This is going to be a long story about Half-Life.

24 years ago I was working on a computer science assignment to build a phone book application in desktop Java. It was a pretty decent portion of the grade for the class. I seriously hated working on it, I saw a future of typing up code for phone companies or banks or law offices. I wanted to make video games and it was hard to see how this had even a dotted-line connection to that end goal.

I thought screw this I’m going to be an art major and installed the copy of Half-Life I’d been meaning to play all year.

Everybody told me it was great, and while it took me the better part of an hour to get used to using a mouse in a first person shooter (!), by the time I hit Office Complex the hook was in deep.

I played the game in one go in my dark dorm room, cutting classes for a couple days. I’d become an art major, I thought. Give up on the CS class. No more phone books.

I ended up failing that CS class. And I did take a bunch of art classes. I learned C++ to make weird graphics stuff. And after bouncing back and forth between art and CS classes I ended up finishing college weirdly prepared to go work on video games, having a mixed bag of skills.

Well I’ve worked in the video game business for almost 20 years now. Through a strange series of events I now work at Valve, the company who made Half-Life. And a few months ago I got it compiling again, and I finally updated it from MSVC6 for Windows 98.

I just wanted to maybe make the crosshair a little bigger at higher resolutions. Maybe get a checkbox in so you could turn off the texture filtering without console commands.