25 years later, this Half-Life scientist finally bites it as Gabe intended
Half-Life celebrated its 25th anniversary last Sunday, and Valve laid out a buffet of Lambda-shaped treats to mark the occasion. The company added new multiplayer maps to the game, released an hour-long documentary delving into its design, and fixed a few of its most resilient bugs. But there's one bug that escaped Valve's digital butterfly net, one that, weirdly enough, is actually seen in the 25th anniversary documentary. Now, it's been fixed.
The bug appears in the Half-Life's «Blast Pit» chapter, which sees Gordon Freeman trying to dislodge a trio of alien tentacles from a rocket-engine testing silo. During the chapter's opening, there's a famous sequence where a tentacle smashes through the protective glass of the silo's control room, slams a scientist against the back wall, then drags them screaming back through the window to a grisly demise. But as you canclearly see in the documentary, the animations don't quite line up, and the scientist sort-of floats through the window underneath the tentacle.
Hardly a huge problem, but nonetheless an unsightly glitch in one of Half-Life's most iconic scenes, one that's been present in the game for 25 years. Since appearing in the documentary, however, the issue has been resolved, as shown in this video posted on not-Twitter by user Vinícius Medeiros.
Understandably, there was some speculation as to whether there was a causal link between the bug's appearance in the documentary and its resolution. Noclip's Danny o'Dwyer, who worked with Valve to create the doc, quote-tweeted Vinícius saying «me putting the broken version of this in the doc may be somewhat responsible. Sorry Valve engineers!»
However! As noted by o' Dwyer in a follow-up tweet, it appears that fixing the bug was
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