

The gun is particularly weedy, and the human enemies really sound like Mr T. A slower, less panicky version of the game that was released. It might be Gabe! It has the ugliest UI you've ever seen, and everything just feels slightly off. This is the developer walkthrough, recorded as as demo file. There's dreadful animation and broken bits aplenty. Some of it is laughable, with possibly the most bug-eyed NPC to ever appear in a game, and a demonstration of a high-poly model that looks a bit like a robot that's going to wet himself. Some of it is genuinely impressive for the time: the coloured lighting, the flocking mechanics, the glass effects. The first video is a walkthrough of the tech. It includes the tech demo, walkthroughs, and a multiplayer map. The result is it works! Work it! It's the Half-Life Alpha v 0.52 from September 4, 1997, about a year before the game was released. A CD image of the game has been posted there and the people got to work getting it to work. This was made possible by the hive-mind of Reddit. We clearly have the better universe, but if you want a glimpse into the world that could have been, then I have videos of the original Half-Life alpha for you. Games For Windows Live is the main digital distribution channel. Valve and Steam are no more, and SiN is the game we all remember fondly. The first difference between universes is that the 1997 alpha wasn't improved. Somewhere in the multiverse there's a universe where that version of Half-Life was released.

It wasn't very good, and Valve took the decision to rewrite most of the game. Way back in time, when the world was in 8-bit and we all paid for our cholera gruel with children's teeth, Valve were working on Half-Life.
