Valve's famous shooter Half-Life 2 is celebrating its 20th anniversary today, and on this occasion, a new documentary film has been released. It follows the development of the game since 2004 and includes interviews with the most significant people from the team, including Valve owner Gabe Newell. The film was produced by the Secret Tape team, which belongs to the documentary studio Noclip.
The documentary ends with a look at new footage from the third episode, which was announced but unfortunately never released, with the main reason for cancellation being the team's focus on other Valve titles.
"I think we worked on it for six months before we moved on to Left 4 Dead," said David Speyer, one of the team members. "We left episode three to go help with Left 4 Dead."
"When we wanted to return to episode 3, we concluded that we had missed the opportunity. We definitely could have come back and finished it within two years."
Gabe Newell stated: "My personal mistake was being too overloaded. I couldn't figure out what episode 3 might look like."
In Half-Life 2, it is now possible to access the first two episodes from the main menu, and when one ends, the other automatically starts. Commentary from the development team has been added, as well as support for Steam Workshop and various graphics updates.
"The Valve team reviewed every map to fix all the issues, refreshed content and features that were not utilized, and improved a few things," they said from Valve.
Along with the new footage of the third episode, demo versions of the game from 2000 from the SIGGRAPH computer graphics conference and two from the E3 fair from 2002 and 2003 have also been released.
For anyone who has never had the chance to play Half-Life 2, now is the right time, as the game is currently free on Steam.
