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.

A group within Valve wanted to do something nice for fans today, Half-Life’s 25th Anniversary. Lots of folks helped on this; I think we fixed a bunch of stuff to be the way we saw it in the 90s, but now on modern screens. It was an honor to work on this update, and it’s so exciting to see servers filling up again.

Happy birthday, Half-Life.