Trivia / Half-Life 2

• The Abridged Series:
  • Half-Life 2 in 60 Seconds.
  • Half-Life Lore in a Minute.
  • Half-Life in 60 Seconds ^note Covers Half-Life and Half-Life 2 in 60 seconds total.
• Accidental Downer Ending: For the longest time, Half-Life 2's continuation in the form of a new game was in doubt, which was left with the add-on Episode Two ending with Eli Vance being killed by Combine Advisors. This had caused a stir among fans that series writer Mark Laidlaw, after leaving Valve Corporation among many others, created fan fiction of his intended conclusion to the story — this spurred the modding community to spawn projects of their own Half-Life 3. As of 2020 there is Half-Life: Alyx but it only retconned a cliffhanger with another.
• Acting for Two: There is only one voice actor each for all male and female citizens and rebels. Any time two same-sex citizens or rebels have a conversation, it's with the same voice, respectively John Patrick Lowrie for males and Mary Kae Irvin for females. Episode Two added a second voice actor, Adam Baldwin, for Sheckley, since he was specifically written to converse with Griggs, who is still voiced by Lowrie.
• All There in the Script:
  • The names of certain Citizens can only be gleaned internally, either from script files, animation names, or within the map itself. For instance, the sole survivor of the Station 1 raid is named Mary, the guy with whom you fight the first Manhacks is Matt, and the man accompanying Lazlo at the beginning of "Sandtraps" is known as Sandy.
  • This can occasionally extend to non-human NPCs in the form of an amusing Shout-Out. Did you know that the two Combine Gunships you have to fight in the Nova Prospekt courtyard are referred to as Penn & Teller?
• Conclusion in Another Medium: Episode 3 never saw the light of day as intended. Instead, ex-series writer Marc Laidlaw released what would have been the story of Episode 3 on his website under the name Epistle 3 with many names changed for obvious reasons to finally give fans closure.
• Content Leak: An incomplete version of the game and the engine's source code was stolen from Valve and leaked online shortly after its delay in 2003. It was bad enough to almost derail the entire game's release.
• Dueling Works:
  • With Doom³, both of which followed on from revolutionary games that had their last installments several years prior and pushed graphics technology of the time to its limits. It wasn't quite the curbstomp that its predecessor gave to its competition in 1998, but Half-Life 2 still soundly won, beating out Doom 3 in critical scores, sales numbers, and lasting influence through its engine and gameplay innovations.
  • To a lesser extent, it also competed with Halo 2, both of which released just one week apart in November 2004, which had several story similarities (aliens invade Earth, a race that was hostile in the first game becomes allies, endings leaving on massive cliffhangers), shared a Troubled Production that culminated in redoing much of the game within the last year of development, and were the Killer App for their respective platforms (Halo 2 for the Xbox, PC and Steam for Half-Life 2). Neither really won or lost, since they were primarily made for completely different platforms (and so both became legendary in their own right without really impacting each other), and comparing them by ports is unfair no matter which way you go (Half-Life 2 was simply too much for the original Xbox to handle well, while Halo 2's PC port was severely gimped by early-era Windows Vista and Games for Windows Live). If there's any place where one is superior to the other, it's in being able to finish a story, as Halo 2 got a solid conclusion to its story in the same amount of time Half-Life 2 took to put out a three-part episodic continuation that petered out after two episodes.
• Dummied Out:
  • Files found in Half-Life 2 indicate that Houndeyes were supposed to appear as enemies, sporting a noticeably leaner and starved appearance, signifying that they've become desperately aggressive in a resource-starved Combine controlled Earth.
  • Cut files, models and textures indicate that Bullsquids were to return as enemies once again, but were cut. Word of God states that they still exist in the continuity, but they've yet to be encountered.
• DVD Commentary:
  • An interactive example: in Episode One and Two and the bonus level Lost Coast, there are commentary bubble icons the player can "use" to listen to information about making the games.
  • In March 2015, "Half-Life 2: Update", a gentle graphics boost mod for Half-Life 2, added a well-researched community commentary to Half-Life 2.
• Referenced by...: The (alleged) Anti-Gravity Gun from Spider-Man: Homecoming is named and shaped after the Gravity Gun.
• Stock Scream: A Poison Headcrab noise and the Fast Zombie's roar are both sped-up Howie Screams.
• Throw It In!: It's fair to say that a good amount of the games came about by accident.
  • The Hunter-Chopper's minespam tactic was a glitch at first — the command to drop a mine was programmed instead of the command to fire the machine gun, and the chopper dropped so many mines at once it overloaded the physics engine and crashed the game. However, the programmers liked it, so they toned it down to a more reasonable amount and added it to the game as a Desperation Attack.
  • Gunships' original behavior caused them to focus on the "biggest threat". They weren't originally supposed to attack fired rockets if you kept the laser sight on them, because the way they were programmed was supposed to prioritize the player as the biggest threat, but as soon as a rocket was launched into the air and got closer to them than Gordon ever could, the rocket itself was tagged as a significantly more deadly threat. So they kept the behavior in for extra challenge.
  • In the development of Episode One, during a run through a scripted scene before its animations were finished, one of D0G's default head-shaking animations inadvertently played immediately after Alyx asks him "you did do the math, right?". It was so fitting that they specifically animated him to respond in that way to Alyx.
  • The vista of the Nectarium in Episode Two came about when a dev was making space for the mine cart trap and knocked out a wall, which conveniently opened up a vista of the Nectarium. All this elegantly lined up with Valve's design philosophy of letting the player see their goal, even before they realize it is their goal, making for a happy accident.
  • In the level "Freeman Pontifex" in Episode Two, there is a bit where a fast zombie is hiding in a dumpster. But when you throw a grenade, it throws it back. The lobbing back of the grenade was originally unintended; it happened because the script that was supposed to make the boxes explode out of the dumpster as the zombie got up would trigger, and when playtesters started getting smart and lobbing a grenade in before the zombie jumped out, one time it just happened to hit the grenade back out at Gordon. Of course, it was too good to leave out.
• Troubled Production: Half-Life 2 spent five years in development, and had a number of setbacks and challenges that impeded work. Unlike many examples, most of the troubles came later in development due to broken promises and thefts.
  • Originally meant to be shown at E3 2002, the team ended up spending close to a year constantly reworking the debut gameplay footage because Gabe Newell and Jay Stelly were unimpressed by it.
  • After an impressive showing at E3 2003, the game was originally given a release date of September 30, 2003, despite the team knowing that there was no way they would be able to make the deadline due to constantly shifting story and gameplay elements. A delay was finally announced on the week before the game was to be released.
  • An incomplete version of the game and the engine's source code was stolen from Valve and released publicly a mere two weeks after the delay. Dubbed "The Leak" by fans,^note While this is the generally accepted name, Valve employees have never called it anything but the "theft" or "stolen build" it caused even more outrage against Valve when it showed that Valve had lied to the community about the E3 demos not being scripted and the generally unfinished state of the game. Valve suffered a major blow to morale, and had to rewrite large chunks of engine code in response.^note While it is often assumed that the stolen build caused Valve to dump much of the game's content and story done up to that point, much of the early content present in it was already being phased out, and evidence that the theft had an impact on gameplay or story elements is circumstantial at best.
  • It would take until November 2004, over a full year after the original announced release date, before the game was finally released. Thankfully, it was met with resounding critical praise and commercial success.
• Vaporware:
  • With no new games or Episodes after Episode 2 in 2007 along with the death of Robert Culp, Half Life 2: Episode 3 or Half-Life 3 seem further and further away, if they will make them at all. In a 2015 Polygon article and a Gameslice podcast, it seems that Gabe Newell and other senior higher-ups at Valve don't want to put work towards the Half-Life series for the foreseeable future and with Marc Laidlaw, the writer of Half-Life 2, retiring, it seems like the Half-Life series has ended on a depressing cliffhanger with the death of Eli and the Combine still in control.
  • All but confirmed with Marc Laidlaw posting a short story to his blog which essentially details how Episode 3 could have happened, with the fairly definitive sign-off of "Yours in infinite finality..."
  • And then Valve released Half-Life: Alyx, which overhauls the ending of Episode 2 and ends with another Sequel Hook. So, maybe this isn't over yet.
• What Could Have Been: It has its own page.

---