HALF-LIGHT

A VALVE engineer had to tell the GPU companies they were wrong

- Rich Stanton

The PC gaming icon that is Half-Life 2 turned 20 last November, and Valve pulled out all the stops to celebrate: a major new update, a commentary track and a documentary absolutely crammed with digressions about the challenge the studio set itself. And one of them was lighting. The development of Half-Life 2 was rooted in what multiple staff describe as “the tech wishlist,” which would take six years to fully realise and was absolutely foundational to what Valve wanted to achieve with the game.

“[It] was a main feature that the light felt very, very realistic and intuitive because of the Source engine and the work, the collaboration between artists and engineers,” says Half-Life 2’s lead artist Viktor Antonov, before introducing our hero. “Ken Birdwell, he was a fan about photography and getting the lighting right.”