In conjunction with the 20th Anniversary of the release of the legendary game Half-Life 2 in November 2024 comes the....ummmmm.....documentary Half-Life 2: 20th Anniversary Documentary on develiper Valve's YouTube which in the words of the description, "To celebrate the 20th Anniversary of the release of Half-Life 2, we've gotten members of the HL2 team back to talk about the game's development, how we almost ran out of money, what it was like when we were hacked, what happened when we were sued by our publisher, the birthplace of Steam, and much more."
That sums everything up tidily as well as redundantly. As the description says, it's a lot of white dudes (and ONE white chick) talking about how they developed the game, iterating and playtesting to refine the game. Plenty of in-progress developmental test footage illustrates things and they show the local residents of their Washington town who were photographed to populate the game as NPCs. Fun Fact: The face of Dr. Eli Vance was a homeless fellow who some of the devs would pass by on their commute and thought he had a good look. So they brought him in and paid him $200 (the rate everyone got) to immortalize him across three games.
The lawfare they were subjected to by the publisher of the first Half-Life was brutal and intended to bankrupt both the company and co-founder Gabe Newell personally as he tapped his savings and even put his house up to keep the lights on. The irony is that a maneuver by the publisher to bog them down with a mountain of documents in Korean backfired as a Korean-speaking intern a Valve discovered a smoking gun email which blew the case up.
But what is sorely lacking is any candor about how Newell is a fat f*cking liar who lied about the condition of the game in the months ahead of it's originally scheduled Sept. 30, 2003 release date. Newell - "Lord GabeN" to his herds of retarded admirers - announced the release date in an exclusive cover reveal in PC Gamer six months prior, firmly stating that the game was being announced then because they were in final stages of making it and it'd be ready to go on schedule. But then a hack - covered in the doc - stole the game code and put it on the Internet and what it showed that it was nowhere close to being ready. (This is fleetingly referenced in the doc.)
Newell's deceit extended to holding a splashy launch event on Alcatraz in conjunction with terminal videocard also-rans ATI (now AMD) which as this report from the Planet Half-Life site detailed lacked the actual game. Because I loved the first game and was naive enough to believe Valve when they said the game would ship when promised, I built a new computer in August 2003 just to be ready for Half-Life 2 the next month. By the time it arrived 14 months later, I'd already upgraded the videocard.
Add on the failure to complete the promised trilogy of Episodes and the fact there are legions of drooling gamers slurping GabeN's grease-and-Cheeto-dust encrusted junk is even more appalling. The loyalty this charlatan inspires is ugh. The Orange Box, which shipped on Oct. 9, 2007, included Half-Life 2: Episode Two which ended on a cliffhanger. As of this writing it has been 6304 days since The Orange Box came out - 17 years, 3 months, 2 days, but who's counting? - and Episode Three never happened. In fact, they never officially cancelled it, preferring to just pretend it was never promised.
If they had simply announced that they didn't feel they could make a concluding episode that was up to their standards, it would've been disappointing, but would've been better than just going radio silent. Concept sketches from the scrapped Episode are shown and work had been done, but they diverted the team to work on Left 4 Dead and by the time they got done with that, it was too late. So they did nothing.
Yes, I am still mad about it.
But even allowing for my antipathy for the fat f*cking liar, Half-Life 2: 20th Anniversary Documentary suffers from being too broad and general while papering over the inconvenient aspects of their operation. Even speed-watching at 2X speed (a feature I wish every streaming service offered on my home theater's apps like they do on web or mobile like Netflix's 1.5X speed), it's a lot of stuff only of interest to the most completionist fans of the game. Even as a big behind-the-scenes making-of, there's too much filler larding out the killer. It could've been half the length.
And Gabe Newell is a still slightly-less-fat f*cking liar.
Score: 5/10. Catch it on YouTube if you're a fan; otherwise Skip it.
Watch the whole movie here:
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