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Half-Life 2: 20th Anniversary Documentary

Valve · 9.4M views · 2024-11-15 · 2:01:18

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Overview

Valve's two-hour documentary for Half-Life 2's 20th anniversary, with team members discussing development, nearly running out of money, being hacked, the publisher lawsuit and the birth of Steam.

On Hacker News

HN recommends it as an excellent inside look at Valve's history, its technology and the games industry of the time.

Recommended by 3 HN people across 3 months · HN mentions 2024–2025

Topics

Tech company stories & documentariesGame history & retro gamingGame programming & engines
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valvehalf-life 2steamgame developmentgame industry history

What people said

sky2224 · 2025-10 · Strong recommendation

I really enjoyed the Half Life 2: 20th Anniversary documentary. It gave a pretty neat perspective of what the games' industry was like at the time, and also made me really appreciate the technology that Valve was building. A lot of really innovative stuff came out of the creation of that game. [VIDEO]

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bejd · 2024-11 · Strong recommendation

Mentioned in the article, but the source is the excellent YouTube documentary Valve released for Half-Life 2's 20th Anniversary [0] [0] [VIDEO]

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scrlk · 2025-02 · Recommendation

RIP. For those who haven't seen it yet, he was interviewed in the HL2 20th Anniversary Documentary: [VIDEO] (intro and chapter 1 at 13:40)

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Sources

Video by Valve, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

HN summaries and labels may contain AI errors. HN dates refer to discussions, not video publication.

HN Library: HackerTube export (2026-10-31) and open-index/hacker-news. Upstream summaries and classifications may contain AI errors.

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