Half-Life: Decay - Development

Development

A cooperative Half-Life game was first alluded to by publisher Sierra Entertainment in November 2000 with the announcement of a PlayStation 2 version of Half-Life. At the time, however, it was unclear how a cooperative version of Half-Life would be implemented; the developers, Gearbox Software, were still experimenting with finding the most balanced amount of players to build a cooperative game around. By E3 2001, the game had acquired the title Decay, named after the scientific concept of exponential decay for consistency with the scientific names used by previous Half-Life titles. While the E3 convention only provided a demonstration of the main Half-Life PlayStation 2 game, further details were released relating to Decay's premise and story, as well as confirming that the cooperative mode was to be designed for two players. The game's use of new model sets were also showcased. These new models were updated versions of Gearbox's High Definition pack for Blue Shift, featuring higher numbers of polygons and animation features such as facial expressions. The enhanced models were around twice as detailed as those in the High Definition pack, which itself was of a much higher quality than the original models in Half-Life. Media updates through the months following E3 showed various screenshots and the trailer to the game. On August 18, 2001, Sierra announced that Decay was nearly complete, and would be submitted to PlayStation 2 manufacturer Sony for verification within days. The entire Half-Life for PlayStation 2 package achieved gold status on October 30, 2001, and the game was released on November 14, 2001.

In October 2005, work was begun by a group of Ukrainian developers to port Decay over to Windows, as a modification for both the old World Opponent Network and current Steam versions of Half-Life. The port relied on the discovery of a method that allowed Decay's PS2 game files to be deciphered, thereby allowing the files to be ported to Windows. The port went into the beta development stage in December 2007 and was released publicly on September 23, 2008. The port was received well by the journalists in the industry; GameSpy site Planet Half-Life noted that it was a shame that an official PC version of Decay never emerged, while British journalist Alec Meer stated that it was "fantastic to have this short but sweet lost Half-Life episode on PC at last, and it even has something the PS2 version didn't—online play".