What's in an engine, or how Half-Life 2 made me

Last month was the Half-Life 2 20th anniversary (November 16th). This post is a boring retelling of how I played some games on a computer (who cares). But I wanted to write this, before one day I forget some of the details. And I get to talk about Team Fortress 2 at the end.

We all have things in our lives which we can look back on as being definitive reasons for the direction we are on. They can spark a founding interest which you followed into a career. Or guided you to a community to be a part of. For me, one of those things is the Source engine.

That probably sounds lame as all heck. "Oh this nerd likes a game engine, take his lunch money". If you don’t know anything about the Source engine, and more importantly to this blog post, the games which are made on it, then I can promise you it’s a story which will be shared by thousands of other people. And if you do know about Source engine games, I think you will already get what I’m on about.

Half-Life

Half-Life came out in 1998, and my family was living in the middle of no-where in Scotland. I had just started my first year at primary school in a tiny village, with a couple of other kids my age making up my entire year group. I just looked that school up on Google. Across 7 school years there are currently 39 pupils. The whole school fit into a room. This is a different vibe to the other schools I went to growing up.

My elder brother and I had a PlayStation 1. It had chipped by our neighbour to play burnt game copies, which my Dad would order cheap from an online mailing list. We played a lot a white label CDs with a black marker written on the top. A lot of Coolboarders 2. The concept of playing games on a computer hadn’t even crossed my mind. A computer basically didn’t exist to me. Why would it. I was 4 years old, really into my Lego Fort Legoredo, living in one of the most beautiful countries in the world. Some boxes should never be opened.

I remember first seeing Half-Life a few years later. We had moved to the south coast of England for my Dad's job. My brother is 4 years older than me, so he formed a lot of my interests growing up. If he was into something, I probably was as well. Such is sibling life.

My brother had his own computer. So when he started playing Half-Life and mods, I started getting interested in it too. Truth be told he was mainly into Counter-Strike. But online games were daunting for me, and a bit much for my wee mind. So I tried Half-Life one time when he wasn’t around. I didn’t get far. I still remember that first lot of hound-eyes you find once the Black Mesa incident has started. They skill checked the heck out of me. I think I loaded up a save at Xen at some point, and just marvelled at the cool alien flora, before falling off the map and dying.

But I knew it was something special. I replayed that intro level where you’re just walking around the facility pre-incident dozens of times. Pretending I had a job, speaking to the guards, being a scientist. The children yearn for labour.

Blue Shift came out around the same time, which scratched that same itch for me of inhabiting a world in a mundane job. It felt great to pretend to be a security guard at Black Mesa. I do blame the intro in that game for a slight fear of elevators, though.

Half-Life 2

When Half-Life 2 came out, I was 10. So I wasn’t really following the gaming news sphere beyond occasionally getting the Nintendo Official Magazine so I could look up some information about Pokemon Sapphire. I have no idea how else a child was supposed to find out strategies to get Latias. I never did catch that fucker.

My Dad bought it the day it came out. He drove down to a local shop (when they used to sell PC games), picked up the game, came back, and quietly installed it on his computer. I don’t quite remember, but I think he had pre-downloaded Steam and created an account in anticipation.

He was buying PC Gamer magazine every month, so he knew what to expect. There was no bigger PC game release in 2004 than Half-Life 2. Ground breaking graphics. Realistic physics. The sequel to a once in a generation game. Once it was ready, he let me into the room, and I stood behind him for what felt like hours watching him go through the start of the game on the (what feels like now) small 4:3 screen in our cramped computer room (remember when we had entire rooms dedicated to the computer). As something of an adult myself now, I can appreciate how annoying it is to have a child stood behind you while you try and enjoy something.

Half-Life 2: Episode 1

Like with Half-Life 1, I didn't actually play Half-Life 2 properly until a couple of years later. My first experiences playing a game on the Source engine was Counter Strike Source in 2006 on random map servers using my dad’s account. I don’t know why I was allowed to do that. I would recommend stricter controls over what your child, don’t let 12 year olds play online video games unsupervised. Especially in 2006 good lord.

Around that same time, I had my own Windows computer built from the scraps handed down. It was filled with 512mb of RAM, an 8gb hard drive, and eventually a ATi Radeon 9800 that remained an absolute workhorse until 2009. I was ready to make my own Steam account, and get the chance to experience Half Life 2 for myself. I made my Steam account, “icemaz”, on December 20th 2006. That account is now 18 years old almost exactly, 60% of my life so far. Icemaz is a name I still use to this day for almost everything, and it was lovingly stolen from my brothers RuneScape account (thanks). My parents got me the “Half Life 2 Holiday Collection” on Boxing Day 2006, which also included Episode 1. I played through them both back to back.

I loved it. They are amazing games. The first time going to Ravenholm with the gravity gun, or driving the car through over the coast, then through nova prospect back into City 17, and finally deep into the Citadel. I will remember these games for the rest of my life. If I have kids, I hope this will be something I am able to share with them.

As an aside, I remember a Finnish kid joining my school for a little while in 2007. He lived near me, so naturally as you do as children you become friends. We used to play Half-Life 2 Deathmatch, the online multiplayer version of Half-Life, on the most random servers together. He would scream so loud on the microphone as only a 13 year old Scandinavian could. We could have been huge on YouTube.

Half-Life 2: Episode 2

I was in and wanting more. I didn’t have long to wait until the next entry, because Episode 2 was on the way in less than a year. The Orange Box (which was all Half-Life games, Team Fortress 2 and Portal bundled together) was probably peak hype for Half Life.

Between the launch of Episode 1 and Episode 2, Garry’s Mod was released on Steam. Through buying that game, I found out about proper internet forums. This resulted in probably my biggest social shift of friends IRL to friends online for my teenage years. I joined the FacePunch forums in June 2007, and by September 2007 I was posting multiple times a day into this community of faceless accounts who were also playing Garry’s Mod.

Being a Source engine thing, the Garry's Mod forums also attracted other people interested in Half-Life and the upcoming Orange Box. This would be my community for the next decade, until the forums shut down in 2019.

In the run-up to Episode 2’s release, I ran a community event called “The Great Half-Life Marathon”. My first community event, at the age of 13, was to just play through all of the half-life games in the run-up to the Orange Box’s release. We did that. I got about 100 sign ups in the Steam Group to do it, and for a few weeks we would all sit in the Steam Group chat and talk about Half-Life. The day Episode 2 released, the group congregated that evening and we played the game together. We shared our joy at the revelations in the story Episode 2 brought, or talking about the upgraded graphics, which ran dynamic shadows at 12fps on my aged computer. It was a good time.

For those familiar with the story of Half-Life, you know that’s kind of it. There never was an Episode 3, and besides Alyx in 2020, the story has been dropped for almost 20 years now. I think that's okay. When things die, things go left unsaid.

Source SDK

Despite spending ages growing up messing around in the SDK, I have never actually released anything worthwhile in the Source engine. I made a couple of maps for some mods, tried and failed learning C+ as a 15 year old so I could create my own full mods, and had a go at making TF2 hats. It was never anything worthwhile, but that was part of the fun.

The Source SDK is a gaming modding suite for mapping, creating new bespoke mods, and a whole bunch of other stuff for the Source Engine. It allowed me as a wee 13 year old to start creating in an engine I was already enamoured with.

And I tried! I don’t know if you have used Visual Studio in the year of our lord 2024, it’s fine but bloated. But back in 2007, the free download of Visual Studio sucked absolute shit and was the most confusing thing of all time. It was worth it though, after going through days of configuring your mod into VS, the first time it compiled, and you made your first couple of changes, I was hooked on programming. I’m not a game developer, I probably won’t ever will be. But those skills I learnt as a teenager I still use today.

The main thing was the mapping tool, Hammer. Even today, I would give this as an example is a nearly perfect software tool. The right amount of simplicity to complexity, allowing for new and power users to thrive using it. Learning Hammer is probably why I like doing front-end development. Backend code is more fun to write and solve problems in, but the stuff people actually see? That’s what people remember. I would look at the other maps people were making and just be in awe of their creativity and skill.

People are using Hammer to this day, forcing themselves through the crashes and bugs. For Garry's Mod, Counter Strike and TF2 mapping, everyone is using basically the same tools that they were in 2004 (and before that WorldCraft for Half-Life 1).

I wrote previously about making maps, and have some screenshots of those maps here. I wouldn't be doing what I do today without the Source engine, and this tool existing.

Team Fortress 2

I could talk about what Team Fortress 2 is, and what it means to me, for hours. Or I guess in this format, paragraphs upon paragraphs. You know how some people like it when people talk about something they are passionate about (At least, I love it when people talk to me about stuff they are passionate about). Get me talking about TF2 and you’ll be looking for the conversation escape hatch after an hour. It will be you walking away from me while I talk about the Mannconomy update.

I can confidently say part of the person I am today comes from being part of the community for this game, for better or worse. This blog post should probably have been about TF2. From seeing that first teaser trailer in 2006, it was something I thought about every single day until I eventually stopped playing in 2014. Every Meet The video, every update no matter how small, every breath from the dev team, it was my life.

To highlight how eager I was for this game to come out, I have the earliest “Primeval Warrior” badge I have seen in my 17 years of playing. It doesn't mean anything, it's a digital item you can put on your character in a video game. But to me it immortalises my excitement, and my impatience as a 13 year old. I begged my dad to download the TF2 beta on his computer, because mine wasn’t wired into the internet, and I wanted to try it before school. I wanted to get a glimpse of the polygonal beauty that is 2fort, to place a sentry and watch the animation of it being built for myself. I had minutes before we needed to leave for school. I booted up the game. I saw the Valve intro video, and I could see the background art. Then, a Windows dialog popped up. It crashed before rendering the menu. There was a game breaking bug on launch, and the game didn't work on Windows Vista on a computer with an ATi graphics cards. I wouldn’t get to play it until a hot fix came out a week later.

There are many moments in my life attached to TF2 which I can vividly remember. Staying up until 3am to watch Meet the Sniper with my online friends, or helping run a few TF2 community servers for years, or trying to take part in the golden wrench drops, or taking part in the first highlander, or getting some of the TF2 devs to sign copies of Valve games I have, or-

To me, it is the greatest multiplayer game ever created, and nothing else comes close.