Former Valve Employee Reveals Early Half-Life Prototypes and deleted bloodbaths.

Former Valve Employee Reveals Early Half-Life Prototypes and deleted bloodbaths.

Image: Early Half-Life Prototypes

Since the first Half-Life game in 1998, there have been decades of new games and notable titles, yet the Valve title has been the subject of numerous arguments throughout the years. It's a franchise that is held up as a paragon of FPS perfection, with the fan remake Black Mesa effectively improving on the original, alongside which are clever tiny tidbits that explain a little bit more about this famous game.

An ex-Valve employee recently spoke up about some of the deleted stuff that was planned to be in the first Half-Life. Designer Brett Johnson released several vintage prototypes of the famous title, giving fans a sneak peek at some of the behind-the-scenes stuff. One example was a mock-up representation of an early design from the locker area that players saw at the outset. Johnson recalls that when the NPC scientists in Goldeneye 64, which he credits as a major influence on him, felt threatened, they would scurry around corners. He thought that said scientists in Half-Life needed a safe spot to hide when they were being pursued, thus the locker room.

hey, so this is pretty neat! brett johnson, one of the devs on the original half-life, is posting footage of some old cut maps on tiktok (of all places). it’s cool to see how much more quake-ish the game originally looked pic.twitter.com/95rmG55FcO

— The Tax Collector Man | BLM (@thetaxgoblin) July 9, 2021

The image he posted illustrates the bloodthirsty violence that was being experimented with throughout the design phase. He goes on to claim that after showing the rest of the team the gruesome mess that would become the locker room, Valve decided to tone down the violence a little. It begs the question of how far the series would have progressed or how successful it would have gotten if it had veered further towards excessive violence, and whether fans would still be talking about the lost Half-Life 3 to this day.

Former Valve Employee Reveals Early Half-Life Prototypes and deleted bloodbaths.

Johnson, who is currently at ArenaNet and working on Guild Wars 2, recounted such memories on TikTok, and even speculated that the game was not initially titled Half-Life. According to him, a variety of ideas were floated about the workplace, including Trip Hammer and The Belly of the Beast. While they don't appear to be fundamentally awful names, there's a case to be made that the games would have received a different reception if the company had chosen one of the other available titles.

Former Valve Employee Reveals Early Half-Life Prototypes and deleted bloodbaths.

Image Credit GR

Johnson also provides some context for prototyping and designing Xen, as well as an early prototype level in which he was "looking for a style, using some of the initial photo references textures." It's fascinating to see early prototypes and options that were contemplated but abandoned.

He also discussed the game's alien region known as Xen, which the fan remake fully revamped after considerable delay and, according to him, was made with limited time. While it isn't the game's finest point, it is a monument to the ingenuity of Valve's developers in the late 1990s, especially given that this was the studio's first outpouring.

H/S: GR, Tiktok