How Valve Finally Fixed a Half-Life Bug That’s Almost as Old as the Game Itself

ign.com:

A quarter century after it came out, the original Half-Life is enjoying a new lease of life after developer Valve released a surprise update. But there was more to come. In the days that followed the launch of the massive Half-Life 25th Anniversary update, Valve issued a new patch that fixed one bug that had afflicted the game for decades.

The bug occurred within a famous scene from chapter six, called Blast Pit, in which an alien tentacle crashes through a glass screen, knocks a scientist to the floor, then proceeds to drag him out of the room and into its terrifying clutches. It's a dramatic, impactful scene, but if you looked closely, you could see that the animations of the tentacle alien and the scientist were out of sync, which caused the tentacle to appear as if it was dragging the scientist away without actually touching him.

The video below shows how the scene looked before it was fixed, courtesy of X/Twitter user @VinciusMedeiro6:

what is the difference between the versions of the scene? Human body is better aligned with alien arm?..

When Half-Life’s 25th anniversary update launched November 20, fans expressed their disappointment that this long-standing bug had endured. Fans also picked up on the fact that Valve designer Dario Casali had called out the bug in a video playthrough of Half-Life published earlier in November. “We’re going to have to fix these,” Casali said in the video.

Meanwhile, the bug appears in the accompanying Half-Life: 25th Anniversary Documentary during a sequence that shows the scene working properly during an early stage of development before shifting to release gameplay footage that includes the busted animations. It’s made a little more glaring by the unfortunate voiceover from Valve