The Only Way To Play The Original Half-Life Is In 4:3
This fall I'm replaying the entire Half-Life series. I'm not sure why: it just feels like the right season for it. Maybe it's all the orange. But I wondered: which version of the original Half-Life should I play? There's Valve-blessed fan remake Black Mesa, which is very good, but not really the same game. There's Half-Life: Source, which improves a lot, but strays a little too far from the original for my tastes. So I settled on the OG release, with no HD models or other enhancements. I wanted to play Half-Life exactly as it was when it launched in 1998.
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I'm glad to report that it's still great. It's not just a game people remember as being a classic: it straight-up is. Gordon Freeman's battle through Black Mesa, fighting grenade-slinging marines and weird aliens, is every bit as thrilling as it was almost 25 years ago. The game's deft mix of first-person shooting, hazardous environmental puzzling, and hands-off storytelling feels remarkably fresh in 2022. But I wanted to take things a step further than simply playing the original version of the game—which, incidentally, is still on Steam and works without any headaches on Windows 11. Valve has always been good at preservation.
Out of habit, I immediately set the resolution to 3840x2160 and started playing the game in 4K. But it felt wrong. Not only was the UI (which won't scale without replacing a bunch of files) stupidly tiny, but it's clear this game was never intended to be played at such a high resolution. When Valve's artists designed Black Mesa, they didn't think people would be looking at it on a fancy 32-inch UHD monitor. They probably didn't even think people would still be playing it at all in 2022. So I
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