Development
Half-Life was the first product of Valve Software, a software developer based at Kirkland, Washington founded in 1996 by former Microsoft employees Mike Harrington and Gabe Newell. Valve settled on a concept for a horror-themed 3D action game using the Quake engine licensed from id Software. Valve eventually modified the engine a great deal, notably adding skeletal animation and Direct3D support; a developer stated in a PC Accelerator magazine preview that seventy percent of the engine code was rewritten. Valve initially struggled to find a publisher, many believing their project too ambitious for a studio headed by newcomers to the video game industry; however, Sierra On-Line had been very interested in making a 3D action game, especially one based on the Quake engine, and signed Valve for a one-game deal.
The original code name for Half-Life was Quiver, after the Arrowhead military base from Stephen King's novella The Mist, an early inspiration for the game. Gabe Newell explained that the name Half-Life was chosen because it was evocative of the theme, not clichéd, and had a corresponding visual symbol: the Greek letter λ (lower-case lambda), which represents the decay constant in the half-life equation. According to one of the game's designers, Harry Teasley, Doom was a huge influence on most of the team working on Half-Life. According to Teasley, they wanted Half-Life to "scare you like Doom did". Newell felt that "Half-Life in many ways was a reactionary response to the trivialization of the experience of the first person genre. Many of us had fallen in love with videogames because of the phenomenological possibilities of the field, and felt like the industry was reducing the experiences to least common denominators rather than exploring those possibilities. Our hope was that building worlds and characters would be more compelling than building shooting galleries."
The first public appearances of Half-Life came in early 1997; it was a hit at Electronic Entertainment Expo that year, where they primarily demonstrated the animation system and artificial intelligence. Valve Software hired science fiction author Marc Laidlaw in August 1997 to work on the game's characters and level design. Half-Life's soundtrack was composed by Kelly Bailey. Half-Life was originally planned to be shipped in late 1997, to compete with Quake II, but was postponed when Valve decided the game needed significant revision.
In a 2003 Making Of... feature in Edge, Newell discusses the team's early difficulties with level design. In desperation, a single level was assembled including every weapon, enemy, scripted event, and level design quirk that the designers had come up with so far. This single level inspired the studio to press on with the game. As a result, the studio completely reworked the game's artificial intelligence and levels in the year leading up to its release. At E3 1998 it was given Game Critics Awards for "Best PC Game" and "Best Action Game". The release date was delayed several times in 1998 before the game was finally released in November of that year. A few days prior to the release in November, the developers discovered an error in the source code. Developers fixed the error by adding corrections into a single line of the source code.
Two official demos for Half-Life were released. The first demo, Half-Life: Day One, contained the first one-fifth of the full game, and was meant only for distribution with certain graphic cards. The second demo was released on February 12, 1999. Entitled Half-Life: Uplink, the demonstration featured many of the weapons and non-player characters in Half-Life. Set 48 hours into the game, Uplink's levels are heavily revised variations of levels cut during Half-Life's development phase, and are not present in the end version of the full game.
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