Half-Life 2 turns 20 today. That’s a meaningful milestone for the greatest first-person shooter of all time, and it’s well-worth celebrating. But as good as Half-Life 2 is on its own, it was even better when Valve paired it with four other games for its Xbox 360 and PS3 debut.
The Orange Box is one of the greatest deals in the history of gaming. It offered an unrivaled line-up of insta-classic Valve games, with Half-Life 2 standing alongside Portal and Team Fortress 2. If you wanted to see what happened to Gordon and Alyx next, you were in luck, as it also boasted both Half-Life 2: Episode 1 and 2. It was the first time 2 had been available on Xbox 360 and PS3, and for the series’ fans, that made it worth buying on its own. All these years later, it’s a damn shame that Valve never brought the Orange Box to any consoles after that.
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Valve Should Start Caring About Consoles Again
For the last decade, Valve has consistently made weird choices about consoles, and mostly just doesn’t bring its games to non-PC platforms. It’s a bizarre pattern, especially given how much Valve supported consoles until the PS4/Xbox One generation. Half-Life, Half-Life 2, Portal, Portal 2, Team Fortress 2, both Left 4 Deads — all of these games came to console. After that, Valve just stopped.
As a Half-Life: Alyx fan, I’ve spent the past four years waiting for Valve to bring it to PSVR (and, now, PSVR2) to no avail. Valve did bring Portal and Portal 2 to Switch, but there’s still no way to play either game on PS4 or PS5. Xbox benefits from its more straightforward approach to backwards compatibility here, as you can buy the 360 games digitally and play them on modern hardware. PS3’s weird architecture has always made that a challenge so, unless Valve re-releases the games on PS5 or Sony adds them to its streaming catalog, there’s no way to revisit these Valve classics.
Don’t Box The Orange Box In
Now that Half-Life 2 is turning 20, it’s time to honor that legacy and make this stone-cold classic easier to play. The anniversary isn’t the only thing that would make this good timing – there are a whole mess of leaks and datamines that point to Valve being hard at work on the next Half-Life game.
Half-Life: Alyx getting announced at the end of 2019 was a big deal, but at this point, it’s been 17 years since Half-Life 2: Episode 2, which was the last Half-Life game that a general audience was actually able to play. Alyx is great, but the best-selling VR hardware, the Quest 2, has sold 64 million fewer units than the Xbox 360, and 67.4 million fewer units than the PS3.
Alyx isn’t available on Meta Quest, but with Steam Link you can play Steam games on Quest.
Obviously, there are a ton of different VR options, and thanks to mods, players can check out Alyx with the VR aspects removed. But any way you slice it, Alyx was played by significantly fewer players than Half-Life 2 and its episodes. It got me excited about the future of Half-Life, but I was one of the few people who shelled out for a VR headset so I could play it. And, again, that was nearly five years ago. There’s a whole generation of players who haven’t seen a Half-Life game released on hardware they actually own.
If Valve doesn’t want the next Half-Life to only appeal to old-timers like me, it needs to provide an easier onramp for those players. Obviously they can play on PC, which is where the game will likely exclusively launch. But if you grew up playing games on console or mobile, deciding to invest in a PC can take a nudge. Making the Half-Life saga available on modern consoles could be that nudge.
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