Early Build Of Half-Life Unveiled From Ex-Valve Developer

Digging into the history of any video game development studio is bound to pull up some interesting nuggets of information. We’ve seen plenty of fascinating scrapped projects, ideas on how certain mechanics came up in conversations to simply watching a build go from a prototype into a full video game release. You likely would suspect that we know just about everything there is to know when it comes to big-name video game projects. For instance, Half-Life is a huge IP and recently we got a bit of insight behind the original prototype developers were toying around with. 

A former developer for Valve, Brett Johnson, has taken online to showcase information about Half-Life that you might now have known about. The developer has talked about names the IP went through before settling on Half-Life and the fact that this group of developers was still figuring out just how violent of a title it needed to be. To showcase that, Brett shared a screenshot he made which was used to figure out how violent the studio wanted to go with it when it came to the actual game build.

During the video, Brett made note that the scientist in the game came from his love of the Nintendo 64 video game hit, GoldenEye. He made note that you could chase around scientists in a level of a game but they would disappear after turning a corner. In the image he shares, we see Gordon behind a scientist while another lays dead within a corner of the room. However, there is a massive amount of blood splatters all around the floors, walls, and even ceiling. 

Using this image the developers decided to scale back the violence featured within before its release. Now we look back at Half-Life with fond memories and an IP that fans are still hoping that a third installment will come out to help conclude the storyline. For now, we at least have a small look at how the developers crafted up the game. 

Source: Rockpapershotgun, TikTok