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Half-Life 2: 20th Anniversary Documentary

Valve3 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2024–2025
YouTube
documentary · general · evergreen · 2024–2025 on HN

Valve's two-hour documentary for Half-Life 2's 20th anniversary, with team members discussing development, nearly running out of money, being hacked, the publisher lawsuit and the birth of Steam.

HN recommends it as an excellent inside look at Valve's history, its technology and the games industry of the time.

Tech company stories & documentariesGame history & retro gamingGame programming & engines#valve#half-life2#steam#gamedevelopment

4 comments from Hacker News

@sky22242025-10 · in “Ask HN: What are some of your favorite documentaries?”

I really enjoyed the Half Life 2: 20th Anniversary documentary. It gave a pretty neat perspective of what the games' industry was like at the time, and also made me really appreciate the technology that Valve was building. A lot of really innovative stuff came out of the creation of that game. ▶ this video

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@bejd2024-11 · in “A summer intern once saved Valve from a near-fatal lawsuit”

Mentioned in the article, but the source is the excellent YouTube documentary Valve released for Half-Life 2's 20th Anniversary [0] [0] ▶ this video

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@scrlk2025-02 · in “Half-Life 2 and Dishonored art lead Viktor Antonov has died”

RIP. For those who haven't seen it yet, he was interviewed in the HL2 20th Anniversary Documentary: ▶ this video (intro and chapter 1 at 13:40)

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@mrbn100ful2025-01 · in “Why Half-Life 3 speculation is reaching a fever pitch again”

They drop the episodic content idea, it will be a full game You can watch the 20th anniversary doc, they speak about it : ▶ this video

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