Half-Life turns 25 years outdated tomorrow, with new maps and updates to have a good time. Valve additionally reunited the sport’s authentic builders for an hour-long making-of documentary by which its authentic programmers and artists reminisce about creating the first-person traditional at a time when a lot of them had by no means shipped a sport earlier than.
Chief among the many revelations inside is that every one of Half-Life’s textures have been created by a single individual, Karen Laur.
Here’s the documentary, produced in partnership with Danny O’Dwyer’s Secret Tape:
Of course, ’90s video games have been made by a lot smaller groups than people who construct video video games right now, even first-person shooters. Yet Valve had a number of programmers, a number of degree designers, a number of character artists. I due to this fact assumed that its textures would likewise have been created by a number of completely different artists. Not so.
One factor the documentary makes clear is that Valve did not have a cohesive plan for what Half-Life ought to be – together with the place its ranges ought to happen. Different folks on the group initially labored independently, and later started-over to attempt to flip it into one thing cohesive. As a consequence, Laur as texture artist had a variety of affect over what Black Mesa grew to become.
“First of all I had a bunch of textures, after which everytime I made new ones, whoever was engaged on the brand new ranges can be like, ‘Oh contemporary textures, I’m gonna use these!’,” says Laur. “Somebody making one other degree would begin utilizing them [as well] and I used to be like no, that is chaos, we have to prohibit this, so I began naming the feel units by the extent that they have been made for. I used to be attempting to implement some visible cohesion, and that basically ended up working.”
“I grew up simply out D.C., and so there’s all these large, actually banal workplace buildings, and that is form of the course I went,” says Laur. “It began turning into a facility. So I began making these linoleum tiles, the drop ceiling, the concrete block wall, the black and white tile flooring.”
“It’s simply an amazing quantity of labor”, says Marc Laidlaw, Half-Life’s author, of Laur’s solo efforts.
Part of my assumption that the textures have been created by a gaggle was pushed by how assorted Half-Life’s textures are, and the way important. When I first performed Half-Life as a 14-year-old, the Black Mesa Research Facility felt like an actual place to me in a method that different video games with reasonable settings from the period, corresponding to Sin and Kingpin: Life Of Crime, by no means did. The geometry of the underlying structure principally consisted of low-poly bins by technological necessity, however textures made every space appear solely distinct.
“Originally I used to be hand-painting all the textures, and you may actually see a shift in a few of them the place they go from hand-painted to picture reference,” says Laur. “The picture references are a lot a lot better. So I used to be throughout Seattle – Harbor Island, Gasworks park – getting rusty metallic issues. What can I get good footage of that’s vaguely industrial and attention-grabbing to take a look at after which how can we use this?”
I additionally assume the textures deserve a variety of credit score for the mapping and modding scene that grew round Half-Life within the years after its launch. Using the textures for Quake or its sequel, all you may ever actually create was extra Quake. Half-Life’s actual world textures have been malleable sufficient that you may apply them somewhat otherwise, perhaps add only a few of your individual, and immediately have a setting solely separate from Black Mesa. That’s the way you get from Half-Life’s singleplayer ranges to early Counter-Strike maps like Assault, Siege, and Prodigy, all of which relied on Half-Life’s textures.
The textures aren’t the one a part of Half-Life created by a single individual. All of the sounds and music have been created alone by Kelly Bailey, who additionally labored on degree design. Half-Life’s sound results have turn into at the very least as iconic as its textures, and plenty of have survived unchanged into sequels and different Source engine video games. I admit that my love of its textures runs deeper, although. I spent a few years as an adolescent tinkering within the degree editor Worldcraft and have become intimately conversant in Half-Life’s texture WADs because of this. Several a long time from now, when I’m discovered useless, the outdated picture clutched in my hand will not be of a misplaced teenage love, it will be a printout of C3A1_W5D.
Aside from discussing her work as a texture artist, Laur does additionally contact on one other topic close to the top of the documentary. “I used to be worker seventeen. There was a lady that was form of the workplace supervisor, and finally Lisa Guthrie got here in on the desk. I used to be the one lady on the group,” says Laur, earlier than sighing. “That was not superior.”
Unfortunately Laur would not get an opportunity to elaborate, however the documentary is price watching all through. I’ve hoovered-up dozens, in all probability tons of of interviews in regards to the making of Half-Life through the years, in addition to listening to developer commentary and studying Raising The Bar and so forth. I used to be due to this fact already conversant in a lot of the story the documentary has to inform, nevertheless it was nonetheless good to see its builders reminisce all these years later.
