A wide-ranging Half-Life 2 mod called MMod, which has been in the works for nine years, is out now, and it reworks Valve shooter's visuals, gunplay and enemy AI.

Combat is the focus, and the mod adds new weapons, changes weapon handling, and introduces new animations. I'm a big fan of the new idle weapon animations that you can see in the trailer above: when stood still, Gordon Freeman will wipe the scope of his crossbow to clean smudges, or lovingly stroke his trusty rocket launcher.

As for new weapons, the video above shows that you can grab a turret and haul it around, spraying down enemies. You'll also be able to aim down sights on some weapons, such as the basic pistol. 

The mod redesigns both the audio and visual effects, and tweaks the graphics in general. It certainly looks prettier than what I remember of the original—I like the new glowy eyes for the Combine soldiers—and particle effects are far flashier. 

MMod also "hardens" the AI and gives the Combine new actions to perform, such as firing underslung grenade launchers. 

It's already garnering praise over on its ModDB page, where you can download it. Make sure you have a clean install of Half-Life 2 and both Episodes 1 and 2, as well as the free community-made Half-Life 2: update, which the mod runs off. 

Thanks, Dark Side of Gaming.

Speedrunner Can't Even has smashed their own Portal world record, completing Valve's puzzler in a mere 7:07.

It's an out-of-bounds run, which means they're constantly glitching through walls and empty space. I like that, occasionally, you'll catch a glimpse of part of the game you recognise, and then suddenly it's gone, and you're somewhere else entirely. The level of precision is properly impressive.

Can't Even reckons they can shave two seconds off the run, but it still easily beats their own previous world record of 7:12. The leaderboard at speedrun.com hasn't been updated yet, but you can see that Can't Even is well ahead of the competition—the next best runner is now a full 14 seconds slower.

They're also in the top 25 for in-bounds runs, which take roughly three-and-a-half minutes longer.

If you're a speedrunning fan, don't forget to mark January 6, a week today, in your calendar—it's the start of the annual Awesome Games Done Quick event. The schedule is live here.

Thanks, Kotaku.

Valve just announced Danger Zone, "a fast-paced battle royale game mode built on CS:GO's tactical gameplay where players use their wits, skill, and resources to fight to the finish." Additionally, CS:GO itself is now free to play.

The mode accommodates 16 players in singles, and 18 players in duos or triples. Danger Zone features the same weapon behavior and damage as conventional CS:GO, Valve says. Like CS:GO, the matches are short, lasting about 10 minutes. It makes many other changes to CS:GO's systems:

• Each player carries an upgradeable special tablet device (on Tab) for tracking other players and accessing a limited buy menu
• You start with just a knife—aerial delivery drones ferry purchased weapons and equipment directly to your position
• Each player publicly claims a landing zone before rappelling into the match
• Cash can be found in the environment and you can also bring hostages to rescue zones
• There's currently one map, called Blacksite - it's small by Battle Royale standards, but big for Counter-Strike 
• The map is divided into hexagonal zones, which are randomly, occasionally bombarded by an airstrike
• Ammo is scarce: even purchased weapons are handed to you with almost no ammo in them
• Your weapon skins from the base game are carried into Danger Zone

From the round I've played so far, it's weird to see a bunch of old weapons and new ideas thrown together into the same pot. Some of the engagement ranges on the single map, Blacksite, are absolutely enormous by CS standards. Grabbing wads off cash off of the ground (or in locked safes that you have to destroy with C4) feels out of place so far. CS:GO does have its exclusively first-person perspective going for it, at least.

Meanwhile, in all modes of CS:GO, players will now be separated into two matchmaking groups: Prime and non-prime. If you already owned CS:GO, you're a Prime player. "When you have Prime Status you are matched with other players who also have Prime Status, and Prime users are eligible for Prime-exclusive souvenir items, item drops, and weapon cases." Danger Zone arrives, of course, with 17 new seasonal weapon skins.

CS:GO going free-to-play signifies, in part, that Valve is confident in the game's current anticheat solution, delivered through a Valve-built machine learning system called VACnet. As far as I can tell, any banned CS:GO player could join the game through a new Steam account, but would not be matched with other Prime players. It's unclear how CS:GO matchmakes mixed parties of Prime and free players.

The next Dota 2 major in Chonqing, China might be cancelled by the city's government if Carlo “Kuku” Palad—one of the pro players that Valve condemned last month for using racist insults against Chinese teams—tries to attend, according to Kuku's team TNC Predator.

The Filipino player made the racist taunt in a pub game last month, and TNC Predator announced they would dock half of his winnings from the recent Kuala Lumpur Major, where the team won $60,000 by placing joint 5th, as well as half of his winnings from the upcoming Chongqing Major. The money will be donated to an anti-racism charity (h/t Fox Sports Asia).

However, rumours swirled last week that both Kuku and Andrei "skem" Ong, the other player who used racist taunts, would be banned from competing in the Chongqing Major, which will take place in January. According to TNC Predator, that is not true—in a series of tweets today, the team said Kuku was not banned, but that they had been told the city's government might cancel the tournament if Kuku attends. 

As you can see in the tweets below, TNC Predator claimed tournament organisers also said they could not "guarantee [Kuku's] safety" should he attend.

The team said they were "yet to decide whether we will continue playing in the event", and were "exploring all of our options".

Kuku issued an apology last week, in which he said there was "no excuse" for his actions, and that he hoped for a "second chance to show that I can become a better example" (translation via Fox Sports Asia).

As for skem, he's been removed from compLexity Gaming's active Dota 2 roster, so is unlikely to attend the tournament. The team previously issued him a "formal reprimand, as well as a maximum fine".

Neither Valve nor the tournament organisers have issued an official statement on the matter.

This feature was originally published in PC Gamer magazine back in October. If you enjoy this feature, you can subscribe across print and digital.

Has any videogame story been told from more perspectives than Half-Life’s Black Mesa incident? 

Including expansions, the vanilla game offers three points of view alone, while countless mods have added to the Black Mesa lore, introducing new playable stories centring on lawyers, black ops assassins and even alien slaves. 

Half-Life: Echoes is the latest in this tradition of framing the Black Mesa disaster from a new angle, and it’s easily the best singleplayer mod for Half-Life in years, offering incredible level design, thrilling survival horror and blistering action. It also weaves itself into the broader Half-Life fiction in some clever ways. 

Created by first-time modder James Cockburn, Half-Life: Echoes puts players in the shoes of Candidate Twelve, another Black Mesa employee who arrives for a normal day at work when the resonance cascade transforms the facility into the world’s most technologically advanced abattoir. Like Freeman, Shepard and the rest, you must navigate and survive Black Mesa’s labyrinth, battering zombies and blasting marines while the G-Man observes it all. 

Familiar ground

What make Half-Life: Echoes stand out from other Black Mesa retellings is the sheer level of craft and ambition that has gone into it. To begin with, the mod’s 20-odd maps are enormous and stunningly detailed. Even the very first area you spawn in, an underground car park, impresses with its cavernous scale and moody lighting. 

As with the original Half-Life, Echoes commences with a peaceful tour of its own segment of the Black Mesa facility, though smartly it lets you explore on foot rather than confining you inside a train. When the cascade occurs, it does so at a distance, unfolding as a gradual infrastructural collapse rather than an instant demolition. Lights flicker and tremors shudder through the earth, while the scientists and security guards speculate on what’s going on. One of my favourite aspects of the mod is how smoothly it repurposes dialogue from the old games to assemble its own conversations and narratives. Even when the seams are visible, it’s beautifully done. 

Broadly, Echoes mimics the arc of Half-Life, but distils its key elements into more potent forms. The arrival of the marines, which in the original game is barely touched upon, is here given the kind of treatment you’d expect from a Call of Duty game, featuring a jet flyover and an almost parade-like column of solders, tanks, and twin-rotor helicopters. 

The first half of Echoes is almost pure survival horror, limiting your arsenal to just a few weapons and making clever use of scripted scenarios to surprise the player. In a splendid Alien-esque sequence, a strange sluglike monster hunts you through a tight cluster of corridors and vents as you desperately try to find a way out. Meanwhile, your personal resonance cascade comes in the form of a gargantuan monster, which traps you inside a train carriage alongside a bunch of other scientists before destroying everything in sight. That same monster hunts you throughout the mod’s running time, appearing at various points just to make your day that little bit more terrifying. 

Once Echoes starts doling out the heavier weapons, the mod ups the ante rapidly. Perhaps a little too rapidly, as the difficulty spikes with the intensity, resulting in several transitional combat encounters that are much tougher than anything either before or afterward. 

Fortunately, the last hour of Echoes moderates its tsunami of opponents with plentiful weapons and ammunition. The climactic battle happens on a scale that outclasses Half-Life’s infamous Surface Tension chapter, a fight that repeatedly escalates like a microcosm of the mod as a whole. Two decades on, Half-Life’s combat holds up, and Echoes makes fantastic use of its weapons and enemies. 

As the work of a single person, Echoes is a remarkable feat of design, while its detailed environment design and sharp pacing more than make up for the outdated visuals. That said, there are a few minor flaws. Although Echoes is vast in scope, in running time it is short, easily completable in a couple of hours. It also concludes in an abrupt sequence which, while an interesting addition to the overall Half-Life plot, feels artificially bolted onto the tail of the game.     

Lastly, and this isn’t really a flaw, but anyone coming to the mod hoping to see new features, such as weapons or enemies, will come away disappointed. Ultimately, these are tiny issues in what is essentially a fourth Half-Life expansion, playable for free. Echoes is that well made. 

While Crowbar Collective has been remastering Half-Life 1 with Black Mesa and even expanding it with Black Mesa: Xen, another team of modders have been diligently downgrading Valve’s sequel, remaking it with the original Half-Life’s engine. We reported on Half-Life 2 Classic last year, but since then there have been some big changes and, most recently, the release of a new demo. 

The goal for the Half-Life 2 Classic team was to recreate all of Half-Life 2 with the original Half-Life engine, GoldSrc, but last year they were still figuring some things out. For instance, did they want to try and match Half-Life 2’s style and fidelity, or did they want to downgrade everything, making the models look more like the first game’s? This year, they settled on the latter. 

In June, the team unveiled some of the new models. “The demo we released last year had models ported directly from Half-Life 2,” They wrote. “Since then, we’ve gotten a lot of feedback and decided to remake character models to fit with the style of Half-Life.”

Coast levels are also being made from scratch. The team discovered that they were simply too big for GoldSrc and, not having the engine code, they couldn’t increase the maximum limit. All the coast levels are being remade, with coast_05 being the first. 

Demakes like this aren’t just a way for people with ancient rigs to play newer games. Not many people, after all, are going to struggle to run Half-Life 2. In this case, it’s fascinating to see how the original engine can handle a much more ambitious game, and it’s an interesting ‘what if’, imagining a timeline where Valve didn’t make the Source Engine. 

The new demo appeared earlier this week and shows off Ravenholm, featuring new models, NPCs and the gravity gun. You can download it from ModDB.

It's not Monday anymore, but Cyber Monday deals haven't disappeared just yet. Amazon is running deals all week long, and some of our favorite deals from other sites are still active, too, in both the US and UK. This is the best time of year to find sales and deals on graphics cards, gaming monitors, mice, keyboards, and more.

There are still savings to be found on monitors, prebuilt PCs, graphics cards, and chairs, especially. Each of those categories below is still filled out with deals. So are most of the others. There aren't as many deals as there were from the height of Black Friday, but the discounts that remain active are still just as good.

Not sure what to buy this Cyber Monday? The first thing is do your homework. Figure out what components you want to upgrade, and do your research to figure out which parts are best for you. (Our hardware buying guides are great for advice on that front.) Once you've figured out your target deals, check how much they're usually sold for using a tool like PCPartPicker or CamelCamelCamel. That way you can tell how much money (if any) you're actually saving.

While we haven't seen too many deals on Nvidia's new RTX graphics cards, we've actually seen some great deals on gaming PCs with RTX graphics. There have also been some great accessory sales, like up to 50 percent off Logitech gear. SSDs are also a hot commodity this year. They make an excellent easy upgrade for your rig, and are a great gift for any PC gamer. (Everyone can use more storage!)

Check back often as the PC Gamer team is working all weekend to find the best deals ahead of Cyber Monday. Stick with us, and you'll be sure to find some great PC gaming hardware on sale.

Here are the best Cyber Monday deals still available:

Cyber Monday gaming PC deals

High-end prebuilt gaming PCs

Mid-range prebuilt gaming PCs

Budget prebuilt gaming PCs

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Mid-range laptops

Entry-level laptops

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Cyber Monday graphics card deals US

Nvidia RTX 2080 Deals:

AMD RX 570 Deals:

Cyber Monday graphics card deals UK

Nvidia RTX 2080 Ti Deals:

Nvidia RTX 2080 Deals:

Nvidia GTX 1060 Deals:

AMD RX 580 Deals:

AMD RX 570 Deals:

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What's the difference between Black Friday and Cyber Monday?

Black Friday began as a day of shopping sales at brick-and-mortar stores, with Cyber Monday later joining it as the day for finding online deals. But as online shopping has risen to stratospheric levels (have you seen how much Amazon is worth lately?), you can expect to see deals both in-store and online starting on Black Friday (and earlier), and continuing through the weekend. 

Some companies and retailers release all of their planned sales on Black Friday, while others divvy them up throughout the weekend, or hold some deals to push live on Cyber Monday. We'll have a team working around the clock combing through thousands of deals—both good and bad—to find sales on our favorite components and deep discounts on other great hardware. We'll let you know if a deal is worth considering, or if it's even a good deal in the first place.

To get the best deals, we recommend checking back often as new deals go live—and as we curate more and more of the best ones we can find. 

Stick with PC Gamer

Our team will be working around the clock through the holiday season scouring the digital store shelves for the best PC gaming deals to be found. Check back often as we track down the best post-Black Friday and pre-Cyber Monday deals, and of course visit us on Cyber Monday itself to see all the best PC gaming deals to be had.

Some online stores give us a small cut if you buy something through one of our links. Read our affiliate policy for more info. 

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The time has come, Black Friday is here, and we're already seeing tons of fantastic Black Friday PC gaming deals on parts, accessories, and games across the US and UK. This is the best time of year to find sales and deals on graphics cards, gaming monitors, mice, keyboards, and more. 

Not sure what to buy this Black Friday? The first thing is do your homework. Figure out what components you want to upgrade, and do your research to figure out which parts are best for you. (Our hardware buying guides are great for advice on that front.) Once you've figured out your target deals, check how much they're usually sold for using a tool like PCPartPicker or CamelCamelCamel. That way you can tell how much money (if any) you're actually saving.

While we haven't seen too many deals on Nvidia's new RTX graphics cards, we've actually seen some great deals on gaming PCs with RTX graphics. There have also been some great accessory sales, like up to 50 percent off Logitech gear. SSDs are also a hot commodity this year. They make an excellent easy upgrade for your rig, and are a great gift for any PC gamer. (Everyone can use more storage!)

Check back often as the PC Gamer team is working around the clock to find and surface the best Black Friday PC gaming deals to be had. Stick with us, and you'll be sure to find some great PC gaming hardware on sale.

Jump to Black Friday PC gaming deals at your favorite retailer:

• Amazon deals
• Walmart PC gaming deals
• Jet PC gaming deals
• Newegg deals
• Dell deals

UK Black Friday PC gaming deals

What we're looking for in gaming PC deals on Black Friday and Cyber Monday

So far gaming PC deals have included a number of systems with RTX 2070 and 2080 cards at surprisingly good prices. Some even more affordable systems use previous-gen 1080s, 1080 Tis, and 1070s. If you don't need the latest and greatest, those are a good choice.

Expect to see steeper discounts on desktops using AMD's processors from last year—the 1600X, 1700X, and 1800X Ryzen CPUs. For example, this iBUYPOWER PC with an 1800X and an RX 580 already dropped to $799 once. You can definitely find a bargain here with a Ryzen system paired with a 1000-series Nvidia graphics card.

Black Friday gaming PC deals

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High-end laptops

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What we're looking for in GPU deals on Black Friday and Cyber Monday

Graphics card prices have finally returned to normal, after the year-long cryptocurrency-induced shortage. Now that manufacturers have plenty of excess stock, you can expect to see some great deals this year.

Nvidia's new RTX 2070, RTX 2080, and 2080 Ti cards bring ray-tracing to mainstream hardware, and we're looking for the best discounts we can find on them, though there won't be anything massive. However, there will almost certainly be great deals on last-gen GTX 10-series cards, like the GTX 1080, GTX 1070 Ti, and GTX 1070.

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What we're looking for in monitor deals on Black Friday and Cyber Monday 

Vendors typically leverage the holiday shopping season to clear out older inventories. It's rare to see a brand new product go on sale, so we didn't expect there to be any significant discounts on monitors like the Asus ROG Swift PG27UQ or Acer Predator X27, the pair of 4K 144Hz monitors with HDR and G-Sync support (everything but the kitchen sink, in other words). But we were wrong: Acer's model is $300 off on Newegg.

We do expect to see deals on 4K monitors in general, and to some extent, HDR displays as well. We also anticipate deals on monitors supporting AMD's first generation Freesync technology. AMD has been pushing an updated 'Freesync 2 HDR' certification, so vendors will likely look to clear room for newer models.

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What we're looking for in SSD deals on Black Friday and Cyber Monday

Solid state drives have been on a steady price decline over the past few years, thanks to lower manufacturing costs and greater competition. This has accelerated in the past few months, leaving SSD prices at an all-time low. Most 500GB SATA drives are less than $100, and 1TB models are typically around $150. Faster M.2 disks are still more expensive than their SATA counterparts, but not by much; 500GB NVMe M.2 drives run for about $150.

This Black Friday, you can expect SSD prices to drop to absurdly-low prices.

Black Friday SSD and HDD deals

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What we're looking for in motherboard deals on Black Friday and Cyber Monday 

Z390 boards are already stocked at online retailers but are new, so they won't offer the best deals. Most Z370 boards also have updated BIOSes to accommodate the new 9th gen Cores. If you are thinking on splurging on one of Intel's new CPUs, but need a new motherboard to go with it, you don't need to rush to get the newest one.

As for motherboards with AMD chipsets, there were a few deals last year on motherboards that supported both first gen and second gen Ryzen processors, like the ASUS ROG Strix X370-F, so it seems likely we'll see those deals again. Of course, if you aren't sure what to put on your shopping list when the time comes, you can always take a look at our recommendations for the best gaming motherboards.

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What we're looking for in CPU deals on Black Friday and Cyber Monday

Intel just launched its 9th-generation "Coffee Lake refresh" Core processors, including the i5-9600K, the i7-9600K, and i9-9900k. Don't expect big deals there. On the plus side, retailers might be more inclined to clear out their existing inventories of 7th-gen (Kaby Lake) and 8th-gen (Coffee Lake) Intel CPUs.

When it comes to AMD, we're looking for steep discounts on first generation Ryzen processors. Something else to consider is that if you're looking for a new CPU, you probably also need a new motherboard. Check the combined total for both parts, as there might be bigger discounts on the motherboard side that can make up for a smaller CPU discount.

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What we're looking for in PC case deals on Black Friday and Cyber Monday

There are so many PC cases out there, you're bound to find one you like on sale. Look out for whole manufacturers like NZXT discounting all their products, or choose from one of the cases we like below.

Black Friday PC case deals

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What we're looking for in RAM deals on Black Friday and Cyber Monday

After a long period of high RAM prices, we're looking for Black Friday to bring us some price relief with affordable DDR4.

Black Friday RAM deals

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What we're looking for in headset deals this Black Friday and Cyber Monday

Last year there were a massive amount of gaming headsets on sale, from low-end models to premium variants. No matter what your budget, this year you can expect to get a gaming headset at a great price. This Black Friday/Cyber Monday, you can expect to see plenty of headsets on sale for around 30-50% off, depending on the manufacturer and original price.

Black Friday gaming headset deals

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Computer speakers don't change much from year to year, but there have been a few interesting product launches since the last Black Friday and Cyber Monday. For example, Logitech released its G560 speakers with RGB lighting, which is now our top PC speaker recommendation. Razer also launched its new THX-certified Nommo Pro, which of course has RGB lighting.

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What we're looking for in gaming router deals on Black Friday and Cyber Monday

This past Amazon Prime Day gives us a good idea of what to expect from this year's Black Friday/Cyber Monday. Linksys, Netgear, Asus, TP-Link, and Synology all had their higher-end routers on sale — typically around 30-50 percent off the original prices.

There haven't been any radical advances in Wi-Fi technology over the past year, so there isn't a specific feature you should be looking for in discounted routers. Mesh systems like the Google Wi-Fi and Netgear Orbi are becoming more and more popular, but recent improvements in that product category are mostly thanks to better software, not new hardware.

Black Friday gaming router deals

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What we're looking for in 4K TV deals on Black Friday and Cyber Monday

There haven't been any radical improvements in 4K TVs since last year, so there aren't any specific products or features you should keep an eye out for. Most smart TVs still run webOS, Roku OS, or Amazon's Fire TV OS. We're looking for the best prices on high-end OLED sets, and to recommend affordable mid-range sets that have great gaming performance thanks to low response times.

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What we're looking for in controller deals on Black Friday and Cyber Monday

There are few better times to snap up a new controller than Black Friday. Peripherals are popular gifts, and pretty much always go on sale. If you're looking to make a purchase, keep an eye on this section, because we'll update it with the best controller deals as they appear.

Little has changed from last year’s options, and as far as we’re concerned, Sony’s DualShock 4 controller and Microsoft's Xbox One controller are still great choices. The addition of the Nintendo Switch Pro Controller to the mix as a viable option for PC gaming has altered the landscape a bit, but it’s considerably pricier. 

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What we're looking for in gaming chair deals on Black Friday and Cyber Monday

Gaming chairs often don't get that many decent sales around the holidays, due to their higher prices and quality. However, discounts that most retailers offer around this time will likely work on inventory they carry that's eligible for percentages off, even if there's not a sale on a gaming chair per se. 

Amazon offered a few gaming chairs for Prime Day recently, such as the Respawn 110 Racing Style Leather Gaming Chair for $139.99, down from its original price of $497, among a few other deals, so we're watching for similar deals for Black Friday or Cyber Monday.

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Black Friday PSU deals

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What we're looking for in case fan and CPU cooler deals on Black Friday and Cyber Monday

There haven't been any radical advancements in fan technology or CPU coolers over the past year, so there aren't any specific products you should keep an eye out for. Case fans still pull air in and out of your computer, and CPU coolers still pull heat away from your processor. We're on the hunt for reliable cooling devices with good discounts.

Black Friday fan and CPU cooler deals

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When is Cyber Monday 2018?

Cyber Monday is the first Monday following Thanksgiving/Black Friday. This year Cyber Monday 2018 is Monday November 26.

What's the difference between Black Friday and Cyber Monday?

Black Friday began as a day of shopping sales at brick-and-mortar stores, with Cyber Monday later joining it as the day for finding online deals. But as online shopping has risen to stratospheric levels (have you seen how much Amazon is worth lately?), you can expect to see deals both in-store and online starting on Black Friday (and earlier), and continuing through the weekend. 

Some companies and retailers release all of their planned sales on Black Friday, while others divvy them up throughout the weekend, or hold some deals to push live on Cyber Monday. We'll have a team working around the clock combing through thousands of deals—both good and bad—to find sales on our favorite components and deep discounts on other great hardware. We'll let you know if a deal is worth considering, or if it's even a good deal in the first place.

To get the best deals, we recommend checking back often as new deals go live—and as we curate more and more of the best ones we can find. 

Stick with PC Gamer

Our team will be working around the clock through the holiday season scouring the digital store shelves for the best PC gaming deals to be found. Check back often as we track down the best pre-Black Friday deals, and of course visit us on Black Friday and Cyber Monday to see all the best PC gaming deals to be had.

And if you're feeling burnt out on Black Friday, have some fun and blow off some steam by smashing lovely aisles of stocked shelves in Black Friday: The Ultimate Shopping Simulator.

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Some online stores give us a small cut if you buy something through one of our links. Read our affiliate policy for more info. 

While we’re reminiscing about Half-Life for its 20th anniversary, let’s take a moment to celebrate its iconic protagonist. You all know him, of course. His unkempt beard, those wild eyes, that flattop haircut that just screamed, “I was in the military but they kicked me out because I was too awesome”. Yes, Ivan the Space Biker had a timeless look that served him well for the five minutes he was Half-Life’s hero. Then wee Gordon Freeman nicked his job. 

The first time I saw Half-Life in 1998, Gordie had already made himself comfortable in the role, but only a year before, it was Ivan the Space Biker’s job to show off Valve’s fancy FPS (thanks for the reminder, Combine Overwiki). He sported a bulky space suit, some glorious facial topiary and generally looked like he had seen some shit. And then smoked it. 

Ivan was used in early tests and promotional material before Valve had really settled on a protagonist. The original concept for Ivan was a beardy computer programmer in a bulky environmental suit, but when it came to actually designing him, the concept was tossed aside and he became this burly lumberjack-looking dude. 

Big macho Ivan turned out to be a bit too conventional of a video game protagonist for Valve, which wanted a more cerebral hero. Sadly, after all the work he did promoting the game, Ivan was thrown in the bin and the gig was given to Gordo instead. He had glasses and a little beard, so you knew he was pretty smart.  

Bring Ivan back for Half-Life 3. 

This article was originally published in PC Gamer UK 262, back in January 2014. It's reproduced here, for Half-Life's 20th anniversary, with author Robert Yang's permission. 

20 years ago, Half-Life was released to a rapturous commercial and critical reception. It is a game about... well, it depends on who you ask. For some people it’s about Gordon Freeman, an everyman physicist who struggles to survive the inter-dimensional alien invasion of a secret government research facility. For others it’s about a mute sociopath who murders anything that moves, as he bunnyhops (always hopping) with bloodlust. More cynically, Half-Life is just another game about jumping on things and shooting things in the face to get to the next level.

But as a longtime Half-Life modder and game developer, I also know Half-Life in a very different way: in its map logic scripting, SDK source code, 3D models and animation events, 2D skins and texture flats—I’ve even studied the way Valve named the individual game files and folders. Game developers must make millions of small decisions all the time, and each decision is in conversation with a million other decisions. How big can a Half-Life level be, how many colours and shapes can it have, what can it look like? Well, it depends on how much texture memory and 3D map geometry memory you’re allocating in the engine. Half-Life’s guts influence what Half-Life can show you and what Half-Life can do.

And what Half-Life’s guts say is that everyone else is wrong. Half-Life is not a game about Black Mesa, Gordon Freeman, headshots or puzzles. Half-Life is fundamentally a game about... trains.

Black Mesa inbound

Half-Life begins with a seven-minute work commute. The Black Mesa facility swirls to life around your monorail: co-workers run late to work, forklifts rush through maintenance tunnels, an idling helicopter waits for passengers. It is an iconic and oft-imitated stretch of scene-setting.

The chapter was pitched initially as more of a tech demo than a bit of subtle atmosphere. According to former Valve writer Marc Laidlaw, it began when a programmer implemented a new type of game object called a ‘func_tracktrain’. Unlike its simpler ancestor func_train, inherited with the Quake-derived codebase, func_ tracktrain could run on a long stretch of path_track, branch onto different tracks, and bank and pivot into turns. To show off the new functionality, the programmer asked Laidlaw to write some use of func_tracktrain somewhere in the game. Laidlaw interpreted the request more literally and asked himself, what were the possibilities afforded by using a train?

1. Level crossingHalf-Life’s first chapter is made of six different map files that load as you cross certain thresholds along the track route. At the time, Half-Life pioneered an innovative ‘seamless’ loading technology between map files without separate loading screens. The player could backtrack between maps and NPCs could even follow the player across level transitions. Today, many games implement some form of ‘level streaming’ where the engine begins slowly preloading new map data in the background as soon as the player is close enough to a transition point, thus drastically shrinking level load times. Half-Life didn’t have that, but it still used the technique to its advantage.

2. Parenting issuesThe monorail tram ‘door’ is a fake door that is part of the tram wall and cannot open. The Half-Life engine did not support ‘entity parenting’, so designers could not glue or ‘parent’ a functioning door to the func_tracktrain of the tram. They couldn’t glue glass windows, other passengers, or even pieces of rubbish to it either. One workaround: start the player inside the tram already, so a functional door is not necessary.

3. TrackingTo tell the func_tracktrain where it can go, the level designers placed a series of ‘path_track’ points. Each point had a unique name and the name of the next path_track in the sequence. When the func_tracktrain runs, it travels along these points in order and connects all the dots. If the train suddenly flew off the track, that meant there was probably a typo in configuring one of a hundred path_track points. It was tedious work.

4. TwinsTo give the illusion of a ‘seamless’ level transition, two map files must share the same room. If a map ends with a dark section of concrete tunnel, then the next map must start with an identical copy of the concrete tunnel. However, it means that if the designers ever change that tunnel later, then they must also update the twin copy in the other map file, which can get messy and time consuming. Thus, transition areas in Half-Life are often featureless narrow hallways with few details.

5. MemoriesHow many megabytes of memory does your graphics card have? A few gigabytes? Back in 1998, game developers counted every megabyte: each map file in Half-Life was limited to two megabytes of texture memory. These days, a single shrubbery in the new Call of Duty probably uses two megabytes of texture memory, an entire Half-Life level’s worth by itself. Perhaps we’re too wasteful these days.

6. Vis-a-VisS-shaped bends and hallway-room-hallway structures were great line-of-sight blockers for ‘visibility culling’, where a game engine avoids wastefully drawing hidden scenery. Why spend precious cycles rendering something behind a wall? Valve designers had to pre-calculate a ‘potentially visible set’ (PVS) of which rooms can see into which rooms. If any walls got destroyed, it would become obsolete, which is one of the reasons few games have deformable worlds.

7. End of the LineSo the tram door was a fake door that couldn’t open, but at the end of the chapter, the security guard miraculously opens it. How? Valve’s hack was ingenious: when the train first arrives, the game seamlessly loads a new map file of the same exact room (see ‘Twins’) except it swaps out the old tram for a new func_tracktrain with a door-shaped hole in the side, and the moving door is actually another func_tracktrain. Who said trains always have to be train-shaped? This trick is legendary among Half-Life modders: how the Valve developers used one unrelated system to fix a different system.

The Shark Cage

In the summer of 1997, Half-Life was essentially just a pile of random moments and encounters. Marc Laidlaw was hired as writer to sort through that pile of game content and bring some semblance of coherence to it, but by then much of the action had already been prototyped. Half-Life’s development history suggests that Valve were concerned less with story as a goal in itself and more with ferrying the player linearly from setpiece to setpiece, to sustain the thrill of constant movement and progression. Half-Life, itself, is a train.

The chapter ‘Apprehension’ is halfway through the Half-Life rollercoaster. In the middle of this dimly-lit ‘water level’ is a shark cage sequence ripped out of a monster movie. When the player enters the cage to pick up the crossbow, it plunges into a pool with an ‘ichthyosaur’ creature that circles menacingly before biting its prey in the face. Trains are surprisingly relevant here because, remember, trains do not necessarily look like trains.

1. RunwayWhen the player first enters the room, they set off a trigger_once that makes the monster_ichthyosaur perform a scripted_sequence to jump out of the water and devour a screaming monster_scientist. The jumping movement of the animation draws the player’s eyes upward, toward the suspended shark cage and balcony. To continue, the player must walk along a platform all the way around the cage, thus viewing it from all sides and likely noticing the crossbow weapon inside.

2. Node graphNPCs in Half-Life are a lot like trains, they mostly go where the track leads them. But instead of a path_track, a designer must place info_node points that automatically link with nearby nodes into a web-like ‘node graph’. To pathfind somewhere, the AI will look at all the different links between nodes to assemble its route. Here, Valve put many of the ichy’s waypoints underneath the cover of the catwalk, to discourage the player from freely sniping at the monster from above water. Good node graphs are often the difference between AI looking dumb or clever in any game.

3. Pickup baitThe crossbow comes with only five bolts. Killing the ichthyosaur on easy or medium mode requires four, and on hard mode it is eight. That means the player can only miss one shot with a weapon they’ve never used, against a monster they’ve never fought. To make it easier, the player solves a slightly earlier simple puzzle for some valuable MP5 alt-fire grenades—which are useless against the ichy, but act as bait to trick the player into picking up 20 extra bolts for a weapon they don’t even possess yet.

4. The cageThe centrepiece of this room is a shark cage containing a crossbow, suspended from the balcony. When the player walks along the beam and drops down into the cage, it breaks and falls into the water. The cage is actually a func_tracktrain, running on a series of path_track points that guide the ‘cage train’ downward at roughly 6.5 metres a second.

5. The GateOnce in the water, the player’s ultimate goal is to open this rusty gate to get to the next room. However, the rusty wheel turns very slowly and the player must hold down the ‘use’ key the entire time or else the gate will close by itself. It takes 12 seconds to completely open the gate—the exact same length of time that Gordon Freeman can hold his breath. All this is probably too difficult to do while fending off the ichthyosaur; thus, indirectly, the game forces you to kill it first.

...or at least that was the intent. Playtesters probably managed to open the door for only 6-8 seconds and then quickly slip through the gap, despite the roving shark monsters trying to kill them. To prevent that from happening, Valve added an invisible trigger in front of the gate wheel, which instantly alerts the ichthyosaur to the player’s presence and slams it into combat mode. This is technically cheating on the developers’ part, but it’s only cheating if you get caught.

6. Flying sharkThe code for the monster_ichthyosaur is actually based on the same code used for flying monsters. After all, what is swimming but flying underwater? So if NPCs are actually trains (see ‘Node Graph’), then we can think of the ichy as simply a mindless homicidal flying shark-train.

7. Bubble funGiven the superb drownability of water in Half-Life, every second spent beneath its surface counts. To help the player navigate, even in foggy and murky waters, Valve used columns of bright bubble particles flowing up, because the human eye is typically drawn to movement. They used these bubbles frequently in underwater sections to highlight tunnels, passages, or pockets where the player could surface for air.