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This article comes from the official account of Wechat: ID:chuappgame, author: NemoTheCaptain

The scene deleted by the official version is resurrected in the form of Mod.

In October 2003, hackers published the unfinished source code and map files of Half-Life 2 on the public network, which shocked the world.

After the release of "half-Life 2" in 2004, players found that many unfinished maps had been deleted by Valve. Today, 20 years later, players are trying to revive these maps in Mod form to create a "half-life 2" that is very different from the official version, and the effect is amazing. Around the "half-life 2" hacker incident before and after a series of events, its topic even exceeds the plot in the game, it can be described as an example of "more powerful outside the play than in the play."

Technology and plot Gabriel Newell (Gabe Newell) joined Microsoft in 1983, then sold some of his Microsoft stock for money and founded Valve Games in 1996 to develop the original "half-life" (Half-Life). To speed up efficiency, Gabe bought id Software's Quake engine license, but his view of FPS is very different from traditional works such as Thor Hammer. Gabe believes that FPS needs to introduce rich plot elements, so the "half-life" adds complex actions to the character.

Young Gabe Newell, for many players, is better known as "G Fat" Valve unveiled a "half-life" technical demonstration at E3 in June 1997, in which the character's actions won praise. Half-life was originally scheduled to be released in November 1997, but Valve was not satisfied with the quality of the game. Gable, with plenty of money, chose to postpone all the levels for a year to re-polish all levels.

Half-Life screenwriter Mark Laidlaw joined Valve in July 1997. he is a science fiction writer, an author of "Thor Hammer" Mod, and has written long stories for id software in magazines, all of which Valve needs. At that time, the script outline of the game had already been written, and Mark's job was to introduce more scenes for the level.

The original level of science fiction writer Mark Laidlaw's "half-life" starts with the protagonist Gordon Freeman opening the subspace portal in the lab, while Mark collects a number of abandoned scenes in the later stage of development. piece it together into a first-person performance at the beginning of the game: Gordon drives slowly into the base on a train, and various facilities along the way are displayed in front of the players one by one. This design makes the "half-life" more realistic, which is very different from the scenes in "Hammer of Thor" that completely pursue playability.

If the "half-life" uses the third-person scene animation, Gordon must appear directly in the picture, and the art needs to make two sets of models of white coat and protective clothing for the protagonist, but Valve did not make these two models until the later stage of development. Mark had an idea and suggested that the team should abandon the third-person animation altogether and present all the plots in the first-person form, which established the iconic acting style of "half-life".

The scene of "half-life" brings a sense of reality. "half-life", which finally went on sale in November 1998, received rave reviews. Mark Laidlaw set a new standard in the FPS industry for the elaborate first-person performance effect of this book, and set a brilliant example for newcomers such as call of Duty.

As for the sequel, Gabriel changed the goal of "half-life 2" from "PC Game of the year" to "Best PC Game of all time". He is willing to empty his personal savings and extend the development time of "half-life 2" indefinitely until he is satisfied. To achieve this ambitious goal, Valve spent more time on technology development, and the Origin engine was born.

Mark Laidlaw's early ideas for "half-Life 2" were influenced by the film "moving the City," which is much darker than the official version. As a villain, the Universe Army replaced the air with gas suitable for aliens to breathe, so that the sky was always shrouded in haze. Such an environment is toxic to human beings, and humans need to wear gas masks to breathe. Mark even imagined that the Union forces would pump the sea water from the earth through the subspace tunnel in the sky, but the engines at that time could not support such a complex effect, so they had to give up.

City 17 in the style of "Soul transfer City"

The sea water was pumped away and the air was replaced. "half-Life 2" planned more levels than the official version in 1999-2001, and some scenes were subsequently abandoned, while others were modified to look like the official version. In the initial plan, Gordon will wake up on a train on the outskirts of City 17 and witness the old city destroyed by coalition forces and alien monsters such as cow squid and dog eyes roaming the suburbs. Walking out of the train station in City 17, Gordon entered the factory that made weapons and equipment for the coalition forces, and then came to the Flying saw Street Airport Hall. This strange arcade hall allows players to remotely control flying saw drones to chase humans leaving City 17. After leaving the arcade hall, Gordon encountered a real flying saw drone in the sewer, and then he realized that the arcade hall was not operating games, but real weapons.

United military factory

In the middle of the Flying saw Street Airport Hall, several levels are more or less the same in concept with the official version, and the difference mainly lies in the later stage. Gordon will stop the coalition's plans to continue to pollute the atmosphere at the air exchange plant, then take a tugboat to the Arctic port, board the icebreaker Aurora borealis, and then use submarines to enter the siren base underwater. Gordon, who left the underwater base, fought a war with coalition forces on the ice sheet. After victory, he took a transport plane back to City 17, which was shot down and crashed into a tall building in the city. After a chaotic battle, Gordon finally returned to the ground of the city from the tall building and attacked the fortress in the center of the city, with a level similar to that of the official version.

The air exchange plant destroyed by Gordon

Pick up Gordon's tugboat.

It took a long time for the Origin engine to enter the barely serviceable stage of the interior scene of the high-rise building in City 17, and many of the scenes in the early days of half-life 2 were experimental. Mark Laidlaw says Valve is a "technology-driven story" company that serves the engine. When the Origin engine decided to focus on the facial expression system, the gas mask and air exchange plant settings were deleted together. As for the Flying saw Street Airport Hall, it is only conceptually interesting, but actually does not perform well, so it has also been deleted. The initial plan also included an ant-lion nest scene, which was later moved to Chapter II, a half-life 2 expansion released in 2007.

At this time, Valve has no plans for a "portal" and aperture technology, and the initial setting of the aurora borealis is completely different from that of Chapter II. The aurora borealis was once chosen as the starting point of the plot, but Mark hopes that half-life 2 will begin in City 17 and end in City 17, which echoes from beginning to end.

At this stage, many of the coalition's vehicles are still imperfect, such as the real-life card-27, while the informal version of the sci-fi helicopter with plasma weapons.

Northern Lights icebreaker

From 1999 to 2001, Gabe Newell paid more attention to the development of "half-life 2". After Valve entered the transition period, Gabe announced the Steam platform in 2002, and this digital game distribution channel has occupied his main energy since then, but the overall project schedule of "half-life 2" is still decided by Gabe.

With the passage of time, the completion of the Origin engine has gradually improved, the picture quality has improved steadily, and the style of the scene has also changed. After the air exchange plant and gas masks were removed, the weather of the game became clear. Art Viktor Antonov (Viktor Antonov), who was born in Bulgaria, suggested that City 17 abandon the dark and psychedelic "soul-moving city" style and become Eastern European style. After this transformation, the overall appearance of City 17 is close to that of Eastern Europe in reality, and the strange Union fortress in the distance becomes more abrupt. This illusory atmosphere and strong sense of contrast become the highlight.

Valve had planned to release half-Life 2 in E3 in May 2002, and the team polished a batch of maps for E3 in March of the same year. The picture quality of this version of the game is similar to that of the official version, and there are many subtle differences in the map. For example, Gordon entered the town of Lewenhom by speedboat, and the matching sunset wharf was deleted from the official version. City 17 lurks the strange translucent spiked monster Hydra, which pierces Union soldiers in a handsome way, but the player's design of being hit with a second when approaching is unreasonable and eventually deleted.

City 17 finally became Eastern European style.

Sunset Wharf in the town of Lewinhom

The translucent monster "Hydra" Gabe Newell accepted the maps in March 2002, and the demonstration included a 20-minute transmission technology experiment to show the character expression system, but he thought the 20-minute length was too tardy. Other levels did not reflect the fun of the physical engine, so the game was canceled from the 2002 E3 public plan.

As a result, Valve's morale was depressed for a time, and the team developed "half-Life 2" for many years. They wanted their work to be recognized. E3 was a stage for players to show, but it was thrown cold water by Gabe, and the development journey of "half-Life 2" seemed to have no end.

After an emotional reaction, the development team accepted the reality, listened modestly to Gabe's advice, and continued to polish the game. The plot of the transmission experiment was shortened from 20 minutes to 5 minutes, and more physical interactions were added to other maps. In September 2002, the team showed Gabe a new polished version, which was finally recognized this time.

Gabe re-evaluated the project in February 2003, and he planned to release the game in E3 in May of the same year, followed by a release on September 30. Half-Life 2 was shown in E3 in 2003, based on version 2002, with a close-up of the face of the mysterious character G-Man, as well as separate physical experiment scenes, which highlighted the game's advances in facial expressions and physical systems.

Close-up of G-Man 's face

Valve, the physics laboratory of E3, shocked the world in 2003. Half-life 2 is not invincible in terms of picture quality alone, but its facial expression, physical interaction and water system are far more important than simple picture quality. These advanced breakthroughs once again pointed out the direction for the gaming world.

"half-life 2" won the house at E3 in 2003. On the other hand, after returning from E3, Gabe soon found that he could not achieve his plan to release the game on September 30, when the Origin engine was still full of Bug, seriously affecting development efficiency. Gabe left the actual development of the game in 2002, causing him to misestimate the progress, and the rest of the team knew that the game could not be released on September 30, but no one plucked up the courage to tell the boss the truth, making it difficult for the whole company to ride a tiger.

On July 27, 2003, Vivandi, the publisher of half-Life 2, said the game would be postponed until the end of 2003, but Gabe responded that the game would be released on time on September 30, even though he and other Valve employees knew it was a lie. In retrospect, even Gabe himself found it funny that he chose September 30, not Vivendi's request. He could have announced the postponement of the game as soon as possible, but failed to tell the truth because of procrastination, making the situation even more chaotic.

It was not until September 23, 2003 that Gabe said that "half-life 2" would be extended to the end of 2003, and players reprimanded Valve's previous lies. Gabe wished he could find a way to get into it, but he could not do so because he cheated not only the players, but also the partner companies.

At the time, Valve signed a $6 million contract with ATI for ATI to tie "half-life 2" serial numbers to Radeon 9800/9600XT cards, a move intended to boost sales of graphics cards, but the serial number was replaced by a pre-order note. ATI also booked the game's launch celebration on Sept. 30, where Gabe only showed a few minutes of HDR special effects and then withdrew because the game was postponed. At this point, apart from Valve's internal employees, only a few hackers online knew exactly what happened to half-Life 2.

ATI's poster for "half-Life 2" hackers attacked Axel Gimbe (Axel Gembe) born in 1983 and living in Schonau, a small town in the Black Forest Mountains of Germany. Axel doesn't have a good family. He has a low-configuration computer, but he doesn't have the money to buy games. He downloaded a "Warcraft 3" serial number generator in 2002, but found that it was a Trojan horse. He analyzed the program in reverse, got in touch with the Trojan author and officially entered the hacker circle. Since then, Axel used the vulnerable port of Windows to write several Trojans to steal the serial number of the game he wanted to play. In June 2003, Axel, curious about half-life 2, began to study Valve's servers.

German hacker Axel Kimber Valve's own network is relatively perfect, and the loophole lies in the link between Valve and Tangis. Tangis is a company that develops PDA office software. The founders of Dan Newell and Gabriel Newell are brothers. The two companies are in the same office building, and Valve's firewall does not block Tangis's servers.

So, through a vulnerability in Tangis, Axel entered Valve's server. He found only a few development documents in the first few weeks, until September 19, when he finally found the source code for half-life 2. Because of insufficient network bandwidth and hard disk capacity, Axel only copied the latest "half-life 2" development version at the time, abandoning the old version-Valve's server was too big for him to think about anything else.

Axel was so confident in his technology that he stole half-Life 2 in a very covert way, initially just to satisfy his curiosity. However, he later revealed the back door in an online chat room with an ostentatious mentality, causing more hackers to access Valve's servers, steal other content and publish it publicly on the Internet.

Valve's response was relatively slow. In August, Gabe noticed only minor problems, such as the sudden disappearance of shared files and recovery five minutes later, before he took it to heart. In September, as more hackers poured in, the problem became more serious, and Gabe's hard drive would inexplicably spin. After he formatted the hard drive and killed the virus, the problem remained unsolved. Then Gabe found that there were hidden partitions on the hard disk, which were not visible under Windows and could only be seen by Linux systems. According to statistics, a total of 13 computers in Valve were infected with Trojans. Realizing the seriousness of the problem, Gabe turned off his computer and called in FBI professionals.

After several hackers discovered the network outage, they immediately released the source code of "half-life 2" on October 2. On Oct. 9, hackers released tens of thousands of more files, including thousands of map material from the early days of half-Life 2 development, as well as material from other new works by Valve.

The 2001 version of City 17 map hackers did not get all the Valve files, but they were sufficient to prove that the "half-life 2" at this time was only a semi-finished product, with a high degree of map completion in the early and middle stages, but no reasonable enemy configuration, and only white models that lacked stickers at the later stage. It is impossible for Valve to finish the game by the end of 2003, let alone September 30.

"counter-Terrorism Elite: action Zero" was originally scheduled for release in September. Hackers released a more complete version of the game with more Bug, but the overall status was close to the official version. The difference mainly lies in the detailed arrangement of the map. The official release of this work was finally postponed to May 2004.

Maps in the development of Action Zero

The development of Operation Zero official maps "counter-Terrorism Elite: the Origin" and "Legion Fortress 2" was very low, and hackers found only a small number of documents. Legion Fortress 2 showed a realistic version in E3 in 1999, and later Valve incorporated the Mod team of counter-Terrorism Elite and Victory Day. Gabe believes that Valve does not need another realistic online game, and he wants Legion Fortress 2 to turn to cartoon style.

Legion Fortress 2, which was leaked by hackers, is a transitional version that includes aliens. Humans and aliens have the same types of arms but different appearance, and both sides collect materials on maps to build buildings. Human generators can power four buildings, while alien buildings consume more materials but do not need electricity. This version pays more attention to the RTS element, each of the arms can build buildings, and some services have their own buildings. Because the system is too complex, the official version deletes most of the architectural and alien designs.

1999 E3's realistic version of Legion Fortress 2

When half-life 2 source code was leaked by alien and human commandos on October 2, Gabe immediately posted a request for help in the hope that players would provide information about hackers. On Oct. 11, hackers who were in the same chat room as Axel provided Gable with a German IP address, but the clue went unnoticed at first.

Many people suspect that the official version of "half-Life 2" deleted many levels because of hackers. Gable denied this claim, saying that removing the levels was an internal decision, even if there were no hackers. The real trouble is not the map file, but the source code. Hackers almost turned half-Life 2 into an open source game. Valve rewrote a lot of code to ensure security, spending a lot of extra time, and game development didn't get back on track until January 2004.

Gabe never expected that Axel took the initiative to contact Valve by email on February 15, 2004. Axel said that although he stole the source code for half-Life 2, he did not upload the content to the public network in person, and the files were released by other hackers in the same chat room. He doesn't want to do military service in Germany, but wants to work in the United States. He says Valve's servers still have vulnerabilities that can be plugged if Gable hires himself as a security staff.

The vulnerabilities used by Axel are indeed different from those used by other hackers. Although he can no longer access Valve's local area network, he can still access the FTP server, and there is nothing Valve can do about it. Gabe pretended to promise Axel to fly to the United States for a Valve interview, while contacting FBI to arrest him at the airport. However, the German police want to deal with the problem on their own.

On May 7, 2004, Axel was arrested at his home in Shenau, Germany, but there was no evidence that he posted Valve documents online, so a German court only sentenced him to two years' probation-and the hacking scandal was finally over. The official version of "half-Life 2" was released on November 16, 2004, with an average media score of 95.48 on Gamerankings, beating numerous masterpieces such as "bullying: San Andres", Halo 2 and World of Warcraft to the top of the list in 2004.

Reviving six years from "half-life" to "half-life 2", Gabriel Newell believes that Valve's biggest mistake is that it makes games while developing the engine, and the levels are constantly reworked before the engine matures, wasting a lot of resources. He didn't want players to wait another six years, so he divided the half-life 2 expansion into small chapters. Chapter I was released in 2006 and Chapter II was released in 2007.

Chapter III was set on the icebreaker aurora borealis, and then the development was deadlocked again, and the team conceived too much new content for Chapter III, causing the expansion to expand to the level of a sequel. Valve needs a more powerful Origin 2 engine to implement Chapter III, but the development of Origin 2 is also bogged down. Mark Laidlaw planned to turn Chapter III into a VR game in 2015, but the project quickly ran aground because of an imperfect engine. Mark also left Valve in 2016.

In 2017, Mark published a screenplay outline of Chapter 3 on his personal blog in the form of a novel, a time travel story around the Northern Lights. Unlike the hacker attack in 2003, the script was leaked in person, which immediately caused an uproar on the Internet, prompting players to suspect that Valve had completely abandoned the "half-life" series, resulting in the screenwriter having to release the script himself.

Players almost gave up hope as they waited day after day, but Valve suddenly released a trailer for VR's new film "half-Life: Alex" in November 2019. After the game was released in March 2020, director Robin Walker finally told the truth: Valve never decided on the script for Chapter III, it was just Mark Laidlaw's own idea, and Mark is a withdrawn weirdo.

Alex broke the 13-year silence of the series in 2023. Mark apologized to Valve, admitting that he was in a bad mood in 2017, so he published the script outline on impulse, which he regretted. Game development is a collective work, and the screenwriter is not alone in charge. The script is only his personal opinion. If the development of Chapter 3 is on the right track, the details will certainly be adjusted because of technology and hurdles, and everything is inconclusive.

Mark returned to science fiction after leaving Valve, but publishers are becoming more and more like entertainment companies, with only the best-known authors in their eyes, and publishers want to promote prolific young authors in order to maximize sales. Mark, who is over 60, is a "half-buried" old man in the eyes of the publishing house. He has no resources to promote it, so he can only publish novels at his own expense.

Mark may return to the game writer in the future, but he has lost interest in the "half-life" series, he has not planned the plot after Chapter 3, and the future should be left to young people. Valve invited Mark to act as a plot consultant for Alex, but Mark refused, hoping that young people would be free to play.

In fact, Alex has recycled a lot of abandoned ideas from the Mark era, and early versions of half-Life 2 can be seen in a variety of Union soldier variants and factory checkpoints. As a result, Mark still contributes to Alex.

On the other hand, today's Valve also seems to have abandoned the attitude of excellence in the past, at least for service games. The Origin 2 engine is still hardly perfect today. Counter-Terrorism Elite 2 was released in March this year and is scheduled to be officially released in the summer, but the follow-up development is endless. The release time on September 27 barely caught up with the end of the summer, but the game is still like a semi-finished product, far from being an "official version".

"counter-Terrorism Elite 2" is still a semi-finished product. For players, the hacking scandal of 2003 takes on a new meaning today: if hackers do not release thousands of map files, the development process of "half-Life 2" will be shrouded in fog. Players can only see a few original paintings in the set. Since the official release of half-Life 2 in 2004, players have been trying to restore deleted content in Mod form.

Dark interval (Dark Interval) is the leader of this kind of Mod. After 12 years of development, this Mod has not yet been completed, and there are many problems in level design and physical determination. However, as far as the scene is concerned, it perfectly recreates the psychedelic feeling similar to the "soul-shifting city" in the early setting of half-Life 2. "Dark interval" does not copy the map files released by the hackers. At the level of detail, please climb to another tall building. Perhaps in many years' time, this Mod will lead to a new life in half-life 2.

City 17 in the Dark interval

The Flying saw Street Airport Hall of "Dark interval"

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