25 Years of Half-Life…

All those years ago when everyone at Frag-Net played Half-Life, we never thought how or where we would all be on these anniversaries. Half-Life is an important game to everyone on this site, it’s thanks to this silly fun game that all our staff found each other and developed friendships.

That’s why we’re so overjoyed to say Happy 25th Birthday Half-Life!

Half-Life released on November 19, 1998. The release of Half-Life is probably just as important as Quake, if not more so - due to the incredible amount of interaction the player was able to excercise with the game environment - it set a new standard.

Valve has celebrated themselves they have released a massive update that addresses many issues that have plagued the game for a long time. They even went beyond the call of duty and gave us a juicy hour long documentary produced by Noclip! The brand spanking new update features:

• Steam Deck and Steam Networking (P2P) Support
• Re-designed menu with Controller Support
• Added Further Data, Uplink, New DM Maps, and Playermodels
• OpenGL renderer now supports Overbright Lighting

This update was rumored, but many didn’t know what to expect. To us who are longtime fans and have been working on projects like FreeHL, we are very pleased with what Valve has delivered. A truly great way to replay the game! And there may be more updates soon! That’s the official word, anyway!

There’s also this video series produced by level designer Dario Casali, in which he provides exclusive developer commentary - from start to finish.

…we’ve not been slacking either

We’re doing our part by supporting the original CD-ROM version and are releasing a brand new FreeHL Public Beta. This beta has many fixes and additions from our last release earlier this year. Monsters are now entirely defined through scripts, and level designers have access to a massive amount of entities from the Source Engine. There’s also new subsystems that allow you to port levels from other games - and the menu is more complete than ever. There’s thousands upon thousands of improvements all over the place (especially in Multiplayer), so you better just check it out yourself and don’t forget to join us on IRC. You can even do so within the game itself, just like the original CD-ROM version!

Go ahead and grab a copy here!

We are now hosting test servers for most of the mods running on FreeHL. So connect to one of them and check out that netcode! If you’re using your old copy of Half-Life, check your rate setting in the console… it might still be set to modem speeds.

That said, we know you’re all going to celebrate this day your very own way. Maybe you’ll spin up the console version of the game on PlayStation 2, or just order a Pizza in the shape of a Lambda.

…and our final reveal of tonight

And finally, our friends over at Cobalt-57 have released a new update for their modification: Half-Life: Absolute Zero!

Half-Life: Absolute Zero is a recreation and re-interpretation of early builds of Half-Life during the time period of December, 1997 to February, 1998. The new update revamps their original 2017 demo to be more accurate to recently released information.

So try out the new build here! (requires Steam to be installed)

To get a feel of what they’re going for…

…here’s some Half-Life development screenshots in their best quality, representing that era of the game that they’re going for. Kindly provided by the team at Cobalt-57.

It’s an exciting time to be a Half-Life fan, now get your crowbars and start whacking!