THE SOURCE ENGINE

The beautiful tension of an engine caught between eras.

- Nat Clayton

There’s a dead end junction, late in Half-Life 2’s airboat segment, that’s fairly easy to miss. It’s nothing special to look at. A concrete run-off with a few shanty houses and a handful of zombies. But this corner, with its distant chirping of crickets and the sunset baking the panelled walls in just the right way, is special enough that I always stop by for a visit when returning to the game. It’s a corner that perfectly captures the fleeting, uniquely melancholy beauty of Valve’s Source Engine.

The Source Engine, the software that drove all of Valve’s games from Half-Life 2 through Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, came at a uniquely transitory moment in game development. It was the mid-2000s, and 3D games were starting to look pretty damn good. Ten years earlier, and games were merely suggesting spaces through blocky corridors. A decade later, and we’re looking at games that are near photorealistic.

Source bridged that gap. It’s at once the last gasp of things like bsp-based terrain, baked lighting, and the entire field of level design, and a peek at the lush, living words of games to come. Over the past ten years, developers have gotten really, bloody good at wringing spectacular landscapes out of the engine – but they’re doing so with a level editor built in 1997, using limitations laid down in 2004.