Any Veterans here?

[Cutey_Kaite]

Any veterans here who could talk about how it was when HL was delayed and how the community reacted? I would really like to know if it was sort of like this, because you never know this could be some ****ed up deja vu or something. I just hope Valve releases this game soon...mmmm...soon.

 

[The DemonWithin]

there were many complaining threads and it was scary, i was hiding in a corner the whole time

 

[Cutey_Kaite]

And when it finally came out, did all the whiners go like "oh, umm, i was just supporting Valve, yea, that"

 

[Jackal hit]

heh all i remember about back then was that it was predicted that one of three games would revolutionize the fps genre; SiN, Duke Nukem Forever, and Half-life. with a possible spoiler in blood 2. and then once the games were released, Half-Life actually lived up to and far surpassed the hype.

 

[Cunni]

I would imagine its worse this time, as now we know the true greatness of Half Life, and we can't wait for more!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[Mr-Fusion]

I generally don't look forward to games which are being made by developers i've never heard of. There's nothing to compare it to.

I'm looking forward to Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 because i know what the developers have done in the past and how much fun their games can be.

I wasn't looking forward to Far Cry in the slightest, until i played the demo. I'm not really that excited about Stalker either. Likewise i wasn't looking forward to Half-Life 1, in fact i only heard about it some time after it was released so technically i couldn't have been looking forward to it :/

I'd also like to know about the half-life community prior to it's release. Were there fansites set-up at the time?

 

[Blad3]

Any veterans here who could talk about how it was when HL was delayed and how the community reacted? I would really like to know if it was sort of like this, because you never know this could be some ****ed up deja vu or something. I just hope Valve releases this game soon...mmmm...soon.

When is came out I was like WTF!?!? it;s out already?

 

[WhiteBoy]

I didn't know there was a game such as half life till about 3 years ago lol

 

[crabcakes66]

well....the forums were overflowing with idiots.......


4000 new threads on the same subject were created every 5 minutes.....


....we had lots of doom3 fanboys trolling around....

every idiot and there brother came up with there own theories about valve and hl2 and ati and the leak and screwing nvidia and and and and and and ..........

a few of wich we hear to this day....like the garbage about valve "leaking" hl2 on purpose......

 

[magnetmannen]

i actually remember when halflife 1 came out, i wasnt totally into pc at the time, as in, liked to play on them, but didnt own one, but a friend did.

well anyways, out comes half life, and damn, it was 1 helluva game! after all the games at the time , was like quake style, with running around just mindlessly blasting uglybuglys.

then swoop in comes this 3d game with unbelievable good animation of the action, fairly good physics, great looking levels, and well so on, the point is, i thought of getting a computer because of this game, well, and counterstrike (so i liked cs, afterall i started playing cs when it was at beta 1.3)

anyways, hl was the sizam when it released, the demo was highly sought after in those days , when internet was a joke.(in norway anyways)

 

[mark.anderton]

Veterans?

Well I went to Afghanistan, Bosnia and Sierra Leone, and i had a great time.Does that make me a veteran? I suppose it does.
You really can't beat a good war. I missed Iraq because i am on a training course, but I'm sure there'll be plenty of casualties left for me to patch up when i finish this crappy course and deploy out there.
And, yes, i've been following HL2 since the first Edge magazine teaser advert, and i almost cried when it became apparent that the September 30th date wasn't going to happen, but since then i refuse to get my hopes up, but i still read these forums every day, just in case.

 

[marksmanHL2 :)]

I spose I aint a veterin really....


I too came into the PC scene late. The first time I saw HL was in a magazine :O. (Didn't have the internet)

I had the uplink demo and thought I would give it a try. I couldnt play it (cos i was shit) and gave up. But the next day I re-installed it because the review was so good. I can't tell you how glad I am that I did.
I loved it. I then went round to a mates house and played it on his comp. Well actually I watched him play.... But I still loved it. I then bought it, and havn't had a game better since. Deus ex came close though....

 

[mortiz]

Well I didn't even have the net when HL was released.

In fact the first game I ever played on the net was HL with about 1000 ping.

 

[Kadayi]

heh all i remember about back then was that it was predicted that one of three games would revolutionize the fps genre; SiN, Duke Nukem Forever, and Half-life. with a possible spoiler in blood 2. and then once the games were released, Half-Life actually lived up to and far surpassed the hype.

Heh I always felt sorry for the guys behind SiN, they suffered the misfortune of releasing their game in the same month as HL, and as a result got butchered in the reviews :x . Certainly SiN wasn't a patch on HL and it was buggy in places, but it was a lot better than the SP dross we'd been used to upto then.

 

[ray_MAN]

When news of the delay came around, there were too many "VL4V3 SUX0RZ!!111!!" an Is it true" threads. Also don't forgt the "I told j00 so" threads. It was shere chaos.

 

[Mr. Redundant]

back then I was really into Warez (dont touch the stuff anymore) and HL could have been another hit or miss title, I ended up downloading it (it got pre-released, about a month or two in advance) and finishing it and loving it, then I bought 3 copies, one for myself, one for my brother and one for my best friend.
still the best money I have spent on games to date.
honestly, HL is the game that keeps on giving. (before HL the mod phenomenon was pretty unheard of... well for the most part.... well it was nowhere near as huge as HL.. although Quake1 had some great stuff going back then too)

 

[Someone]

The reaction is more severe now because this is the second time around. When they delayed Half Life 1 people were annoyed and pissed off, but it was the first real game valve released so no one knew what to expect from then and if this was going to be a one time thing, or would continue down the road.

This time valve waited 4+ years to announce HL2 being released only months away so the expectations were very different. 99% of everyone expected them to release it on sept30th because the game had been so secret that they could have announced it ANY TIME.

I would compare it to being cheated on. Obviously cheating is worse as we're only talking about a game here, but I think it's a similar concept. Imagine going out with someone for a short time and you find out they cheated on you. It's a first time thing, but you're clearly angry and shocked. Now say you stay with this person and they cheat again. It's a very different feeling. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.

If there ever is a Half life 3 (which I'm sure there will be) just imagine the crap valve will get when they announce the game.....and imagine the crap they will get if, it too, is delayed.
--------------------------

On a side note....I too feel incredibly bad for the SiN boys...that could have a been a great game. Imagine there was no Half Life, and imagine SiN wasn't so buggy....what could have been.

 

[B_MAN]

how long was it first delayed for? how many months?

 

[_-_-SELAS-_-_]

how long was it first delayed for? how many months?

About a year I think... Not sure I think I read it some place... Ummm yeah.. in some thread

crabcakes66 dude were talking about the Half-Life ¹ delay not the HL²... Its a bit early to call ppl that remember the HL² insident veterans :cheese: :rolling:

 

[Dougy]

i just never touched Hl till 2000.

it was on one of my old pirated Cd's Sweeney 5 or something......

played around with it never completed it, didnt like it that mutch.

then Op4 came out and i whored it, decided to find out who freeman was and completed Hl1.


got the Net in 2000 56k modem, only ever played Starcraft a few times and lost everygame. but it was still so cool.

then in 2001 christmas i got 500K cable, used it for songs and movies etc....

only regulary started buying legitimate copies of games a few months later, got Quake 3 and got bored, bought MTW and loved it.

but i wanted something new and was in PC world one day when i saw BF1942, played it for a while then upgraded to 1mg cable.

played BF1942/MTW for months then saw Hl2 in pc gamer.

was impressed and upgraded to 2 meg cable (wich runs at 2.5 meg :E ) and awaited Hl2 in september.

the rest is history.

*ends life story*

 

[Cutey_Kaite]

i just never touched Hl till 2000.

it was on one of my old pirated Cd's Sweeney 5 or something......

played around with it never completed it, didnt like it that mutch.

then Op4 came out and i whored it, decided to find out who freeman was and completed Hl1.


got the Net in 2000 56k modem, only ever played Starcraft a few times and lost everygame. but it was still so cool.

then in 2001 christmas i got 500K cable, used it for songs and movies etc....

only regulary started buying legitimate copies of games a few months later, got Quake 3 and got bored, bought MTW and loved it.

but i wanted something new and was in PC world one day when i saw BF1942, played it for a while then upgraded to 1mg cable.

played BF1942/MTW for months then saw Hl2 in pc gamer.

was impressed and upgraded to 2 meg cable (wich runs at 2.5 meg :E ) and awaited Hl2 in september.

the rest is history.

*ends life story*

:dozey: I wish i had a life story

 

[FAK3R]

Yeah it's not as bad now as it was then, atleast in my opinion

 

[Bova]

My experiences with Half-Life when it first came out was similar to someone else's in this thread, I had read up on it in PCGamer and CWG. I still remember in the December issue of PCGamer around when Half-Life was set to come out (the one with Indiana Jones on the cover for anyone who read it back then), they had a list of 50 games that were highly anticipated. Half-Life was on the list of course and the accompanying picture was of one of the fish monsters and I remember thinking "WOW that looks so real!!". But by the time the game came out my PC was getting obsolete and I had gotten out of PC Games. A couple people I knew had played it and said it was awesome, I remember one of them praising the multiplayer saying you could spraypaint stuff on the walls (I of course got the wrong idea from that and assumed one of your weapons was a bottle of spraypaint that you could write on the wall with. Yes I'm serious.) So anyways, I didn't pick it up until 1999 when I got a new PC.

And as for that question about Half-Life 3 and how it will be received, I can guarantee as soon as it's announced all the places like Gamespot and IGN (not to mention all the messageboards everywhere) will say "Alright it's been announced...so how soon till it's announced as being delayed?" No one is going to expect it out on time but maybe that's for the better.

 

[Dalamari]

Well, when Half-life was delayed I was just getting into gaming, so I was like, wow what a bunch of flaming nerds! freaking out over a game...

Now here I am, ready to go to valve and put a gun to Gabe's head to get this thing out.

 

[Keeson]

Well, I'm very old skool as I followed the development of HL1 very closely before anybody knew who these Valve guys were.

Way, way, way back in 1997 (sumnmer or fall I can't remember precisely) I was flipping thru a PCGAMER mag when I came across a little article along the lines of "25 games that will change the world... blah blah blah". In the article a number of titles were mentioned including: Trespasser, Legend of Zelda 64, SIN, Unreal. Included in that group was a little game called Half-life by a small unknown developer Valve Software.

After reading through the article it was apparent to me that only 2 games really stood out:

1) Legend of Zelda 64 and 2) Half-life

Valve's game seemed very special to me as they were trying to take 3d shooters to the next level.
They actually wanted to have a story!!!! A research scientist trapped when an experiment goes incredibley wrong! Very Cool!

They claimed that they were going to the best and most incredible creatures found in any shooter thus far. There were pics with the article to prove it. They were going to make them using an unheard of polygon count and the models were to use an ambitious skeletal animation system not found in any game before. And of course the creatures were going to be very smart. The levels would be continuous until the end and very movie like using "scripted sequences"

Well this was truly visionary stuff for shooters, this is way beyond the dull kind of quake gameplay/environments prominent back in those days.

Of all the games I read about in the article these Valve guys had the best ideas, I knew then and there that this was truly the game to watch, so I went to the internet to find out more. This was back before the internet was really mainstream, but then I'm not a really mainstream kind of dude.

I'd also like to know about the half-life community prior to it's release. Were there fansites set-up at the time?

There were a bunch of websites for HL1. There was a web ring of fan sites, most were pretty small with a few screenshots and such. The two biggest and the ones I visited regularly to track HL's progress were called:

1) Jasper's Halflife Site and
2) www.Contaminated.net

I don't really recall any turmoil over the HL1 game's delay, I mean Valve was an unknown company, the internet wasn't really populated by angry folks like it is now. There were no trolls, spam wasn't really a problem back in those days. Forum debate was really all about which of Half-life, Unreal or SIN would be the next big shooter.

Anyway, those two websites mentioned above eventually merged around the time of the HL game release and became a megasite called, drumroll please!!!

www.PlanetHalflife.com !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This is typical of Gamespy to buy out the most popular enthusiast games sites and rename them to be part of the Planet-xxx empire.


try this type www.contaminated.net into your browser and see where that takes you!!!!!!!!!!!!!


I think I spent 1998 telling everyone I knew that this little game called Half-life was going to be huge. No one would believe me, it was like:

"No way dude, Perfect Dark will rule!!!" (i.e. the GoldenEye sequel for N64)
"Get away from me weirdo, WTF is a Halflife"
"What!!???? Games??? You play games on a computer!!!"


I downloaded all the early trailers for HL, here's a few things you may not know:

• The blood effects in the early trailers were bizarre, when you shot somethink the blood would squirt out like a garden hose i.e. like your jugular vein was cut, really wild stuff not in the final game
  
• 
  The incredible yellow robotic vehicle carrying a crate you see during the opening tram ride for HL was originally intended to be drivable, one of the things cut from the game by Valve due to time and complexity contraints. At least they stuck the incredible model!! (one of my faves) at the games start. I also think the helicopter might also have intended to be driveable.
  
• 
  There is a Zena princess warrior pinup photo in the game, but in the early trailers it was a Farah Fawcett pinup photo instead (she is from the original Charlie's Angels i.e. a tv show from a long time ago)
  
• 
  Valve originally talked about having and Darwinian "alien ecosystem" as part of Halflife. If you were to run though a level "A" but not kill everything and move on to a later level "B" but then later on return back to level "A", the monsters you didn't kill might have mated and multiplied i.e. kill everything but 2 headcrabs come back later to find they have multiplied to 100 headcrabs possibly eating the dead carcasses littered around the level. Opposing creatures might have to battle it out for supremacy - natural selection. This never made it into the final game but this is the kind of wacky shit Valve comes up with. They have cool ideas and concepts but not everything turns out the be practical or feasible enough to come to fruition and make it into the game.
  This ultimately is what makes Valve great - they are willing to take chances and try to push the envelope, to take 3D shooters to a better place.
  
• 
  In the summer of 1998 some HL website operators got to interview Gabe Newell about HL in the Valve Office!!!
  They brought a video camera!! Gabe let them tape him demoing HL for like 45 minutes in his office. This video tape was later converted to AVI file and placed on the internet. (Of course I downloaded it)
  
  The first thing that was cool about this movie is that in 1998 Gabe had a 32 inch badass monitor. It must of cost alot back then and he demoed HL on it and it looked great!!!! On top of Gabe's huge monitor was a copy of Mario64 (the Miyamoto masterpiece for N64). Often you'll hear Gabe mention his admiration of Miyamoto game designs and Mario64, Pikmin, etc in interviews. This is very telling as you'll often hear Gabe talk about HL2's design in interviews, Valve take's the players experience and the gameplay very seriously just like Miyamoto.
  
  Anyway the HL1 game demo starts of in an elevator in the office complex:
  - Gabe goes in a duct and show some headcrabs getting killed by a whiling fan with cool blood splatters
  - Gabe shows scientists being grabbed by tentacles and eaten
  - He shows scientists being killed by an automatic ceiling gun turrent
  - He show the freezer part of the game with a bullsquid which proceeds to chase him!!
  
  While this is happening the camera guy can barely contain his excitement, the camera shakes alot (the original shaky cam) he almost drops the camera but this bullsquid chase is freaking amazing...
  
  - Gabe shows off scripted sequences where a Zombie kills a barney, and where zombies burst out of walls
  - at one point however the Zombies stop working, they can't see Gabe, they just stand there, Gabe hits them with a crowbar and they don't move. Gabe is very embarrassed.
  
  So Gabe loads up another level with the bit in halflife where the scientist is hanging on to a cable in an elevator shaft. Gabe scales the shaft to reach the scientist, but as he reaches him he falls (scripted)
  
  Embarrassingly the game crashes!!!!!!! Completely frozen, have to reboot!!
  Gabe says somethings "guess we set the velocity a little to high on that one!!"
  
  this is the end of the demo which didn't quite go as planned
  
  What is interesting about this demo is that in the actual HL game there is a sign on a lab door that reads:
  
  "Dr. Newell: Chaos Theory"
  
  This lab door is in one of the maps that Gabe showed in this filmed demo. The Valve guys added this sign to HL1 as a reminder/tribute/inside joke of this buggy demo.
  
  You will note that none of the E3 HL2 demos are being played by a live demostator but are all canned demos.
  
• 
  In late summer of 1998 Valve announced that "HL: Day one" a demo containing about the first quarter of the entire game had gone gold. This demo has not public but rather a demo to be packed exclusively with certain video cards. Its release was signifigant because it meant that the full game was going to be going gold within a month or two.
  
  This demo was rather quickly leaked onto the internet (some say Valve did this on purpose possible, but who knows). Word quickly spread about this amazing HL demo. There was a huge buzz among gamers over this thing, anyone that played it quickly learned that HL was seriously hot stuff. Anticipation for the actual game's release grew and grew.
  
  One interesting fact about this demo is that the tram ride to Black Mesa at the start of the game is much longer that in the real game. Valve cut down the length of it before release. The rest I believe is pretty much the same as the real game.

When the game finally came out in November of 1998 I jogged my ass down to the local Electronic Boutique and asked them when they were getting the game in, the conversation went something like this:

Me: "do you have Halflife"
EB dude: "we'll be getting it in tomorrow"
Me: "this is the biggest game in history, the monsters are incredible, its going to be so great........."
EB dude cuts me off: "nah Halflife sucks, that's the game you want" ***points to wall to Baldur's Gate***
Me: "ummm dude, but Half-life is going to own Baldur's Gate, it's going to be your biggest seller..."
EB dude: "I work in a game store so I know what's good and what's not.... blah blah blah"
Me: ----leaves store, but of course came back next day to get my copy of HL on the very first day of release---


needless to say I have no confidence in Electronic Boutique to this day, some of their associates are dumbasses
note: I'm not slagging off Baldur's Gate by any means, but if I had to choose HL all the way baby!!!

:dork: My only regret is that I couldn't buy Valve stock, I mean I knew they were on to something big back in 1997.

 

[Keeson]

I am really sorry about the length of the preceding message. Really really sorry

 

[umop]

i hit the PC scene in like '96.
my friend's all had computers and i thought they were pretty damned cool, but since i was like 14 at the time i couldn't afford one myself. my friend showed me command and conquer (wow did that look so fking cool at the time), aol and all of that. so i begged my parents to get one and we finally did. at the time i was obsessed with learning things, so i started programming and creating web pages / graphics and i was almost completely oblivious to games (big mistake). then i finally upgraded my p1 120 mhz w/16 megs of RAM and bought myself a new hp and then one of my friends showed me half life and counter-strike.
i thought half life was the coolest thing in the world so of course i bought it and ever since then (at the time cs beta 6.1 came out) ive been HOPELESSLY addicted to it. actually i dropped out of high school to play cs (yeah its sad i know.. but its true) and kind of spoiled myself with it. wow i must be rambling like crazy, sorry bout that. i think ill just stop typing and spare you the misfortune of reading some idiot's nonsese
jeez once i start goin i turn into a zombie and never stop...

 

[Cutey_Kaite]

I am really sorry about the length of the preceding message. Really really sorry

Kesson, that was so informative, really. Thanks for all the info, and you dont have to be sorry. Thats what the thread is about and you said everything. Thank you so much, I just really wanted to know how it was when good ol' half life was released, and you just said it all. Thanks a lot :E

 

[Brian Damage]

Wow. Amazing. I actually enjoyed reading one of Keeson's posts.

 

[-JeZ-]

Keeson, thanks for one of the most interestign and informative posts I've read on these forums in a LONG time

 

[chimpmunk]

I remember, my father said, (twas in 98, just bought a pentium II) we're gonna have CABLE internet, so he gave a magazine and said look at it, to know what to do with internet (well, i already went on the net in school since 96) and they were talking about HL who came out like a month before, so i decided to buy the game,
Thank you DAD!

 

[TrueWeltall]

Now thats saying something.