In the history of video games, there are titles that have single-handedly turned the rules of the industry. Half-Life, released in 1998, occupies an important place among these. The creation of the Valve studio was revolutionary in many aspects, but one of the most important was the presence of a well-thought-out plot, which could no longer be put into a couple of proposals for covenants John Carmack.
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At the same time, from the birth of the idea to the release of Half-Life, it managed to go through a lot of big changes: whole layers of mechanics, individual creatures and entire levels disappeared from the final version. Cybersport.ru offers a look at what Half-Life could become – and what it will never be.
Little dream
Photo of the original Half-Life development team
It all started in 1996. Two former Microsoft employees Mike Harrington and Gabe Newell cashed their stock options in the company and invested the millions in a dream business – Valve’s own game studio. From the very first days, the two developers set themselves an ambitious task: instead of becoming another company that just creates shooters, they wanted to make a small revolution in the genre, focusing on the development of the world and the plot.
Taking into account that the team could not be large (yes, thanks to Microsoft, Harrington and Newell made several million, but on a company scale this is not so much money), they decided not to create their own engine, but to turn to the industry mastodon – id Software. Newell admitted in interviews that he saw no need to worry about the engine, when the team was already facing a big task. Two men with a track record of working on Windows NT are the fathers of the shooter genre looked down on – but they did not refuse the license. With the purchase of the Quake Engine, which was used in the development of the first Quake, the first name of the future game was born – Quiver, at the same time a nod to the engine and the name of the military base from Stephen King’s “Mist”, from where the inspiration for the game was initially drawn “Mist”).
The team was recruited primarily from enthusiasts: the first employees, in addition to Newell and Harrington, were several modders of the original Quake. Other amateurs followed, accompanied by more sophisticated employees from companies such as 3D Realms, Shiny Entertainment and the founder’s hometown of Microsoft. As a result, the team quickly grew to a couple of dozen people.
The main character of the canceled Prospero
Quiver at first remained a corridor shooter with a plot similar to King’s novel, except that there was no question of a supermarket. But the parallel development of Prospero was supposed to make a real revolution. The action-packed sci-fi adventure game was supposed to resemble not so much a shooter as a complex Myst-style adventure game. It was assumed that the player will control a girl named Aleph, who will use her psionic abilities to fight enemies, as well as travel to different worlds. Realizing that they needed a really high-quality script, Valve hired writer Mark Laidlaw, who was supposed to deal with Prospero. However, the plans turned out to be too ambitious: the game first turned into a kind of MMO with the ability to create your own worlds and keep lists of friends, and then suddenly died out. But some of her ideas migrated to Quiver, and with them Laidlaw, who initially had only a little help with the script of this game.
Global ambitions
One of the very first screenshots from Quiver
Quiver was originally supposed to see the light of day back in 1997. At the first demonstrations, however, it already received its final name – Half-Life. Gabe Newell once explained that the name was chosen as appropriate for the topic, not clichéd and has a characteristic symbol: the lambda, which became the logo of the series, is included in the half-life equation, where lambda is a constant. In early 1997, the first public demonstration of the shooter took place at E3: a small trailer demonstrating the gameplay, animation features and artificial intelligence. The audience liked the game, but Newell and Harrington felt they weren’t happy with the result. Half-Life was supposed to be a revolution, not just a competitor to Quake II.
A little about the plot of the early version: in the rocket bunker, scientists created a portal leading to another dimension. No one runs the risk of meddling inside, since aggressively minded creatures almost continuously climb from the other side, killing everyone in their path. The security service is not very happy with such a turn and is ready to shoot to kill not only the intruders, but also the scientists guilty of the disaster. The player was assigned the role of space biker Ivan (as he is recorded in the game files), who had to break through to the portal and save humanity from outside threats, fighting enemies on the other side.
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