A new pre-gold build of Half-Life has just been released

Half-Life was initially released in November 1998 and has shaped the games industry as we know it in many ways. While it’s been extensively remastered by fans and has dozens of mods or side stories to play, there was still a version no one could access. That is, until now.

LambdaGeneration, one of the largest Valve game communities, recently announced that a pre-gold build of Half-Life is finally available for anyone to download and play. The build is from October 1998, which is just a month before the full game’s actual launch. Fans are incredibly excited about the release because, while it’s likely very close to the final build everyone got on release day, there could be subtle, hidden changes that are always fun discoveries when looking back at older titles like this.

The flying scientist is back

You can download this pre-gold version of Half-Life from the official Archive.org page and try it out for yourself. The page has many useful tips for getting the game to run, which will definitely be needed if you’re trying to play on a modern PC.

This build is technically what you’d call a beta build. It’s from a point in development before the game went gold, which is when the developer is happy with the code and can have it printed onto discs and shipped.

As such, it might contain bugs, glitches, and a few features that you can’t find in the final game, including that one that took Valve 25 years to fix. This could include different skins for enemies, entire rooms, or items that have been left in place for testing before being removed for the final build.

Some elements of game development were very different in 1998. For example, it wasn’t uncommon for a game’s final code to have to be hand-delivered to manufacturers or publishers. Despite there only being a month between this build and the final version of Half-Life, many changes could lie in the code, and it’ll be exciting to see what hardcore fans dig up.

There are also many versions of Half-Life and the other games in the series that you’ve likely never heard of. One of the rarest is Half-Life: Uplink, which was a demo distributed with magazines ahead of the game’s release. I think this just goes to show that no matter how many versions of a game you own and how much you research it, there’s always something new to discover.

At a time when Half-Life: Alyx is the latest game in the series, and we’re all gagging for Half-Life 3, this is a welcome new release. Even if it’s yet another version of the first game. I first played Half-Life on PS2, but I remember the game’s PC launch and the various big box releases you could get. Given their price now, I wish I’d bought them.