This article originally ran in PC Gamer 328 back in February. The render above is by our art editor John Strike. Subscribe here and get great features like this sent to your door every month.

It all started with Black Mesa. Firstly, because the stars aligned in Christmas 1998 such that my first taste of PC gaming happened to be Half-Life, the best shooter ever made. Santa Claus delivered a personal computer to our home that year—a Packard Bell Platinum 350, since you ask. A 350MHz Pentium II lay within it. A 3DFX Voodoo 2 with 8MB onboard memory. 16MB of RAM and 6GB of hard drive space. These were formidable gaming specs, and when I was given the luxury of choosing a new PC game to accompany it under the tree I relied on the wisdom of PC Gamer, who sure were keen on this Half-Life game. That Christmas was magical. But that’s not the point. 

I mean to say, it all started with Black Mesa, the Source Engine reworking of Half-Life by Crowbar Collective. When it appeared on my radar back in 2013 I thought it looked like the perfect way to experience the game I’d confidently been calling the best shooter ever made—having played it just once, aged 12—once again. After 15 years of abstinence I’d once more allow myself to take in the giddy delights of creeping past the tentacle beast and watching Barneys plunge to their doom in broken elevators through the lens of this Source Engine remake. 

I lasted about two minutes. That was all the time it took to realise that every slight deviation, every instance of minor creative licensing, was only going to wind me up. The Barneys all had different lines! The posters were slightly different! Some of the rooms were bigger/smaller than I remembered! This wouldn’t do. 

No, this wouldn’t do at all. I made a very serious promise to myself that day, having closed down the perfectly good Black Mesa mod. The only way I’d play my darling Half-Life ever again was in situ: the original game disc I’d kept all these years, running on a Packard Bell Platinum 350. So began a painstaking and indefensibly self-indulgent quest to source nearly worthless PC parts.

The keyboard and mouse were surprisingly easy to get hold of. Having set up eBay alerts for every bit of Packard Bell minutiae I required, I was directed to the very same ’board, complete with redundant multimedia controls, going for a princely £10. It arrived shortly afterwards, smelling faintly of someone else’s house and, well, presumably working. I didn’t have anything to plug its PS/2 connector into to check. I opted for a Microsoft Intellimouse to pair it with because—and I’m ashamed to write this—I can’t remember much about the original mouse that came with my first PC and I’m pretty certain we plumped for the Intellimouse quite quickly anyway. They’re ten-a-penny on eBay too. Easy, this retro PC-sourcing lark. 

Retro fit

The real difficulty began, funnily enough, when it came to finding a specific model of PC released 20 years ago in good working order. Retro gaming PCs are all the rage at the moment, and there’s a growing cottage industry of PC builders who source old parts and practise the dark art of ‘refurbishment’ on them (in reality a can of compressed air and some homemade bleach solution to remove the yellowing on beige plastic). But what if you’re not just looking for a retro gaming PC, but the retro gaming PC? After a year of eBay alerts and fortnightly searches, I hadn’t come close. I was at such a low ebb that I considered hitting the ‘Buy it Now’ button on a Dell.

I also thought about building the machine by sourcing the individual parts, and I must now say in the strongest terms possible: don’t do this. You’ve forgotten everything about hardware standards and compatibility from 20 years ago. You have no idea what chipset that motherboard you’re looking at is, and there isn’t a damn thing on the internet about it to inform you. No one will help you if that Voodoo 3 doesn’t fit, and good luck getting all the right cables to connect your miraculously compatible components which you’ve implausibly found working drivers for. Honestly, forget it. Buy a prebuilt PC which the seller confirms is in full working order. If they include the original recovery disc, that’s a massive bonus. You’ll need to buy your old operating system of choice otherwise, and although Windows 98 isn’t quite as expensive now (£15-£20 from most sellers), it’s an added cost you might initially overlook. If you want, you can even refurbish an old machine yourself by buying a £5 can of air and following one of the many questionable recipes for ‘Retrobright’ solution to bleach parts back to factory fresh—just know that PC Gamer accepts no responsibility for you ruining your floors, bathtub, hands and PC parts. 

It came as quite a surprise when my exact make and model of PC materialised on eBay after a full year without leads. I stared at each shaky smartphone photograph on the listing with an almost pornographic fascination, barely conceiving the needle I’d found in eBay’s discarded goods haystack. The seller had listed it with a guide price of £400 to encourage private offers, and honestly I’d have paid it if it came to it. In the end, though, I sent an offer of £100 and spent the day worrying that I’d lowballed to such an insulting degree that my bridge with this seller was forever burned. He accepted it instantly, because you would, wouldn’t you, if some weirdo came out of the woodwork desperate for your unwanted two-decades-old computer. Thanks again, sync_it, and sorry about deleting all your old Champ Man 3 saves. 

The fates had smiled on me. I’d secured some very specific pieces, and I hadn’t even had to risk the one website that claimed to still be selling my original PC new, 20 years later. Still, two pieces elude me: the Packard Bell Milano 17-inch CRT monitor, and the recovery disc. I’ll keep searching, of course, but I was especially disappointed not to fully immerse myself into 1998-o-vision with a CRT’s characteristic display. Good CRTs are hard to find now—most have either been chucked, broken, or taken to recycling centres to fester away. Of those that appear on eBay, most predate my target Windows 98 era—there’s high demand for Win95 screens and earlier, it seems. They’re also heavy as all heck, which means delivery is a real issue—there are specialist couriers who deal with fragile items and know how to handle a CRT, however. Perhaps there’s someone out there who’s cared for a Milano monitor all these years, someone now ready to part with it. Until I find them, I must subject my retro rig to the indignity of outputting on a 32-inch IPS.

Never mind. The beating heart of the PC was just as it had been. Likewise my peripherals. What a perfect way to remind oneself what PC gaming was really, truly like 20 years ago. That’s no small point—that era’s been fetishised in recent years, evidenced by Kickstarter-funded odes to the Infinity Engine RPGs, and reboots of everything from Thief to Outcast. Not to mention Black Mesa, of course. What’s clear when you press the power button on an old tower PC, hear the Windows 98 welcome chimes, and load a game’s CD-ROM into the tray, is that we’ve forgotten much of the era’s reality.

For example: first-person shooter control schemes were the wild west in 1998. By default, Half-Life’s controls are bound to the arrow keys, of which left and right turn, rather than strafe. At least mouselook is enabled by default. Quake II, released just a year prior, maps the mouse to moving forwards, while A and Z control your vertical view. Barbaric. 

Revisionist History 

On the technical side, we’ve forgotten much about what games looked like when they released—for most people, running on a software renderer in 640x480 and still not hitting anything like 60fps. The Half-Life you see in YouTube speedruns and let’s plays, running at modern day resolutions, bears little resemblance to the one I lost myself in the Christmas it came out. That game is grainier, darker, and somehow more atmospheric for it. Although hundreds of shooters have since aped Half-Life’s setpieces, NPCs and storytelling techniques, Valve’s vision stands as tall and impressive on this retro PC as it did on release. Half-Life was, and is, a place you go, rather than a game you play.

Perhaps the most profound realisation that comes from building an old PC and booting up a treasured memory is that I’d advocate every single PC gamer do the same thing. The nostalgia hit is absolutely worth all that e-trawling, but more than that, sitting at a PC without an internet connection (for goodness’ sake don’t try to go online with Windows 98) reminds you how easily distracting your modern gaming habitat can be. There’s nothing to alt-tab out to and no Steam list of zero hours played shame. That feels like an important reminder. 

If you've ever wondered what the top of Gordon Freeman's head looks like then Half-Life: Top-Down is the mod for you—it turns Half-Life into a top-down shooter, complete with plenty of camera customisation options.

You can watch it in action above, but I wouldn't judge it until you've seen the last 30 seconds, which shows how you can adjust the camera. On the default settings the overhead camera hugs the ceilings and, as the mod's creator points out, "it makes the camera get really close when the ceiling is low". It's a bit claustrophobic, and makes it hard to see where enemies are. But it's easily fixed thanks to a neat options menu that lets you manually set the height of the camera.

If you tell the camera that it doesn't have to stay in-bounds and bump the height up then it starts to look more like a conventional top-down shooter, and you can actually see the enemies you're fighting (see how it looks in the picture below). Unfortunately it will show everything that's out of bounds in a bright red colour, but I think it's worth putting up with. Beside, modder Sockman111 is working on a solution, perhaps by placing a big object with a texture far below.

The mod also tweaks the auto-aim to account for the fact you can't aim higher or lower on an enemy, and makes it easier to interact with objects if you aren't looking straight at them. 

A word of warning: the creator says they're "not sure yet if the entire game is playable like this". One player in the comments of the mod has also reported a number of bugs. But it's something Sockman111 is working on, and most people seem pleased with the results. 

You can grab it from ModDB.

Half-Life, released at the end of 1998, did not have cooperative gameplay. That was unacceptable to Sven Viking, who on January 19th, 1999 released beta 0.8 of his mod Sven Co-op, a proof of concept multiplayer modification consisting of a single level of the campaign. Today, 20 years later, Build 3482406 of Sven Co-op is available. That’s exciting, unless, like me, it makes you feel the inevitable march of time and the looming of the grave all the more keenly.

The lovely update squashes a healthy multitude of bugs and rejiggers some of the various checkpoints, along with the campaign from They Hunger. It also adds a glorious thing: varied sounds for NPCs firing the MP5 submachine gun, one of the most grating repeated noises in all of video games history. The patch drops support for Windows XP and Windows Vista, operating systems which weren’t even in development when Half-Life and Sven Co-op were first released.

The mod’s developers suggest going online and booting up svencoop1 with everyone else today. You should probably play dial-up modem screeches in the background while you do it for the full, authentic experience.

Sven Co-op has its own page on Steam. You can read the Sven Co-op team’s full post on their forums. 

Half-Payne is, as the name suggests, a mash-up of two classic PC shooters: Half-Life and Max Payne. Basically, it gives Gordon Freeman the same skills that Max has, including bullet time, a dive move, and painkiller healing. Creator suXin has now released what they call its "last major update", which adds a random mod feature, Twitch integration, and a new nightmare dream sequence.

If you turn random mods on, you'll periodically activate one of the many tweaks that suXin has added during development. For example, you might be granted infinite ammo—and then, when that wears off, you might get a wobbly camera that makes aiming hard, followed by a modification that pushes you back every time you take damage. It means that no two play sessions will be the same.

One of those random mods is the rather disturbing 'Payned', added in this update. It transforms all enemies and NPCs into Max Payne, but doesn't alter their body shape or head size, which leads to some twisted character models. Barnacles (the tongue things), just become Max's glorious face. You can see it in action in the trailer, above. 

Twitch integration revolves around those random mods: you can let viewers mess with you by voting on the next modification, which sounds like fun.

The new nightmare sequence is another tribute to Max Payne, adding a dream sequence into the Apprehension section of Half-Life. The update also adds a Gungame mode that forces you to use random weapons.

The whole thing is a great excuse to play Half-Life all over again, and both bullet time and Max Payne's trademark dives look like they transfer surprisingly well to Valve's shooter. You can download the mod from its ModDB page. 

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.