Early Half Life 2 history.

This was written a long time ago. First page of my Half Life web site (The Apprehensive Guide..





Information from HL forums + 'HL2-Raising The Bar' ::

In 1996 Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington 1996 ex Microsoft employee took the decision to licence the Quake engine from ID.

They take an office in the Seattle suburb of Seattle (Kirkland), Washington.

There are two design teams:.
Code name Quiver to be a FPS like Doom, with aliens+monsters...an adrenaline fest.
Code name Prospero a moody, literary game drawing on sources ranging from Myst to Borges.


Quiver gradually absorbed every member of the company, and the emphasis on narrative and atmosphere from Prospero. It was originally based on a novel by Stephen King’s story The Mist in which monsters swarm out of a military base known as Arrowhead. One episode of “Outerlimits” in particular influenced Half-Life; it was called “The Borderland” and tells the story of a team of scientists who manipulate magnetic fields to enter the fourth dimension.

A rebuild from ground-up in 1997... adding another year to production.

Quotes.

"When choosing a name for the game, we tried to establish criteria: it needed to be evocative of the theme, avoid cliché in the genre, and have a corresponding visual mark. We brainstormed some ideas, and then picked Half-Life. We wanted to communicate the science fiction feel, the more mature sense that we were going after a game that was not just a shooting gallery. There was going to be a richer experience and a more thought provoking one...and so Half-Life. We thought about that, and that seemed cool, and we tried to look at Half-Dead. We went through hundreds of different names; Half-Life was one that stuck out fairly quickly" Gabe Newell.

"We went round and round on names for the character. I thought it should evoke some famous scientist, so I took the name of one of my hero’s, physicist/philosopher, Freeman Dyson, and smashed his name together with that of the French mathematician Jules Henri Poincare. Gabe immediately countered with the far more reasonable Gordon Freeman, and that was that. Like many important game design discussions in those days, this all happened at lunchtime, in Gabe's car, en route to our favourite Japanese restaurant" Marc Laidlow.

"Kelly Bailey and I only had a weekend to get the test chamber disaster sequence built. We worked for 48 hours straight. Mercifully, I had both food and a comfortable chair to sit in, but Kelly sat atop of a wooden sawhorse we affectionately dubbed 'The Throne Of Woe' in order to keep awake. We barrelled through it and went home for a few hours of sleep and came back Monday still in a zombie like state. Every one in the office was all exited about something, but it took a bit for me to realise they had found the sequence and all played through it; everyone just loved it. It was one of those great moments" John Guthrie.

Half-Life 1 background story:

Deep in the bowels of the Black Mesa Research Labs, a decommissioned missile base, a top secret project is underway. Information about the project is strictly on a "need-to-know" basis, and as a low level research associate you (Gordon Freeman) "need to know" very little. Each morning you ride the train to work from the employee dorms, you put on your environmental protection suit, you enter the test chamber, and you run stress tests on whatever odd devices have been delivered from some other nameless part of the Black Mesa compound.

But this morning is different.

This morning, your test lab is suddenly the most important place on Earth-because something is going seriously wrong. Maybe it's sabotage-maybe it's an accident. Whatever the reason, reality is getting all bent out of shape. One minute you're doing your job, pressing buttons. The next thing you know, you're staring into an alien world.
Something huge with too many arms is taking a bite out of your partner's face. An explosion of unearthly light....then darkness.

Disaster.

Sirens wailing.

People screaming.

And everywhere you turn, people are dying--being eaten.

Monsters are everywhere. Monsters--there's no better word for them. You head fro the surface, to get the hell away from ground zero, but the usual routes are impassable--damaged by the disaster, infested with headcrabs and houndeyes and increasingly larger and hungrier creatures.

Madness is the order of the day. You enlist the help of traumatized scientists and trigger-happy guards to get through high security zones, sneaking and fighting your way through ruined missile silos and Cold War cafeterias, through darkened air ducts and subterranean railways where you must ride a missile transport sled straight into the jaws of slavering nightmare.

When you finally come in sight of the surface, you realize the aliens aren't your only enemies--for now the government forces have arrived with heavy-weapons goons, squadrons of ruthless containment troops, and stealthy assassin gals. Their orders seem to be that when it comes to Black Mesa labs, nothing must get out alive....and especially not you, the guy who made it all go bad.

So much for the cavalry. When your own species turns against you, where do you turn? You've uprooted a bunch of nasty government secrets. You've found a portal to another world, and an alien light comes shining through. Can it get any worse over there? Some things you just have to see for yourself.

What made Half-Life 1 different?
In Half-Life t the player gets information in a slightly more realistic fashion, information is provided by the game charactors in scripted scenes 'scripted-scenes'. For instance the first time Gordon sees the tentacle he sees what it does and Barney gives him the knowledge he needs to stay quiet . There is no 'computer update' the player makes his or her way through the game using naturalistic clues about what is and isn't safe, and about what goals should be acheived to progress.

After Half-Life?
After Half-Life 1, VALVe began to discard the Quake-derived Half-Life engine and started to create Source. Because the interaction with computer charactors (the NPCs) creates a more realistic and emmersive storyline VALVe made developing the technology for better acting and animation, a top priority. In Half-Life 2 the aim was for a game plot that depended upon characters, ambitious scenes and powerful animation as much as combat.

The setting of HL2 is City 17, an Eastern European setting. The emphasis was on creating a striking and original visual universe. Here, humans and vortigaunts are in servitude to the Combine…there are no children. The town is dominated by the citadel, alien technology absorbing the human city.

The citadel interior design was influenced by the monumental totalitarian architecture of Nazi and communist regimes.

There is a theory about City 17 being located at 43 degrees 7 minutes 0 seconds North and 45 degrees 2 minutes 0 seconds East.

Nevsky Prospekt.

The theory behind this is as follows, Valve wrote some things that led to a website with the G-Man's picture. The Source code revealed a bird and Gordon in ASCII text. Well one of the guys over at HL2.net spent some time looking at the password for the secret site: 437N452 and he came to the conclusion that it looked an awfully lot like a latitude/longitude grid reference.... The closest sea to the location in the link above is the Caspian Sea - and the Black Sea, the Black sea is closer to Europe which better matches Valve's information of City 17's location: Eastern Europe.