A quarter century after it came out, the original Half-Life is enjoying a new lease of life after developer Valve released a surprise update. But there was more to come. In the days that followed the launch of the massive Half-Life 25th Anniversary update, Valve issued a new patch that fixed one bug that had afflicted the game for decades.
The bug occurred within a famous scene from chapter six, called Blast Pit, in which an alien tentacle crashes through a glass screen, knocks a scientist to the floor, then proceeds to drag him out of the room and into its terrifying clutches. It's a dramatic, impactful scene, but if you looked closely, you could see that the animations of the tentacle alien and the scientist were out of sync, which caused the tentacle to appear as if it was dragging the scientist away without actually touching him.
The video below shows how the scene looked before it was fixed, courtesy of X/Twitter user @VinciusMedeiro6:
what is the difference between the versions of the scene? Human body is better aligned with alien arm?..
— Bruno Gelb (@bruno_gelb) November 23, 2023
When Half-Life’s 25th anniversary update launched November 20, fans expressed their disappointment that this long-standing bug had endured. Fans also picked up on the fact that Valve designer Dario Casali had called out the bug in a video playthrough of Half-Life published earlier in November. “We’re going to have to fix these,” Casali said in the video.
Meanwhile, the bug appears in the accompanying Half-Life: 25th Anniversary Documentary during a sequence that shows the scene working properly during an early stage of development before shifting to release gameplay footage that includes the busted animations. It’s made a little more glaring by the unfortunate voiceover from Valve developers who big-up the animation work as the bug is inadvertently shown to the viewer.
Fans thought that was that. But then this week, Valve issued a further update to Half-Life that finally squished the pesky bug. "Fixed timing for the sequence where a tentacle grabs a scientist in Blast Pit," the patch notes said.
In a social media post, Valve programmer Ben Burbank explained the situation. Valve had wanted to fix the bug for the 25th anniversary update, but “other stuff took priority pre-ship”, Burbank said.
“It's not a systemic bug and seems to largely be isolated to this cutscene (largely because it's the only cutscene that seems to depend heavily on syncing a bunch of animations and also has a part in the middle where an actor navigates through space before playing an animation.”
Valve had three options: attempt a code fix, change the animations that play, or change the map so the timing works. Valve chost the last one. “If we fixed the sequence so that the scientist timing worked out, a player could still stand in the doorway and shoot the scientist, interrupting the sequence, and then he would play his animation in an insane way,” Burbank said. “So we wanted to change how the sequence was triggered to be uninterruptible.
“That said, recompiling the map was creating a bunch of changes in the resulting binary space partitioning (remember, these maps were last compiled on a Windows 95/98 computer). Any bsp difference could cause minor but annoying pathing and collision bugs. Didn't want that.
“Hence, I just hex edited the map. Triggering the animation on the door opening (some community mods did this with decompiled or recompiled versions of the maps) instead of when the player walks through the door ensures the player can't shoot the scientist before things start syncing. The sequence is slightly different but plays more closely to what the alpha maps ran when this was authored.”
Here's how the famous Half-Life scene now looks, again courtesy of X/Twitter user @VinciusMedeiro6:
Valve has finally fixed this scene in today's Half-Life update pic.twitter.com/IDgnieZOVU
— Vinícius Medeiros (@VinciusMedeiro6) November 23, 2023
It’s cool to see Valve fuss over bugs in a 25-year-old video game, but then this is Half-Life we’re talking about, and the bug in question was showcased in a documentary about its development. You can understand the developers wanting to stamp it out, even if it passed most Half-Life players by.
Danny O’Dwyer, director and editor of the Half-Life: 25th Anniversary Documentary, provided some additional context on this Half-Life bug. It seems the animations lined up as intended when Half-Life came out in 1998, but a post-launch update broke them.
O’Dwyer told IGN the tentacle scene ran into trouble at some stage over Half-Life’s time on Steam, although it’s hard to pin down exactly when all these years later. “Back in the day the animations were in lockstep, but something happened over the years that caused them to get out of sync,” O’Dwyer said. In his social media posts, Valve’s Burbank said those who had a Half-Life launch day CD and played the game on computers running at least Windows 2000 or newer would experience the bug.
“I was only working on the documentary side on the Anniversary celebration but I know from talking to some of the team working on the new content and updates that they were trying to fix as many bugs as possible,” O’Dwyer continued.
“I let them know about a few we'd come across during filming and gameplay capture. Stuff like the exploding barrels at the start of Surface Tension that no longer shot into the sky like they did at retail — Dario Casali pointed that out during an interview.
“Fast forward to when the documentary comes out and we had a part of it where the de-synched tentacle was front and centre. Most of the folks at Valve didn't see the documentary until it went live and I heard that it was bugging them that they hadn’t fixed that tentacle yet.
“A few days later the patch was pushed with the tentacle fix. It's just amazing to realize that they jumped back in the code to fix such a small element of a 25-year-old game. The whole thing is just hilarious. I was playing Half Life: Deathmatch on my Steam Deck over the weekend, smiling at how outrageous this whole update was. It was a great way to celebrate a game that means so much to so many people.”
Players, too, are celebrating Valve’s follow-up patch. “The Blast Pit tentacle animation has been fixed. This is not a drill,” wrote redditor Rampage470 to the Half-Life community. “November 22, 2023: the most important date in human history,” said knb128pl, perhaps getting a little carried away. “Somebody at Valve is super geeked about Half-Life right now. I wonder what else they might work on?” pondered Left4DayZ1.
We’ll leave this here: Half-Life 2 turns 25 in just six years.
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
