Valve releases a major update in honor of Half-Life’s 25th anniversary

Valve has released a major update to the game to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Half-Life. The developer makes a whole host of technical improvements, but also adds some extras from previous expansions of the game.

Valve has in their own words Fixed several bugs from the original 1998 game. The developer has, among other things, overhauled the game’s user interface, making it easier to read on larger screens. The game’s menu has been given a new skin, which now looks like the menu from the 1998 build of the game. Thanks to the update, the game also has support for Steam Networking and Valve has made the necessary adjustments to become Half-Life certified to make for the Steam Deck.

The update also adds some extras to the game. For example, players can use the update to play a new mini-campaign that was developed a few months after the release of Half-Life: Half Life Uplink. This expansion was reportedly only found on CD-ROMs from certain gaming magazines and hardware manufacturers. Valve is also adding seven multiplayer maps. Three of these maps come from Half-Life: Further Data, an expansion from 1999. The developer also adds some multiplayer skins to the game.

To celebrate the game’s 25th anniversary, Valve also published a documentary on Youtube. The original development team will speak and share experiences about the creation of the game, among other things.

Half-Life was released by Valve on November 19, 1998. It was the first game from Valve, which had founded the Steam platform five years after the game’s introduction. Half-Life is a first-person shooter with puzzles and made quite an impression shortly after its release. The development team at Valve used a modified version of the Quake engine for Half-Life. The game’s logo, the Greek letter λ, or lambda, refers to the name Half-Life. The symbol is used as the decay constant for exponential decay, such as in radioactive decay. The PC version of Half-Life has an average score of 96 points at the time of writing on Metacritic.