Unforeseen Consequences: A Half-Life Documentary

Thanks for watching our documentary on the legacy of Half-Life! Before you ask, yes we have a number of break-out videos coming from this. We'll have a longer chat with Scott Smith about the history of Counter-Strike, a chat with Geoff about The Game Awards, Cory about God of War and a few more. Look out for those over the coming weeks. We also have a 40-minute behind-the-scenes feature available for Patrons and Channel Subscribers so if you want to watch that and help fund more docs like these, check out our Patreon: patreon.com/noclip - Thanks again for watching. Make sure to hit that like button, subscribe, spam your friends and tell your gran! (Caption inbound. We ordered them a week ago, still waiting. I guess this video was long.)

The right man in the wrong place can make all the difference in the world.

Man Geoff Keighley has a mean poker face. He said in the 'behind Closed Doors at Valve' video that he's been aware of project Alyx for a couple years now meaning that he would have known about it at the time of making this documentary.

50:30 back when I was playing Half Life, I went to get my wisdom teeth taken out The surgeon was Dr. Freeman (didn't notice the name, when I was awake); coming out of the anesthesia, I hear the concerned voice of the nurse "Tim, doctor Freeman needs you to wake up!" I thought I was dreaming, and didn't want it to end

hearing Randy Pitchford talking about how Valve was exploiting them and proceeded to say “we would never do that to any developer” makes me feel like i just drank a gallon of grease

This documentary is in desperate need of a sequel.

Geoff avoiding talking about VR.. He knew!

"The entire industry fundamentally shifted with the release of that demo..." might be the most powerful quote from a dev ever imo. Great interview.

Watching this in a post Alyx and post complete black mesa world is just...unreal

The term “unforeseen consequences” still sends chills down my spine

"I dont think my kids ever played Half-life.... I have to go home and fix that." (1:43:30) Loving that sentence.

Alyx was so amazing, and showed ME personally that Valve still knows how to make a good SP game. It was definitely worth getting VR.

I like how at 1:01:50 Jeff knows exactly that Alyx is around the corner, even smiles when saying he doesn't know.

Now... about that beer I owed ya.

Thank you for doing this documentary. I was 8 when i came home from school one day to see my dad playing this new game on our family computer. From that day on my life changed. I couldnt stop talking about it at school. I used to draw new map outlines in my notebook and come home to create them in Hammer editor. When i was 15 i emailed Gabe about a "mod making book" for HL2 that was rumored to be released but never was. Another employee at valve answered my mail and asked for my adress. A few weeks later i got a package from valve with two half-life shirts in it, signed by Gabe Newell himself. Im 28 now and I still have them today.

i feel ashamed to have always thought of geoff as some sort of figurehead for the game awards when in reality he's actually a super interesting guy

Throughout the video, I've heard the developers say "I loved what we were doing" "We were having fun" "What do the customers want?". They were in an era where the passion and the community mattered.

2:01 yoyo that's me

Hey, I'm Robert Yang, I'm in this documentary. Some additional engine politics talk / commentary: It's cool to see Gearbox's side of the story, and the lack of support / communication with Valve is pretty telling but also not unusual -- it's a lot of work to maintain a game engine and support your licensees, that's part of the reason why id Software got out of the engine licensing business, their heart just wasn't really in it. Yet both Half-Life's were driven a lot by their game engine technology, and now in 2018/2019 Valve can't scale to match the usability or feature-set of Unity or Unreal anymore -- while also pushing a VR ecosystem, while also running Steam, while also etc. etc. Project Borealis moving to UE4 is also very telling; Source 2 has technically been available for tinkering (in DOTA2) for years, but at this point, even diehard Valve fans have given up on it, and Valve themselves are using Unity a lot... Really, the only big tech advantage that Valve has left is their VR expertise, which definitely fuels the Half-Life VR rumors, it's basically the best way to rescue the VR game industry at this point.

Shout out to my dad who introduced me to this game when I was about 10. I'm now finishing up my bachelors degree in I.T. and I'm looking to break into a career in software development. This game series, which premiered a year after I was born, really did inspire me :)