Gaming - Valve just made Half-Life free and put out a massive update with cut content and an hour-long 'making of' documentary

Nov 19, 2023

The Helper

Necromancy Power over 9000

Staff member

Happy birthday, Half-Life!

It's been 25 years since the release of the original Half-Life, one of the most important videogames of all time, and to celebrate the big birthday Valve has released a major new update to the game that adds new features and support for modern displays, restores cut and lost content, implements full Steam Deck support, and a whole bunch more—and it's giving the full game away to one and all until November 20.

Okay, fair enough: The odds are that you already own Half-Life, or maybe the Black Mesa remake, or at the very least you've played it at some point over the past half-century. But this is not the Half-Life of days long ago—I mean, it is, but there's a whole lot more going on courtesy of the 25th Anniversary Update.

"We launched Half-Life on November 19th, 1998," Valve wrote. "We are very proud of what we built back then and we remain extremely grateful for the community of players who have been enjoying it ever since. The game hasn't received as much attention in recent years as many other titles in our catalog, so we thought this milestone was a great opportunity to spruce up the player experience and add some fun new ways to play the game."

Here's the quick lowdown on what's in store:

Half-Life Uplink - Originally released as a CD exclusive for magazines and hardware manufacturers, this mini-campaign was built by the Half-Life team right after the game went gold.
Four New Multiplayer Maps - Built by Valve level designers, these new maps push the limits of what's possible in the Half-Life engine.
Updated Graphics Settings - Play the game the way it looked in 1998, but on a modern monitor.
UI Scaling Support for Higher Resolutions - We built most of this stuff for 640x480 CRTs and apparently some of you have upgraded since then.
Controller and Steam Networking Support
Steam Deck Support!