Valve has released a 25th anniversary update for the original Half-Life along with a new one-hour documentary celebrating the game. As part of the celebration, Half-Life is available for free this weekend and the entire franchise is on sale with huge price cuts on Steam.
(Note: Sorry I’m late to the party on this one – I flew home on Friday and spent all of Saturday moving, so I’ve been a little busy.)
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“We released Half-Life on November 19, 1998,” explains a Steam news post from Valve. “We are very proud of what we built back then and remain very grateful to the community of players who have enjoyed it 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 improve the player experience and add fun new ways to play.”
Valve has a rich history of ignoring the millions of people who are still Half-Life fans, so this sudden change is even more poignant: this new version of the OG game has been “restored, augmented and revitalized” with settings of Updated graphics. which help make sense on today’s PCs and support for controllers, Steam Deck and Steam Networking.
There’s also a ton of new content, including that one-hour documentary, four new multiplayer maps, three older multiplayer maps that were on the “Half-Life: Further Data” CD, original main menu artwork, some early prototypes of player models from the Alpha versions of the game, the original Half-Life demo, the original Valve intro video, and much more.
As noted, the OG game is available for free this weekend and all other games in the franchise are heavily discounted. For example, you can get Half-Life 2 for just $0.99, Half-Life 2 Episode 1 for $0.79, Half-Life 2 Episode 2 for $0.79, and Half-Life: Alyx for $20.39. Half-Life 2 Opposing Force, Blue Shift, and Deathmatch cost $0.69 each, and the Half-Life Complete bundle, which includes all the older (non-Alyx) games plus Half-Life 1: Source, costs only $6.55.
You can learn more about the Half-Life 25th Anniversary Update on the Half-Life website. But be sure to check the offer first.