The Ringer-Verse - Twenty Years Ago, Modern Gaming Began With 'Halo 2' and 'Half-Life 2' | Button Mash

Episode Date: November 21, 2024

Is that Jason Concepcion's music?! Jason joins Ben to discuss the recent nominations for Game of the Year at the Game Awards (5:00) and then celebrate the 20th anniversary of one of the most momentous months in gaming history, November 2004 (17:40). Specifically, they reminisce about and analyze the legacies of two classic first-person shooters—'Halo 2' and 'Half-Life 2'—highlighting how they were made, how they improved upon their predecessors, and how they broke creative and technological boundaries in ways that changed gaming forever. Host: Ben Lindbergh Guest: Jason Concepcion Producer: Devon Renaldo Additional Production Support: Arjuna Ramgopal Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's happening? It's Todd McShay, and I'm back with a new home and a new show at the Ringer and Spotify. The McShay Show. It's a video and audio podcast coming to you year round with all my NFL draft information, big boards, mock drafts, and player movement. Plus, I'll be chatting with some of my best friends in football, including some of your favorite football analysts. During the week, we'll have episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays that'll include discussions about my player rankings, who's rising, who's falling, and who your NFL team should be keeping an eye on. Plus, we'll be reacting each week to the college football playoff polls and giving you previews and picks for each Saturday's slate. In addition, I'll have episodes on Saturday nights

with my immediate reaction to the full day in college football every week. So if you love the college game, the NFL, the draft, or all of it like me, make sure to like, follow, subscribe, and get ready for the McShay show on the ringer, Spotify, and wherever you watch or listen to podcasts. For adults with Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis symptoms, every choice matters. Tramphia offers self-injection or intravenous infusion from the start. Tramphia is administered as injections under the skin or infusions through a vein every four weeks, followed by injections under the skin every four or eight weeks. If your doctor decides that you can self-inject trumphia, proper training is required.

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Well, that's it then. Bring the ship back up to Combat Alert Alpha. I want everyone at their station. Everyone, sir? Everyone, sir. And Cortana. Let's give our old friends a warm welcome. I've already begun.

Attention to all combat personnel. Please report to your action station. Wake up, Mr. Freeman. Welcome to City 17. And also to the ringerverse, your nexus feed for all things fandom. I am Ben Lindberg, senior editor for the ringer, person suffering from a mild cold. I'm also your host here at ButtonMash, or as it's sometimes called by Spotify's automated podcast transcription tool, butmash, which would be a very different show, though who knows, maybe a better one. A wise G-man once said that the right man in the wrong place can make all the difference in the world.

So can the right podcast hosts appearing on a podcast he's not normally on, which is why I'm joined today. by an old friend, the host of X-ray Vision, six trophies, and the official podcast for Foundation and House of the Dragon, Jason, the Maister Chief, Concepcion. Like what I did there. Wonderful to be here. I love that. That was great. Thank you. It's fantastic to be here with you, Benjamin.

It really is. This is a historic crossover event, only slightly less anticipated than the dual debuts of Halo 2 and Half-Life 2. 20 years ago this month. Oh my God. It's been a while. It dates us. Has it been so long? So long.

For years, people have wondered, when would Jason, a legendary Ringer alum, guest on the Ringerverse, to reunite with the co-host of his beloved former podcasts? Well, the wait is over. Today is the day.

Dozens of you have been dreaming of, me and Jason, together again, almost seven years since the end of former Ringer Gaming podcast's achievement-oriented. RIPP. When people have asked if you'd appear on a Ring ofverse show, this is what they wanted, right?

That's exactly. This is the one. This is the one they've been clamoring for. We're so happy to give it to them. When a great podcast ends, sometimes multiple great podcasts bring up in its place. And then we all have even more excellence to listen to. But it's nice to get back together again every now and then. You know, we never officially announced that achievement oriented was ending. So I guess we can confirm that now. That's right. Much like half-like three.

Status was kind of up in the air. Yeah. But now let's end it. It's in development. It's just on hiatus. It hasn't officially been canceled, maybe. But our relationship lives on. And Jason's here because I couldn't think of anyone I wanted to talk to more about today's topic.

So I'm in my H.E.V. suit. Jason's in his Molnier assault armor. We're wielding our gravity guns and energy swords. And we are teaming up today to discuss two games that rocked our worlds, really everyone's worlds in November 2004, Halo 2 and Half-Life 2. Jason, before we get to two of the best games of 2004, let's talk briefly about the best games of 2024 because the nominations for the Game Awards were announced this week. So the six nominees for Game of the Year, drum roll please, are Astrobot, Bellatro, Black Myth, Woo. Kong, Eldon Ring, Shadow of the Nerd Tree, Final Fantasy 7 rebirth, and metaphor, Refantazio. Do you have any hot TGA takes?

I have no hot TGA takes other than, you know, I clearly this is a, this is, these nominees are a reflection of me being out of the mix. I played briefly Blackmuth Wukong. I did play Eldon Ring, Shadow of the Earth Tree. of course. Belatro, people are telling me I've got to see it, but I've never been a card person. Me neither.

Me neither. So it's a tough pick up for me. Astrobat looks absolutely charming, have not played it. You got to? I've got to. And I've never been a Final Fantasy person because it's just too much talking. Everybody's talking all the time.

We're just always talking, talking to me. And metaphor refantasio I have not played. So I feel out of the mix. on at least 50% of these games. Well, since you have played Shadow of the Urtree, there's a controversy currently about whether it should be eligible for this award. It was announced shortly before the nominations were announced.

It was announced that you could have DLC be eligible for Game of the Year. This has prompted some strong takes. Do you have a position on whether this should qualify or whether it should be banished to some separate expansion slash DLC kind of a category. I'm of two minds. Okay. My rational mind feels like this is a little bit like the bear for comedy. Yeah. We're playing fast and loose, I think, with the definitions here, and I understand why

some would be upset. The other side of my brain thinks, Elder Ring Shad of the Urtree was undisputably one of the can't miss events of the gaming calendar. Mm-hmm. And therefore, you've got to find a way to put it on there. And I think I lean towards the latter opinion. I think Eldon Ring is an event. Game soft games are an event. Shadow of the Earth Tree was absolutely a can't miss event. And it was, you know, a lot of people fell back into the game,

replayed the game because of the drop of Shadow of the Earth Tree. And so therefore, I lean towards it being. absolutely fine to include it. What are your thoughts? I am with you, and here's the thing, I'm going to blow everyone's mind here. Almost every game is downloadable content in 2024. So I don't know that we necessarily need to draw these arbitrary lines. I think the bar should be high if we're talking just some small expansion. If we're talking new skins or something, no, not game of the year. But if it's essentially a full-fledged game as Shadow of the Nerd is, we're talking a 30 plus hour game here, right? Maybe more if you want it to be. They could have

just released it as a sequel if they had done a Spider-Man Miles Morales and just said, this is a separate game, then it could have qualified that way too. So I think, yeah, if it's just kind of an add-on, if it feels tacked on, if it feels like a money grab or something, then it shouldn't qualify, but that would never be nominated anyway. So if it feels like a full-fledged game in its own right, then why not? Yeah. My other takes on this, and I don't really have a problem with any of the nominees, I think there should be more of them.

Why are we restricting ourselves to six? Jeff Keeley wants to imitate the Oscars. That's the whole point of this thing. Why don't we go to 10? There are so many video games. There are so many genres. It's hard even to do an award show for video games because who has played them all. but why not make the tent wider?

Why not make the umbrella bigger? I think Bellatro is a good start, but get more Indies in there. Let's spotlight more non-Tripple-A story-driven single-player games. Get Hell Divers 2 in there. Yes. Get echoes of wisdom. Why are we limiting ourselves here?

You know, those show up in other categories too, but I say Goody should go to 10. I completely agree with you. Where is Horizon Zero Dawn? Where is Paper Mario? Where are these other games that I think, Hell Divers is a great example of a game that absolutely took over the gaming conversation

for a solid month and a half? I mean, it was, you could not avoid the Hell Divers content on your social media platform of choice. Yes. And it absolutely deserves to be there. Not to mention that the overall licensing kind of, legal story behind hell divers was also a huge story. I think it was one of the most impactful games of the calendar year and deserves to be on there. Definitely. Let's put POW World on the game of the year,

top ten. Not necessarily, but these are games that defined the year, at least. So my other take, my other quibble just with the format really is that there's too tight a turnaround between the announcements of the nominees and the award show itself. So any game released by November 22nd is eligible, but ballots were due on November 12th, which is just one month before the show. So you talk about other award shows, Grammys, whatever. There's a longer gap between those. So we're talking today about Half-Life 2, which came out November 16, 2004. If the Game Awards had been around that year, it would have been eligible, but very few people would have been able to play it by the time ballots were due.

And I don't know whether, say, Dragon Age, the Veilgard would have been nominated anyway, but because it came out just a couple weeks before the ballot deadline and it's a big game, maybe you end up with some snubs there. So this might be because the Game Awards are sort of spawncon as much as they are an award show. It's just about selling games and advertising upcoming games. Maybe they feel like they have to hold it in December. But it just doesn't make sense to me that we're cutting off a big chunk of the year. we're making it so that coming out earlier in that year probably gives you an advantage here.

So these are more of my complaints, more so than the actual picks themselves. It's just the way this whole thing is organized. And I'm not that big an award show guy myself. I don't know. Once you've won a sports Emmy like you, then maybe you start to feel better about award shows in general. But, you know, I don't need anyone. I don't need Jeff Kui. I don't need the media to tell me what I think about games.

I am the media. That's exactly right. How dare you? I think to your point, I think a lot of this, too, in the game space in particular, and of course, award shows, I think in general our SpawnCon to a large degree, that goes all the way up to stuff like the Oscars, the Emmys, etc. That said, I also think, you know, there's a undercurrent in the game space in recent years, in which games, there's a certain embarrassment about the discourse around games.

And I think that that lends itself to a desire to just get it over with. Don't give people too much time to talk and think about games and have takes that they want to give about games because it can go left. So I think they just want to be like, okay, just hurry up. Don't think about it. What are the games? Okay. Great.

Yes. Let's move on. Yes. The prompter message at the game awards, right? Just please wrap it up, play them off, start the music. All right. Well, I think we agree here for the most part. Having kind of crapped on award shows, I will, of course, remind everyone to stay tuned

for the Button MASH Game of the Year awards podcast coming up next month. We can't wait. That's the real. That's the definitive ruling on the best games of the year. But generally, we agree. Not bad picks, but there should be more. There should be more time allowed to ruminate, to let these games marinate, and we're okay with DLC being nominated.

I don't think Shadow of the Art Tree would be my game of the year, but I'm fine with it being in the conversation. What would be your game of the year? Oh, man, it's tough. I think right now it might be Astrobot. I think I probably had the best time playing Astrobot of any game this year or possibly possibly Helldivers too. but I haven't fully weighed my options

and considered everything yet, so I don't want to spoil next month's pod. We will see. This has been another good gaming year. These nominees are great games. I don't know that we will look back at them, any of them, in 20 years, the way that we do,

the two we are reminiscing about today. So coming up on the rest of this episode, Halo 2 and Half-Life 2 talk, coming up elsewhere on the feed, The Midnight Boys, Poo-Pew! We'll be talking Gladiator 2. and drafting leading men on Friday,

followed on Saturday by the finale of Mint Vember as the junior Mintz and Jessica Clemens cover the sure-to-be-shattering end of arcane. Next week, we will be getting in the Thanksgiving mood by shouting out recent releases we're thankful for on Ringiverse Recommends. It's not too late to submit your November nominations to Ringoverst Recommends at gmail.com.

Then the Midnight Boys will provide some Thanksgiving week counter-programming by airing their complaints on a midnight grievances episode over on House the Bar, featuring Joanna Robinson and a different former co-host of Jason's. They will be diving deep into Gladiator 2 and Dune Prophecy Episode 2 and sharing their winter hype meter. On Buttmash, we'll be showing our age even more as we journey even further back in time for a PlayStation 1 30th anniversary draft early next month.

We are really getting old. And, of course, you can contact us at Ringiverse Gaming at Gmail. Mail.com. Jason, what do you and Rosie and Shea have cooking? We're going to continue to cover the NBA on six trophies as the in-season tournament begins to simmer towards its clothes in Las Vegas and X-ray Vision. We're covering the end of arcane. We're in the midst of our Gladiator Week, our swords and sandals week as we bring you back to the iconic Coliseum in Rome for Gladiator 2. Yes. The shark-infested Coliseum.

Shark invested and historians, shut up. It's absolutely fine. No one was there. There are sharks. We don't know. You don't know. Can't prove anything. You have no idea if there were sharks or there were not sharks in the Coliseum.

It's absolutely fine. Let the sharks be there. This episode is brought to you by WeatherTech. Everyone knows winter is the MVP and making a mess. You don't need Weather Tech floor liners in the summer unless you hit the beach or go camping. Then you'd want a cargo liner or a road trip go. sideways, ketchup goes rogue, ice cream drips. Yeah, you'd be pretty happy about those weather tech seat protectors. So just to be clear as the mud, you're inevitably going to step into the

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as part of a balanced diet and healthy lifestyle may help reduce the frequency of minor digestive discomfort, which includes gas, bloating, rumbling, and abdominal discomfort. The playoffs are here, and you can predict the action all the way to the finals with Fandul Predicts. Follow all the playoff dishes, swishes, wishes, and misses.

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Halo 2, Half-Life 2, Malice at the Palace. Palace, this was like a formative foundational month for the younger Jason Concepcion. You pretty much peek there. That is true. I think I did peek there. Halo 2, you know, had taken over my life, half-life 2. I had to beg, borrow, and steal a PC in order to install it. But I was equally blown away in the mouth, so the palace remains, I'll never forget my brother calling me and saying,

you have to see, come here right now, you have to see this. Yeah, there was a lot of that this month. that year, really, because 2004 was just generally one of the best years ever for video games. In fact, we did a 2004 video game draft on Button Mash back in May, but November 2004 specifically may have been the best month ever for this medium. Keep in mind that GTA San Andreas came out in late October. So when November began, we were still in San Andreas. Then the deluge started. So there were a lot of very good games. that month.

The Legend of Zelda, the Minish Cap, EverQuest 2, Need for Speed Underground 2, Jack 3, Roller Coaster Tycoon 3, Mario Power Tennis, Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines. Then the Nintendo DS launched that month, along with... Wow! Yes, Mario 64 DS.

A couple of other classics, Metroid Prime 2 and Metal Gear Solid 3. But those were just the warm-up acts. Those were the openers. Because there were three games that changed the medium forever. World of Warcraft and the two that we are focusing on today,

Halo 2 and Half-Life 2. In a few hours, one of the most eagerly awaited video games finally goes on sale. ...uparing to rewrite retail history. Video game is expected to have bigger first-day revenues than any movie has ever had an opening day at the box office.

Biggest retail launch and entertainment is free. You know, dozens of grown men and probably about three women have crawled out of their parents' basements tonight to be first in line by the new video game Halo 2. Video gamers across the country are anxiously awaiting the midnight release of a game called Halo 2. 45 minutes in counting for Halo 2 to go on sale.

The line right now is probably about 100 yards off. It is the most anticipated game in entertainment history. Where were you in life in November 2004? What were you doing when you weren't playing incredible video games? So I was a huge Halo combat evolved addict. Yes, right. It's what I was doing at that particular time, gosh, I was downloading the leaked and official videos of Halo 2 gameplay. I remember that some of the first dual-wielding videos were shown in that way.

And I was just, I was aimlessly floating through life, Ben. I was living in New York City and I was working as a waiter. And I was spending my spare time playing a lot of. video games and I mean a lot. A lot. Was this during the burrito era for the no skips fans out there? Was this when that was all going down?

This is somewhat later than the burrito era. But, you know, in the ballpark of the burrito era, you know, it was a ton of, I wasn't sure what I was doing with my life. One thing that happens for me when I'm not sure what direction I should take

is I will end up playing six to eight to 12 hours a day of video games. I was also in New York. I was, and am, a little younger than you. And I was also figuring out what I wanted to do with my life. But I didn't really have to know yet because I was just starting my senior year of high school, which was pretty much perfect because I also had a ton of time on my hands.

And I also spent much of that time playing Half-Life 2 and Hale 2, primarily the latter, just because it was such a social experience for me and my friends at that time, which we can talk about. So three years after Halo Combat evolved, Halo Combat evolved even further in Halo 2, which came out on November 9th, 2004, exactly one week later, November 16th, Half-Life 2 came out, having been in development for twice as long as Halo 2. When you have a game that's hailed as one of the greatest of all time, as Half-Life and Halo were, it's tough for a sequel to be seen as both better and more influential than the original, especially the influential part, because you can't have the sequel without the first one, yet you can arguably, debatably, defensively say that both

Halo 2 and Half-Life 2 were better, but also that their legacies are even greater. Am I tripping here? I think you can say that. I think I am saying that. I think you're absolutely right. There are things about both of these games that are best in class, I would argue to this day. Gapers who are younger than us will not understand that pre-Halo 2, if you wanted to game with a group of friends, right? And you load it into a match. At the end of that match, you were cast to the four wins.

You were like ashes in gusts of wind, flying in every direction, and you'd have to try and figure out someone would find a game, and then you'd have to send the invites, and then you can all get back together. Yes. Wake up and smell the ashes, as the teaming said. Halo 2's lobby system was, and I think is a game changer, the fact that you could with a group of friends

stay together across multiple games of a game, multiple multiplayer lobbies, not get broken apart, not have to go through the whole rigamarole, of trying to find each other. That was a quality of life improvement that you can't even, it's like going from the telephone to the cell phone.

Like it was huge. It was a really, really, really big deal. And Half-Life 2, I don't think there's been a game that I ever felt the physics more than that game. It felt like I'm in a world that I could play with everything that was here. Like that is still something

I think games are chasing, and then Half Life 2, No, 20 years ago. Yes. And not just staying together with people once you were playing with them, but often you had to be physically together, which meant that you needed. It was just an enormous production. And I know this is dating us and we're sounding like, you know, in my day, he had to walk 10 miles uphill both ways. But it kind of was like that.

Like, I remember when Halo came out. It was huge. And all my friends were into it. But in order to get everyone together, there was so much planning involved, so much equipment. You had to, I remember, like, I had, like, notebooks. I was, like, jotting down, like, who's available when? And this is not when you had, like, Google Calendar. You know, you're going around, like, are you free this day?

You're trying to get, like, eight people together or more. And you're linking up your Xboxes, which weighed a ton, by the way. Yeah. The controllers alone, my hands could hardly hold. And you had to get like a number of TVs together. You had to have a special kind of Ethernet cable or like the Xbox crosslink cable. And it was like this fleeting, almost miraculous thing. Like I could probably count on one hand the number of times when I was actually able to do that with my friends.

And on the one hand that I'm counting on, those were some of my favorite memories from that time. So like the labor involved really made it memorable. And so you remember like, you know, just eating in. entire pizzas while spending an entire day and maybe all night also just playing capture the flag or whatever and hearing from the next room over people shouting and groaning and then like switching up the teams. That was really fun, but it was so hard to do. Any kind of like land activity was just you needed so much like the minimum requirements for that were so high. And then you get to Halo 2 and it's just like I can play anytime I want with as many people.

as I want, and it's seamless, and it just works like this. Game changer, literal game changer. We've never gone back, nor would we want to. We've never gone back. And I think the other aspect of Halo 2 that I think is baked into the mystique is that there were glitches in the mechanics of the game that then became this other level of skill. skill that one could achieve if you could master these glitches.

I mean, there's the various button combos, sword cancel. Sword flying, yeah. Sword flying, the BXR, melee cancel, and then shoot that could be a one-shot kill that was very hard to pull off. But if you could pull it off, you would, I mean, you basically had like the equivalent of an unstoppable, like, killer crossover in the NBA. That added a level of scalability and skillability that just made. it feel like nothing else. And there was also, I mean, you talked about what a great gaming

calendar this was. This was also the infancy of online gaming. And so there was less, you know, now there's like a good game, a critically acclaimed game coming out on any number of, on your phone, on any number of platforms on PC, like all the time there's a new one out. I go on Steam and it's like, oh, look at this new game. That's either, you know, it's not quite ready for alpha, but it's playable and people love it. I'll try it. Then it was like, that was it. We played Halo 2 for five years straight. And there was like nothing else. You know, it was like Halo 2, Half-Life and then some Half-Life bonds. And that was it. You played Halo 2 until Halo 3 came out. It's like, okay. It was a really different world. I think, you know, one day, Ben,

your child is going to come to you and say, Dad, what was it like? What was gaming? What was the peak of gaming like? And you're going to say, in 2004, Halo 2 and Half-Life 2 came out in the same month. And you'll never understand it. And it's true. People will never understand it.

It was legitimately game-changing. Sorry, but it was game-changing. It was. And game design is iterative, obviously. Almost nothing is truly original and out of nowhere. everything borrows from and builds on something else, everything else. But I really believe that you could just draw a line through that month. And I would lump in World Warcraft, obviously, too. Oh, yeah. And make a pretty good case that modern gaming began then, that there was just a

pre-November, 04, post-November, 04 that gaming has been just unrecognizable from the before time since then, that that was just maybe the most pivotal month ever. I mean, before Warcraft, people didn't ruin their lives playing video games. That happened after War, like after Warcraft, I personally knew people who like lost jobs and failed courses. Sure. Because they were just so into Warcraft.

It was just like it was an amazing time to be a gamer. Yeah. I mean, there was EverQuest, Evercrack, right? So there was some of that. But I think the policy. of these three games, the accessibility of them. World Warwick Cup kind of built on EverQuest and was like, what if this were just more fun

and just easier and you could just get into it? I think that's what all of these games did, that it was just kind of a mainstream cultural phenomenon, or at least it was accessible to everyone. And yeah, when you talk about the glitches, those things would probably be patched out now, which in some cases is good, you know, but like there are all these things that just,

define games like Starseed Tribes, for instance, which was another trailblazing online multiplayer game. I love tribes. And there was skiing, right? Like you just kind of, and that was an accident. That was a bug, but everyone liked it and they kept it in. And maybe that would happen now, but maybe not. Maybe it would be like in a patch note that would be gone. And it's good that you can fix games post-release now.

It also maybe encourages people to ship broken games even more than they used to. but it's also like how do you decide whether to fix something, whether it actually is a bug, or whether it's a feature. And these are things that contribute to how memorable that experience was. And so I was struggling to think of just like in any medium, what is a more influential little run than that like three consecutive Tuesdays? Half-Life 2, Halo 2 World Warcraft. I don't know if we even really appreciated as hyped as we were about those games coming out, just how much things were changing.

Like people talk about September 24th, 91, when Nevermind came out and blood sugar, sex magic, and the low end theory. And they talk about June of 82, which was the sci-fi horror nirvana, not the nevermind Nirvana, the word nirvana, when you had poltergeist and Rath of Khan and ET and Blade Runner and the thing all at once, quick succession. I don't know, though, if Halo 2, Half-Life 2 and World Warcraft coming out, three consecutive of weeks can be topped or has ever been topped or will ever be topped again. One more example of the long-lasting influence, I think, of Halo 2 is it represented to me,

I think, the death of the health pack. Okay. It's particularly in multiplayer or even as single player experience, you know, we've all had the, we've all had this happen, you're playing through a level, you're getting dinged up, and now you're looking for a health pack somewhere, bandages or whatever the case. maybe. Halo 2 streamline that so that what you want to do is get out of danger. Stop taking damage and your health and shield will regenerate. It streamlined the game. It kept you in play. It added a level of anxiety and care and

a level of strategy in which you're trying to play conservative. You're thinking about team shooting and how to break people's shields so that you can get the kill. And timing out, people shield regenerations and it added a whole different level to the game that I think you see now when you, you know, look at almost every other shooter on the market, has some version of this health regeneration mechanic so that players can stay in the action and not have to go on these side quests looking for bandages or health match or whatever the case may be. Yes. And there were a lot of things these games had in common. but also a lot of ways they were very different,

not just the consoles or the systems they were on, but also aspects of the game. I think one thing that they had in common was that they really wanted to reinvent the wheel and not just give you more of the same. There was a quote from Gabe Newell to the Game Award's own Jeff Keely back in the day, why spend four years of your life building something

that isn't innovative and is basically pointless? If Half-Life 2 isn't viewed as the best PC game of all time, it's going to completely bum out most of the guys on this team. So no pressure, putting pressure on themselves. This has to be the best of all time. And it kind of is or was. It kind of met those unbelievable expectations. But one interesting thing about these games, you think,

okay, they're both masterpieces. They both did the test of time. Probably like this was the perfect realization of their creative visions and everything came to fruition. I was watching a couple documentaries this. week to prep for this podcast because Valve in just kind of a quintessentially Valve move surprise dropped a two-hour documentary with like never before seen footage from Half Life 2 episode 3 and all sorts of behind the scenes stories and everything. I watched that. I watched this Halo documentary that

was made about Halo 2 for the 10th anniversary. And one constant is that these games were kind of a mess for much of their development cycles, which is the case for pretty much all games, I guess, until a certain point when hopefully they all come together. But these games were delayed. They had like dramatically broader scopes and they had to be cut down because they realized like there's no way we can ship this thing. We can't make this work. Obviously Halo 2 has the cliffhanger ending because they just essentially lopped off

a third of the game. Like the last act of the game is just not in the game. So many compromises, so many delays. And you would think that that would be the story, like the troubled development, what went wrong. And yet I guess they set their sights so high that even though they ultimately had to lower them, they ended up with two of the greatest games ever.

But it's, I guess, heartening just given that it's almost a miracle that any video game ever comes out, that even two of the greatest ever to do it were basically like broken and had all sorts of scope creep and had to be basically reinvented on the fly. Well, I think you make a good point, which is it is common. these days to release a buggy game, somewhat buggy game, somewhat imperfect game, and look to tweak it

with DLC, with patches, and what have you. This is, I think, a common theme of the video game space over the last, I don't know, three, four years. It seems like you got particularly bad maybe in the last couple of years, you know, but I think it was something about that period of time where despite the fact that a lot of their ambitions, things they wanted to do, got narrowed, they knew that what they were going to deliver had to actually hit somehow. And another thing I think is specific to these games that is part of their greatness is there's a, everywhere there's a hook. Everywhere in these games, there's a small thing, whether it's a quality of life improvement,

whether it's a mechanical thing that is the best version of that thing or something you've never seen before, like dual wielding and the HALA 2. I had not seen it. Amazing. Swords had not seen it. Incredible. Half-life 2. Playing with physics, picking up objects in the world and throwing that and people and solving

puzzles that way. I had not seen that before. You know, like I'd not seen the kind of AI. that the enemies in Half-Life 2 had where it just felt like fire fights went on forever. I have no ammo. These fucking enemies are hunting me everywhere.

I've been fighting the same two guys for 10 minutes. I can't get rid of them. They keep hiding for me. And that experience just felt like nothing else. Like really nothing else. Yeah. Even if they weren't the first to do something, they were just the best to do it to that point.

It was just the most polished. It was just the best implemented, just across the board, just the most finely tuned. And just like, you know, part of that, of course, along with the troubled development, is that crunch, right? Just like people were chained to their desks, right? And fortunately, they don't make games, but at the time, like incredible sacrifices that people had to make to their health and to their well-being and to their personal lives to get these games out when they did.

And I was going to say, like, the fact that November was so big, because back then, the holiday season was everything, right? It was everything. Yeah. You had to get your game out, you know, not in every case, but obviously developers, publishers, they were all aiming for that October, November, December window. And there was a perception that this is going to be a failure if you don't get it out for Christmas. And you look at, like, this month, November 2024, there are some moderately big games. You've got Mario Luigi Brotherhip. Stocker 2 and Lego Horizon Adventures and Dragon Quest 3 HD2D remake and a new Microsoft Flight simulator.

Okay, but the biggest games of this year did not come out this month. We are kind of untethered from the holiday season. Back then, that was the era where it took a little less long to develop even a big budget AAA game like this. So you could put out Halo in 2001 and have Halo 2 ready to go in 2004 at great cost to your life, like well-being. But, and then you could have Halo 2 out in 2004 and have Halo 3 ready to drop in 2007. So the developmental timelines weren't as long.

And now it just takes so long. And there are so many great games that I think they've kind of just released themselves from the expectation that it has to be the holiday season. It's like it ships whenever it's ready, right? So that's another difference, just the process. Hopefully it's better in some ways. It's also just so much more demanding to make and, market games now, but it took just a toll on the people who made these games. And, you know,

they created something great, like a monument to the human suffering. It's like the pyramids or something. But like, it really, it extracted a lot and exacted a lot from the people who made these things. You're absolutely right. And I think part of that is, to your point, hitting that, hitting that mark, you know, the landscape is different now. I've been playing Sons of the Forest, which is the sequel to the Forest, a really fun kind of zombie cannibal game, survival game that is available on every platform probably for like $5 to $12, pick it up if you haven't played it. That said, Sons of the Forest, I believe, is not Alpha. I don't know when it's coming out.

I've been playing it for like a year and a half on PC. Just in like a beta form as they assemble pieces and update the thing and make it, you know, ready for, I guess, final release and escape from Tarkoff. It was another game like this. Is that game out? There was a period where everybody I knew

who was a hardcore, first person, shooter person, was playing Tarkoff and seemingly, by the way, hating it. Seeming, I never spoke to anybody who loved playing Tarkoff. But that's another game that,

is that fucking game out? Like, that game's not out. So there's this whole ability now to play. What does that mean? It comes in stages, yeah. Yeah. There's just like an ability to play games before they are, quote, unquote, finished now that has changed the landscape of the gaming experience. Yes, and not just because Valve got hacked and the source code for Half-Life 2 was released early, but like legitimately, it's out there.

So I think another big difference, I was just kind of thinking about the fact that these two games came out about a decade after Doom, right? Like less than 11 years after Doom. and think of just the leaps and bounds by which the first-person shooter or just gaming in general improved over that period. When these games came out, Doom was more recent than, say, the Last of Us is now. And it is, right? It's just such an evolutionary leap. It's just hard to even conceive of how quickly things were changing and advancing then. And, you know, Halo 2 is kind of a continuation of Halo.

it adds the multiplayer online component, but the game itself is sort of building on that same foundation, whereas Half-Life 2 is barely the same thing that Half-Life is. You know, it's like it takes place 20 years later, whereas Halo 2 picks up right after Halo left off. It's so much more expansive in the documentary. They're talking about how they had a hard time making it seem like it was even the same series. Like, how is this even still Half-Life exactly?

It's just unbelievable. like how quickly things advance from Half-Life 1, where Gordon's just this normal dude in an extraordinary situation. He's just in Black Mesa, you know, indoors most of the time. And then in Half-Life 2, he's like, he's like a Messiah or something, like taking on this intergalactic overrace in like this massive outdoor landscape. It's incredible how quickly that shifted.

Half-Life 2 was such a big boot. over Half-Life, which was itself just a boundary-breaking landmark achievement, as was Halo on consoles. At the time, it kind of felt like you never knew what was coming next. And you would just gasp when you saw these things. Yeah, the initial, like, trailer for Half-Life 2 that showed the kind of, like, dystopian city. And I remember being like, that's fake. There's no way that that's real. And then playing Half-Life, I had to, like, get an updated graphics card, install it, like, on my mom's fucking PC. Like, I had to do so much shit to play that game. But I remember thinking, like, I have never seen an NPC that looked as real as Alex.

I can't believe this. I legitimately, like, I can't believe this. And then there was, like, a moment where I realized that, like, their eyes track you? Yes. It was a revelatory moment where you just didn't, you didn't think that games could be that detailed and that good and that immersive and that NPCs could feel that lifelike and that enemies could feel that smart. And it was a game changer.

And that's before we even talk about the thriving ecosystem of mods that came up after Half-Life that was like a whole other rabbit hole to fall into. Mm-hmm. Yes, there are still games that aren't immersive in that same way from of like a voice acting perspective, an animation perspective. You know, you boot up a Bethesda game. It's still going to be more uncanny valley than Alex Vance was at the time. Yeah. And like, you know, character and story was not a strong suit of first-person shooters at the time or prior to this. And Half-Life and Halo themselves were kind of boundary breakers in that sense. You still had mute Mr. Freeman, but you had real characters, you know, Dr. Kleiner and Alex and Eli Vance and incredible voice acting, whether it's Mike Shapiro as the G-man, who, you know, even if he's essentially cigarette-smoking man in a video game, still just an absolute legend. Or Keith David as the arbiter in Halo 2. Oh, wow. I could listen to that voice all day or Merle Dandridge as Alex. Like, just unbelievable. Like, that's why.

These were full-fledged experiences in a way that, you know, they had these immersive worlds, even the original Halo, where it was like, yes, it showed that you could actually do this on a console in a more sophisticated way than Golden I did. And it didn't just have to be a corridor shooter where it's all indoors like Doom, but you could go out in this outdoor world. But then they both just broadened that so much in the sequels, especially like Half-Life 2 when you're in that like City 17 or Highway 17, the sprawling like road trip portions of the game.

It just felt so expansive and semi-open world and just every aspect of it. Like you could buy the soundtracks to these games. You know, like you would not have been buying the soundtracks to some like midi game prior to that, right? Like these were just like, Steve Vye was playing guitar on this thing, you know?

They should have gotten you to lay some licks down at that time. You weren't a band. You could have done it. I was in a band. I could have done it. Yeah. Yeah, it was truly a different kind of experience. You know, I think now destructible environments and physics type mechanics in games is very normal.

Like, that's a very normal thing. Lifting the car with the crane in Half-Life 2 and then realizing that you were going to have to, you were going to have to remember that because you were going to use that. And then discovering on the Lost Coast road trip portion that there were puzzles that you would use this gravity gun for that would teach you how to use the gravity gun by. by stacking things or pushing things or pulling things. That, I had not, it felt like a first for me. I never understood that you could do that in games

coming from an experience in which, you know, at the time it felt very normal to like look at a table in a game that had maybe a coffee cup and a book on it and just understand like you could shoot that book. It's not coming off that table. You could melee that coffee cup. It's staying there. And then you get to have a coffee cup.

Life 2 where things are flying around, grenades are going off and are blowing up boxes, you're pulling ammo towards you, you take a sawblade and cut a guy and have, like, it was, it was so incredible and it unlocked a feeling of creativity to a playthrough. Yeah. But I don't think it had existed before that. And Hyl-2 was the same kind of thing with, with all the glitches in the game, with the multiplayer aspect of the game with all the different, with the super jumps and all the different heighty holes in the different maps, it just added a level of replayability that felt

incredibly unique at the time. And I think we've become spoiled in a way where we expect as gamers a Stardue Valley level of content, you know, in every single game that comes out where a game, you expect the game to meet you exactly where you are with how you want to approach the game, how what your personal play style is, all the different clothing and looks and shaders and guns and all that stuff. And it just felt like these two games balanced unleashing the player and giving the player's structure in a way that just had not been seen before, had not been seen. Yeah. And you can watch videos of like E3 demos and people watching.

and playing and just like gasping, just not. And sometimes a trailer or a demo can lie to you and it can just be all pre-rendered. Killzone. Killzone. Killzone also came out that month, I think. But yes, exactly. Sometimes they over promise and under-deliver, but it really was like going from black and white to color or something or, you know, just even more dramatic than that, where you

had to, they really had to teach you how to play. They had to hold your hand because we didn't have. the language to know what to do. So they did have to build in all these puzzles to just hold your hand and be like, and here's how you manipulate your environment because you just assume that that can't be done. Even now, like I think in some respects we've sort of stepped back in destructible environments. I wrote about that earlier this year, you know, like the red factions and the battlefields where you could just totally drill holes and shoot rockets into everything.

I think there's a less, a little less of that these days, if anything. But Half-Life 2, it wasn't just like a tech demo either. It wasn't just like, look at the fancy things we can do. But it served a gameplay purpose. And it was just integrated into the puzzles. And if you're playing Tears of the Kingdom and you're wowed by Ultra Hand, you know, that's like that's the gravity gun more or less. I mean, more than that.

But that was the first time really that I can recall, at least something that felt that full, featured that well integrated into the game, that hyper-realistic. Yeah, I agree. There's always these moments in games, particularly previous to these, where you felt like, you felt yourself come up against the invisible wall in which the developer said, okay, but you can't do that because it'll fuck the game up. Or the invisible bush that you can't climb over.

Yeah. Yeah, Master Chief can't go onto the bridge when he's talking to the Admiral and kill everybody. I just can't do that. A half-life two, it was like a shrub. to find those things because it just felt like, oh my God, I can do this. Wow, I can do this too. Halo 2 is different in that regard in that I think some of the mistakes actually added to the flavor in a way that made that game magical.

But these two games are just epoch-changing events. And you wonder if there's anything like that now. You know, it feels like even, you know, Tears of the Kingdom took me over for a long time. Erd Tree got me back. back into, you know, that world. But there aren't games now where I'm just like, I think I can play this for a year. I think I can play this for two years.

I can think I can play this for three years. It's really, it is not an exaggeration to say that between Half-Life and Halo 2, people played those for three to five solid years. Oh, yeah. Every day. Counter-strike and Day of Defeat and just everything that came along with it. Yeah.

And, you know, people have played Fortnite for several years at this point. Sure, that's true. And Roblox, like, they're out there, obviously. But I was going to say, like, I don't know that any game has the capacity to blow my mind the way that those games did at that time. And to be clear, I think games are better than ever now. Yeah, games are better.

Yeah. I'm not saying that games were better or that I want to go back. I'm just saying the feeling that those games gave us at the time because they were such huge advancements. I think games are better now. because they built on the foundations that these classics laid down. I think there are more great games than ever before, just so much choice. But I think maybe the medium has matured to the point that I've seen too much.

I'm jaded. You know, the leaps from a console to the next console or a PS5 to a PS5 pro, it's indiscernible. I'd like to think that there is a game out there that we will see someday that will give me the feeling that these games did, where it's just I never dreamed that this could happen. This is just like a step change. This is an incremental improvement. This is something we've never seen before and we're never going back. I'd like to think that could still happen. I don't know that it can't. Do you think a game will give you the feeling that these games gave you again? I think tears of the kingdom for a month felt like that to me. And Breath of the Wilds when it came out.

And Breath of the Wild for sure, for longer in a different way because of the sheer adventure of exploration that that game gave me. Tears in the Kingdom, because it is such a massive gameplay and physical evolution from Breath of the Wild, and because it essentially runs on a calculator, and I don't understand how the engineers were able to do this

with, you know, a past its prime platform to add physics and machine building and with all the complexity that is there. The first month and a half, two months of Tears of the Kingdom, had me feeling a little bit like this month in 2004. Not quite at the same level. But Tears of the Kingdom came close.

That's the kind of thing where show me something where, I guess Roblox and Minecraft is kind of like this, although the accessibility is much higher. But the ability to build things that you just know that nobody has come up with a thing quite like this before and tiers the king of like, I was seeing people create like mech suits.

Yes. And you know, like, you know, and that fucking blew me away and continues to. to blow me away. Even some of the kiddly, like, vehicles, like bombers and stuff that I've built, I'm still like,

I can't believe that this is, that you could do this. And then you could do this on this hardware. Yes. And some of this is nostalgia speaking. I know based on where we were in our lives when we were playing this game. Like, you know, if Halo 2 equivalent

came out now, I just wouldn't be as invested in it, most likely, as I was in 2004. or when I'm in school, all my friends are playing. You know, we're in school talking about Halo all day and then we're going home and immediately playing Halo again together. Like, it's just nonstop Halo. And like, you know, it's not really any more entertaining

to tell someone about like your great multiplayer matches than it is to talk about your fantasy team or something. But like, you know, if I see some of those friends today, now, we will reminisce about specific matches that we're just like larger than life in our mind. at that time. And it was just all encompassing because of the seamless matchmaking and the clan system

and all of the choices that you have. And so where I was in life is definitely coloring my perception of these things. But I think even if I can look at it objectively or impartially to the extent that I can step back as someone who looks at the history of video games,

they really were that momentous, I think. And not just like the games themselves, but just how they change the industry the business of video games, whether it was with online multiplayer being as easy and working as well as it did on consoles, or you mentioned Steam a little while back. Steam was not really a thing pre-HalfLife 2.

It existed, but there had been very little released on it, and then suddenly you have to have Steam to play Half-Life 2. Now, that pissed people off at the time because it just seemed like some form of DRM. It's like, why do I have to be online? why do I have to activate this? Even if you bought a physical copy, you had to go and activate it on Steam.

But in retrospect, looking back, like this is the game, you know, being bundled with Counterstrike Source. Just like this was the game that set the tone and the pattern for the next 20 years in terms of how we would interact with these virtual worlds, how we would get games, how we would play them.

You can really look at then and before then and after them. and it's just an entirely different era. Steam had a lot to do with that source, the havoc physics system that we've been praising all this time. Like, that changed the industry forever. Yeah, the ability to make a great mod and have that great mod become part of the product is something that I was amazed at at the time,

and I'm still like, wow, that's incredible. Like, the fact, that Counterstrike, which has a rich and storied history all of its own as both a competitive game and as a hardcore shooter experience, is its whole other thing. And that would not exist without the moders who created it from Half-Life Day of Defeat, a wonderful World War II mod that I played so much, so much day of defeat. I thought the reload physics were incredible. I thought the Gaming physics were incredible. I thought the M1 grand is the best M1 grand

that's ever existed in a video. Ding! And those are two games that would not exist without the modding community around Half-Life 2. And I think when you add that all up, it's an incredible footprint and an incredible example of what makes gaming unique. It's a conversation in a lot of ways

between the developers and the fans and its, you know, industrialized fan service to a large degree. And when it really works, it's incredible. And Steam was ahead of its time now. You know, it's like you need the Epic Games platform to download Dead Island.

There's a million of these now. For every developer has like their version of this. But Steam was truly ahead of its time to the point now where, I mean, if you're, can you call your, a gamer if you don't have a Steam account. You're not a serious gamer. You're not really in the shit if you don't have Steam. Yeah, it's true. It changed everything. And these games are still accessible. A lot of games, even after 20 years, it's like they might as well been from the

dark ages. Like, you just can't play them, right? You can't play them on current consoles. It's a problem for preservation. These games are still highly accessible. And that's a testament to the companies that made them, but also to the communities. And yes, you can play Master Chief Collection and you can play these spruced up versions of Halo 2. And it's still fun. You could still, I think, play on an original Xbox if you drag that thing out of storage. Like it'll still, you know, servers still online. And then, yeah, you could play Half-Life 2 in all the various forms and packages in the Orange Box. And there are people working on Half-Life 2 remasters, RTFX now. It's going to just be beautiful, right? So, you know,

Are they quite as amazing if you play them for the first time now? No, because everything that's come after has built on them, and it's hard to see them with 2004 sensibilities. But they are both extremely accessible, and they've kind of kept up with the times. And that's a nice thing. If you want to check out these games, they don't necessarily look like they looked in 2004,

which, like, in my mind's eye, they're both beautiful. And then you see the original footage, and it's like, oh, man. That's why I felt about the Half-Life One. Yes. Oh, my God, this is incredible. I can't believe this. And then you jumped to Half-Life II. And you look back and you're like,

these guys were like blocks. Yes. People are walking around. Yeah. So without source, we wouldn't have so many other games, so many mods. We wouldn't have skibbitty toilet. Where would we be as a society, you know?

So it's just like incredible contribution, technologically speaking. Are there any favorite moments? that stand out in your mind. It's been a long time. I mean, like, in terms of either Half-Life II set pieces or Halo 2, like, favorite levels, favorite set pieces, favorite sequences. You know, we spent most of our time in the multiplayer, I would imagine.

So if they're favorite maps of yours where you just lived for that portion of your life. Lockout on Hero 2. Yes, lockout's the best. Small but not too small. It was non-simpearlable. was non-symmetrical in a very interesting way. Yes. It had high ground that you wanted to capture.

It had weapon spawns that you wanted to control. It had choke points that you wanted to try and cover. And it rewarded team play, four versus four team play, in a way that felt like a chess game to me, when it when you I really felt like I understood that map and I was playing with other people who also understood it who were playing in roles which we all felt like we were suited for those were my top moments in Halo 2 and I I got together with a group of players I had joined this like over 21 year old gamer community because another thing that you know while we're waxing nostalgic about 2004 in the game game space. This was also like the first time gamers got mics in en masse. And it was a fucking disaster. Huge mistake. It was not. It was a huge fucking mistake.

It was better when we were all like Gordon Freeman. Yes. You could not. In many cases mute people, not easily, certainly. And it was a fucking disaster. So I joined a community of gamers who were not doing. be engaging in toxic dialogue and that era and in particular finding players who were good and knew how to play and wanted to play lockout amongst other maps. That changed the game for me. And I just so many memories of playing lockout and holding sniper on tower and trying to snipe guys as they came up the ramp and trying to make the jump from the middle ground

to the top tower. all these things under pressure, under fire, calling out, that was the other thing. It was like the teamwork on lockout that was necessary to play well. Unlocked a whole kind of video game experience that honestly I'm still chasing in multiplayer. Like, you know, I'm still looking for that kind of feeling of a team playing really well together. And that's hard to find. But that those nights on lockout were. they were the best.

They were unreal. And what your level was, it really mattered at the time for bragging rights. 37. That much of a competitive. A natural 37. It mattered to me. Even though I'm not that much of a competitive multiplayer guy, at that time, I really wanted to rise in my rankings. Like, I wanted the better flare.

I cared about all those things because I was just spending so much time in the game. So, yeah, lockout, midship, sands of bar. You know, like coagulation, upgraded blood gulch, right? Like, it's hard to beat blood gulch and hang them high. And those games you remember from the maps you remember from Halo. But oh, my goodness, yes. And as miraculous as it was, it did open up these Pandora's boxes where it's like, oh, this is great.

We can all talk to each other and we won't be face to face. Uh-oh. Maybe there will be some unintended consequences of that we're still reckoning with to this day. Or even something like that. like Steam and the immediate backlash to that, which is like, I bought this game. I own this thing. Like, why do I need Steam? You know, if Steam disables this, do I not, can I not play it anymore? Like, that is an ongoing discussion now where we're getting laws about like, what if they turn the servers off, you know? Like, what does it mean to actually own a video game and software

and to possess something when we just stream and download everything? So again, this was like, you know, that's why I think of this as kind of the beginning of. of modern gaming for better and for worse. So those Halo 2 maps, those are probably the highlights for me. Like, you know, the game itself, obviously even though it was curtailed, the campaign was great. You know, there were people who didn't want to play, like, as the arbiter, you know, just I want to be Master Chief. Like, this is a distraction. This is sort of a side quest.

I liked that, though I liked, you know, all the like the Gravemind stuff, the Delta Halo Master Chief with the ODST, NPCs, like incredible stuff. In Half-Life 2, I think Ravenholm, that one level that was just sort of a showcase for all of the, it was like right after you got the gravity gun. Yeah, the horror, the horror section. The horror, yes, with Father Gregory and everything.

Yeah. And you know, I'm a coward when it comes to games, but that level was just like so unnerving and unsettling, but also just such a sandbox, like such a playground for, I'm out of ammo, but I can pick up this sawblade and I can just shoot it through these guys. I don't need weapons anymore. And then the Highway 17 road trip

with Colonel Odessa cubbage. Oh, yeah, awesome. They had to build it so that if you were on the buggy or the boat, you could just zip through those levels, but also you could get off at any time and explore if you wanted. And they just tucked in all these little secrets and stuff that was there for you if you wanted to play that way. So it really rewarded exploration as opposed to just,

the moment-to-moment gameplay being great. What about the aftermath of these games, not just in terms of the legacy, but I mean the franchises themselves, Halo and Half-Life. Notoriously, we are still waiting for Half-Life 3. So, you know, we got episode one, we got episode two.

We are still in a state of cliffhanging. We're still dangling off the end there to find out what happens to Alex and Gordon and Dog and the universe. frankly, but Half-Life hasn't missed, right? Like, whenever there has been a Half-Life game, it has been defining of the medium to that point, whether it was Half-Life or Half-Life 2 or Half-Life Alex,

which was that but for VR, essentially. And of course, Valve has gone on to do a lot of other great things as well. Would you rather have that where it's just like, yeah, we're still waiting, but the reputation is just unspoiled, you know? Like, they have never failed to do anything but put out one of the greatest games of all time. Or would you rather have Halo where we've had a pretty steady supply. And Halo 3, incredible game, right? Like, you know, built on everything.

And it's all right. Yeah. Just met the extremely high expectations, as did Halo 2, if not even more so. But then, you know, the subsequent games, there have been a lot of good ones, but not genre, medium-defining ones. Bungy leaves Microsoft. to make destiny, 343 takes over. I like a lot of the subsequent halos.

I enjoyed infinite, but they haven't hit the heights. They haven't had the legs. Kind of a crappy TV adaptation, you know? It's like, I'll still be hyped for the next halo, but it's not quite the same. Which would you prefer? I think I probably would prefer,

but not by a lot. the Valve Half-Life 2 version, where you've got something that is a masterpiece, an unblemished masterpiece from a company that you trust completely will only put something out when it's great. I think that's easy to do when you've created this entire sideline through Steam that has become essentially the business. I would prefer that. I would prefer that. I like, you know, like I like ODST, I like Reach, I think, Firefight Mode predicted a lot of the kind of gameplay modes that we have now and it's kind of like for Hell Divers kind of co-op, bullet sponge type of gameplay. But those are like, you know, little diamonds on a rusted shell. I think everything else has been a little disappointing in the Halo universe, sadly. The Ultimate Edition or whatever they call it.

I forget what they call it. Master Chief Collection is great. Master Chief Collection is great, but it was buggy in it at first. I enjoyed Destiny immensely, but you feel like that's where a lot of the creative impetus went, you know, after the split. And I think I would prefer, I prefer the Valve, the Half-Life, the Half-Life version a little bit. What about you? I guess I'm with you, especially because the doors, closed someday, someday.

Someday, it's going to happen. We might have halfway three. It has to happen someday. So, yeah, the quality over quantity approach, especially because, you know, Valve has put out a bunch of great that portal, portal two, and left for dead, left for dead to steam deck on and on, right? And, you know, they almost went out of business while they were making Half Life 2 because they've got lawsuits going with Sierra, their publisher, and Vivendi, their parent company,

like they had to finish that thing to like put food on the table. Now they're rolling in it because of steam. And I don't know whether that like takes the edge off a little bit. But when they put something out, it is still really great. Right. And they still have that capacity. They still have that in them. One other thing I meant to mention is that I think this really was the moment when gaming

kind of crossed over. Now, you know, I don't want to exaggerate. There had been Pac-Man and the arcade craze. There had been Mario, you know, Nintendo kids. Like this was a big. deal before this point. But Halo 2, the marketing muscle and budget that went into that thing, just the hype, the way that, you know, people were talking about the sales and the units, and it's the most any entertainment product has ever made, and it's more than any movie has

ever made. This, I feel like, was when we kind of hit the big time. And, you know, maybe there's still that sort of younger sibling syndrome with gaming where you feel like you have to earn the respect of the snooty, you know, cultural gatekeepers. But that was the moment where it was like, this is as big a business as anything. And people lining up around the block to get these games or World Warcraft too, when that went mainstream and broke out and you had celebrities openly discussing their embrace of this game, right? That's when it became not going to say cool, but at least like much more just accepted.

Yeah, of course, you're playing video games because that's something people do, right? Like this, this was the moment, I think, when the medium just ascended from a revenue perspective, but also in kind of a cultural penetration sense. I think you're absolutely right. I mean, this is the first time you're really seeing commercials on television. Yes, yes. For video games that had the actual in-game footage in the ad, not just a recreation, not a live, reenactment, not some kind of narrated thing, but the actual game video. And that was a, that was a sea change. You didn't see video games advertised on television before this.

And man, I remember seeing the Halo 2 television commercial like before Christmas 2004. Yes. And being like, yeah, let's go. I love it. Yes. And it's a big deal, huge deal. Mm-hmm. It was.

Yeah. And I think, you know, like the soundtrack had a lot to do with that, obviously, just the all-time banger of Halo 2 just as soon as you hear that, it gets you going. And, you know, by the way, like there was e-sports before this and Starcraft and everything. But majorly gaming, MLG, I think that was the first time, at least in the U.S., that a game was televised Halo 2, right? And, you know, that's still kind of making Enroids. It hasn't completely crossed over.

But that was a milestone, too, where from a competitive standpoint, Halo 2, not just casually for all of us, but professionally, and in a way that, you know, like, it would be on USA Network or whatever the heck it was on. Like, it was just kind of a... It was on you. Gilbert Arenas, NBA star Gilbert Arinas had his own team. Yeah. It really did feel like a cultural moment where it was no longer the reserve of weirdos and nerds and

Dungeons and Dragons type characters lurking in the mall, arcade, or by their, you know, PC. It was big business. Yes. And it was treated that way with the kind of not necessarily gravitas, but with the economic gravitas that comes with something being truly big business. Yeah. And that was new. Even if you didn't get it, even if you didn't partake, you had to respect it.

You had to be like, okay, I see you. You make a lot of money. So at least in that sense, and kind of a capitalistic sense, I respect what you're doing here. People actually care about this stuff. Well, I'm glad that I could have you here to discuss this incredible cultural moment. We could probably spend almost as much time talking about World of Warcraft as we did Hale 2 and Half Life 2. Oh, man. Out of respect for Valve, we won't discuss a third game on this episode. That's a third rail for them. Jason, I love you. I miss you. Maybe we will meet on Mike again someday.

Perhaps. Let's say you'll return to the ring reverse before Half-Life-3 comes out. Can we agree on that? Yes, it will do. Certainly before the release of Half-Life 3. Although, knowing Valve, will we know when Half-Life 3 comes out, or will it just surprise drop one day and we'll all be taken by surprise? I think that's what will happen.

It will just come out with little to no fanfare. The entire source code will leak just as Half-Life 2. did. Thanks to Devin Ronaldo for producing today's episode and to our Juno-Remical pal for his senior podcast management. Stay tuned to the Ringiverse and House of Our and, for that matter, X-ray vision for coverage of Gladiator 2, Arcane, Dune Prophecy, and more. But MASH will be back in a couple weeks.

Send your questions and comments to Ringiversegaming at gmail.com and your November nominations for Ringervverse Recommends to Ringervors Recommends at Gmail.com. We aren't ending this episode on a cliffhanger, but it still feels like there's only one way we can end it. So will you be my scene partner here for a little? Absolutely. All right, here we go. This is Spartan 117.

Can anyone read me? Over. Isolate that signal. Master Chief, by telling me what you're doing on that ship? Sir, finishing this podcast. Rather than offer you the illusion of free choice, I will take the liberty of choosing for you if and when your time comes round again.

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