Half-Life 25th

Posted in Anno Domini Sat Nov 18 2023

The Big Half-Life 25th Anniversary Update is interesting from a variety of perspectives, if you'll permit me to ramble a little bit (I just got back from the pub and refuse to pay for longer tweets, so, uh, bear with me here)

First, it's a sign of a new generation at Valve. The old hands were pretty openly un-nostalgic. They were constantly aiming forward, even if "forward" never quite reached escape velocity. I remember their reaction to Steam's 10th anniversary being "oh shit, really?!?"

Looking at current staff piping up and going "...and I helped!" on this new update (not naming names! I know what HL fans are like), it's clear this was driven by people who grew up with the game and had more personal interest in shoving it into its Sunday Best than the old guard who had crafted it and moved on

If you compare that old attitude to this and the big 20th anniversary thing Steam did recently, it's a pretty marked sea-change. Whether it's an exchange of the baton or whatever, I'll leave to smarter, sober-er people to blast out reams of paragraphs over.

Another perspective is that it's interesting to see big-budget rights/platform holders looking at the stuff Night Dive and their peers like General Arcade, Digital Eclipse et. al. have done and going "we can dedicate, like, bare-minimum resources to doing that!"

Does this mean other big publishers are gonna do similarly big, playable tributes to their past? Fuck no. What are you, stupid? But it does suggest an increasing interest in the modern era's foundational blocks, potentially resulting in rights-holders more interested in reissues.

One can hope that this shakes other publishers into putting fractionally more resources into sharing the mistakes, lessons and triumphs of the past with the modern world, so that a fresh batch of indies can learn and build upon them (and they can steal the resulting innovations!)

...I think what I'm trying to say here is that someone at Insomniac needs to embezzle a few tens of thou off the Spiderman 3 budget to get a nice remaster of Disruptor. Let us see where the modern heroes came from, cheesy wooden FMV sets and all.