HALF-L IFE : ALYX
Let’s start by addressing the inevitable: Valve has spent a very long time not making (or, at least, not releasing) Half-Life games. A dozen years have passed since HalfLife 2: Episode Two’s cliffhanger ending gave birth to an Internet rallying cry and established the studio’s reputation for being allergic to the number three. So what exactly happened to Half-Life during those years?
“I don’t think Half-Life really left our minds over that whole period of time,” Valve’s Dario Casali tells us. “It was always there, it was always, ‘Well, what are we going to do, how are we going to push it forward?’ – and those are difficult questions to answer. I guess there weren’t any projects that put forward a really viable claim to, ‘This is the idea for the next Half-Life.’”
“We did actually start some efforts that were
Life- oriented,” Greg Coomer adds. Small teams gathered around these ideas, as happens with any new project at Valve – and then, unconvinced they had something worthy of the name, fell away. “Those experiments didn’t ever reach critical mass.”
Casali and Coomer are designers (Valve’s freeform, nonhierarchical structure means exact job titles don’t really exist) who have both worked on the series from its original incarnation through to the present day, with Half-Life: Alyx. And after that long absence, they’re clearly glad to be back. “Valve has done a bunch of things in the 20 years since we made our first Half-Life
game, and of course we’re proud of all that stuff, but everybody has their favourites,” Coomer says. “And
Halfto me, it feels like Valve has Half-Life in its DNA somehow – so when we’re back to doing that, it does feel like we’re coming home, to the thing we know better than anything else.”
It’s a sentiment shared by many of the other Valve veterans we speak to. Take Robin Walker, a designer who joined the studio back in 1997 when it bought up the team behind the Team Fortress mod. “For all the years we weren’t shipping new Half-Life products, there was no lack of desire here,” Walker says. “There was definitely a concern: ‘Do we still know how to do it?’”
Various obstacles stood in their way. There was the growing pressure from fans, and – because the studio’s structure means employees are free to choose what projects they work on – a swathe of other enticing games they could join instead. And not just games, either. According to Coomer, “a significant fraction of the people at the company” took the opportunity to hop the fence from games to work on the development of Steam or even Valve’s hardware efforts. Those obstacles are all still there today, however. Why, then, is Half-Life resurfacing now?
The answer lies in that hardware business. By 2016, Valve had taken the plunge into virtual reality – working with HTC on Vive and beginning R&D efforts on what would eventually become Valve Index – and realised that technology would need software support. It needed a reason, in short, why someone would
actually buy one of these headsets. And so small teams started to explore options for virtual-reality games, reaching right back into Valve’s longest-running franchises and looking for something that would be a good fit for the medium.
“It wasn’t actually super-obvious on day one when we had those conversations that it should be a Half-Life game,” Coomer says. Competitive multiplayer games were rejected because of their reliance on player numbers, something that VR wouldn’t be able to provide. Casali briefly worked on a Left 4 Dead VR prototype (it was “creepy as hell”, he says, but was missing some essential Left 4 Dead- ness). Portal was considered until the team realised how heavily its puzzles leant on momentum and, not wanting to make players vomit, put the idea aside.
“Then we put together a Half-Life prototype, and it was just like, ‘Oh wow, we can easily see how this is going to work,’” Casali says. That first version was pulled together within a week using old Half-Life 2 assets. It was “very rudimentary”, a 15-minute experience that didn’t add up to much more than a shooting gallery – but people were sold on it immediately. “It was clear pretty quickly that there were a set of things about Half-Life’s DNA that worked really well in VR,” Walker says.
Not only that, but it gave the team a solid reason to return to the series. “VR was exactly the thing that dragged Half-Life from the back of my mind to the forefront – ‘Oh, I can see why this is going to make Half-Life interesting and novel again,’” Casali says. He makes the comparison to HL2’ s Gravity Gun and physics engine: the big idea upon which the rest of the game could be anchored.
“I think that VR let us get to work on it to some extent,” Walker says. “We understood Half-Life, and this project was about ‘How does VR change Half-Life?’. That’s very tractable. We could start work on that very quickly. So, to some extent, we didn’t have to worry a lot about the larger questions. We could just focus on, ‘Let’s build a really good Half-Life game’. And we know how to do that.”
As Half-Life Alyx came into focus, the slowly growing team – “There were less than 20 of us for the first couple of years,” Walker says – found other ways to help it feel less like they were labouring in the shadow of that looming ‘3’. Like, to pick one
particularly pertinent example, dropping the number entirely. Alyx is simultaneously sequel and prequel, sitting between the first and second games – and that was enough to free Valve from some of the expectations that had been holding it back for so long.
“There was a reason we decided to make it a prequel,” Casali says. “We recognised that the VR platform was limited in audience – and we also recognised that this was not Half-Life 3. We didn’t want to put out a product not every Half-Life fan could play that would advance the storyline beyond where HL2 was, and leave all these people without VR headsets saying, ‘Hey, why can’t we participate in this?’”
We sense that Alyx being a prequel lets Valve treat it as something hermetically sealed – that if the game fails in any way, it won’t spill out and tarnish the broader series. But as more staff joined the project, they found their work defined by this decision, for good or ill. “There’s this space between Half-Life 1 and 2 which was completely unexplored,” says Rob Briscoe, an artist who joined Valve after making Dear Esther. “That was super-exciting to me because, as a fan, I was always into the lore side of things.” The art team found ways of connecting the two games aesthetically and narratively.
Briscoe uses the example of Xen flora, which after infecting the world in the first Half-Life is absent from its sequel. The art team looked at HL2’ s unexplained canals of toxic waste, reasoned that the Combine could have been dissolving it down to chemicals, and worked the logical midpoint into Alyx’s environmental art. The game never tells you any of this, but it’s there for anyone who goes looking.
This work all happened before any of the game’s credited writers joined the project. When Portal 2 co-writers Jay Pinkerton and Erik Wolpaw began work on Alyx – alongside Sean Vanaman, who’d recently joined Valve along with the rest of the team at Campo Santo – they inherited a world and a rough structure. “When we came in, we had a lot of the where but we didn’t have any of the why,” Pinkerton says. Which meant they also inherited the problem of writing a prequel, and all the difficulties inherent to it. “If you know where all the characters end up, where’s the drama, where’s the conflict?”
Part of the solution they came up with was the introduction of Russell, a new character played by Rhys Darby (Flight Of The Conchords). Russell provided the writers with someone whose fate was uncertain,