yet somehow Arnold is probably still fitter than me. I wonder if there is another year another couple of game's anniversary that can top the above 2 legendary games.
Half Life 2 20th anniversary update https://www.half-life.com/en/halflife2/20th And it’s now free! https://store.steampowered.com/app/220/HalfLife_2/
Hopefully Re-Raising the bar comes out soon, I still have my copy of the original. The pages dedicated to the 'gritty' and 'more realistic' Team Fortress 2 are golden.
Very cross with Valve for the reminder on the passage of time but fantastic documentary, really enjoyed all the interviews and very excited to get a copy of raising the bar, wish I had an original.
I did over 6000 hours with HL DM (over 3 years), but only 100 hours with HL2 DM (just not the same as HL) My mispsent youth hard at work
I also have the original and am waiting for the new book release. Without any merch store or partner store, I'm not sure where they're going to do it, however. Maybe they'll re-open a store and release the HL:A and HL2 soundtrack vinyls at the same time.
I still have it, it's a wonderful book. It would have become more meaningful to me if I'd pursued a career in games development, I know it spurred a lot of people along that path. Nice to see they're still bugfixing HL2 to this day, but I bet the speedrunning community hate it when that happens. Hot take: Episode 3 probably wouldn't have been very coherent or good, because Valve's track record is that they're great at premises and bad at endings. HL1, HL2 and Ep2 all had bonkers endings that made little to no sense and just threw everything at the wall in a desperate attempt to surprise and intrigue - like Lost, or a Steven King novel. Ep3 was positioned to be the ending of the franchise, so it would probably have been confusing, frustrating and badly written. Or, best case scenario, it would have just ended with another vague cliff hanger teasing more sequels that, in turn, never arrived. Something about their company's culture just seems to prohibit closure on anything. Will they ever stop making TF2 content, for example? For whatever reason, they just want things to last forever, which mixes badly with linear storytelling. Then again, Portal 2...
I got a pre release of HL1 from America, for those of you that remember Valve IDs for playing online, mine was only 4 digits, I was very proud of that at the time