Half-Life Brings Out the Evil

Since Half-Life's release, gamers have been in awe of the new graphics and the new gameplay options they've experience over multiplayer connections. And while normally the sales of a game tell everyone how popular a particular title is, developers can gauge popularity with the demand for illegal pirated copies of the title.

Late on Tuesday, Valve's founder Gabe Newell posted a sizable update on his company's game addressing what these pirates are up to, what Valve is doing to patch some small problems in the title, and what new multiplayer levels are in the pipeline for release.

Pirates all over the web have been trying a series of techniques to either coax legitimate buyers of Half-Life into telling pirates their CD access key numbers or attempting to impersonate WON.net employees who need the CD key numbers to help players with problems. Pirates have tried to come up with access key generators to enable the game to install and have only been mildly successful.

One of the complaints from new purchasers of Half-Life have varied from not being able to run the game after its been installed. While gamers' initial reaction was that Valve and/or Sierra had messed up and pirates had figured out how to create access keys (in essence taking keys before people got the game).

"The key generation software that was being sent around on the warez channels is pretty goofy, and never would have passed the WON authentication scrutiny, just the single player game check." Gabe said, "We've had some pirates call up Sierra product support and complain about that."

After looking into the problem, Valve discovered that many gamers had some viruses on their PCs that were corrupting the game's main executable. Gabe Newell explains, "Half-Life essentially acts as a virus checker by checking to see if the game files on your machine match those of the current version. If you have a virus on your system and it infects your Half-Life files, you won't be able to be authenticated by the authentication servers. This is much, much, much more likely to be a source of failed authentication than a pirated key."

As for new things coming up with the game, Valve will be adding four-speaker sound for gamers with Creative's FourPointSurround system - and new video drivers for nVidia's TNT and Matrox's G200 are coming up as well.