Modder gets Half-Life 2 working on Nintendo Switch via Portal bundle

A modder has gotten Half-Life 2 working on the Nintendo Switch. That was successful because the Portal games released on Tuesday for the Switch also appear to contain parts of Half-Life 2. Levels and music still need to be loaded from an external source.

Portal: Companion Collection has been available for Nintendo Switch since Tuesday. That is a bundle of the games Portal 1 and 2, ported by Nvidia Lightspeed Studios. That studio also previously made a port of Half-Life 2 for the Nvidia Shield TV set-top boxes and large parts of it appear to be present in the Portal bundle for the Switch.

switch mud OatmealDome writes that he managed to get Half-Life 2 up and running in Portal 1 on the Switch. According to him, this is possible because Portal 1 is in fact a ‘glorified mod’ for Half-Life 2 and because the studio that made the port left many Half-Life 2 assets in the Portal bundle.

Half-Life 2’s maps and music are missing; OatmealDome had to put it on the Switch itself. That is only possible with a jailbroken Switch console. According to the modder, there are still quite a few crashes, it is not possible to complete all levels and there are many bugs in animations of NPCs. Save games don’t work either. In a YouTube video, OatmealDome shows that the game runs at 60fps. Sometimes the game stutters, but that is probably due to shader compilation and node graph rebuilds.

While the game isn’t running flawlessly yet, the modders show that Half-Life 2 could run well on the Switch, provided the game is optimized for the Nintendo console. Valve has not yet announced any plans to bring a Half-Life game to Switch.