Page 14: The Sweater Falls Apart

The post-E3 celebration at Valve was short-lived. With Newell hell-bent on shipping the game on September 30, there wasn't time to celebrate or take a vacation. But it might have been a good time for a reality check. Even though Newell kept talking about the September 30 release, the team knew there was no way the game could make that date. No one, however, had the heart to tell Gabe. "In retrospect I could tell things were off with the schedule when I came back from E3," Newell admits. "I'd sit in meetings and when I'd talk about September 30 the rest of the team would just start looking at the ceiling."

But at the time Newell didn't pick up on the signals. He just kept talking about how exciting it would be to ship the game on September 30. "I'd say we needed to get the localization going for the dialogue to meet the September date," he recalls. "But the dialogue wasn't done so we couldn't start that." Slowly Newell began to realize that something was wrong. "We hadn't put a bunch of items on the list that needed to be there--and the items on the list were taking longer than expected," he says. Newell felt backed into a corner: He had been so absolute in setting the September 30 date that he felt an obligation to deliver the game as promised. When he finally realized the game was unlikely to make the date he called a meeting with the team. "We all sat around and said, 'OK, what the hell do we do?'" Birdwell remembers.

FacePoser, the tool used to create the animated sequences, still wasn’t working well in the summer of 2003.

One option considered was to drastically cut the size and scope of the game. "We looked at the game and said, 'OK, if we cut this in half can we ship it in time?'" Birdwell says. If Valve took that path it would mean cutting the most difficult--and potentially memorable--scenes out of the game. Since vehicles weren't working yet, the Jet Ski levels would have to be cut. The dramatic scenes would also have to be scaled back because they were still too hard to animate. "So we went back to Gabe and said, 'OK, here's what we can do to meet your date or a date close to it: We can cut all this stuff and ship a game that's half of what it's supposed to be,'" Birdwell says.

Not surprisingly, Newell told the team that they shouldn't compromise the game design to meet a release date. And that's when reality set in: The game wasn't going to ship on September 30. "There wasn't one big moment where we said, 'S***! We're going to miss September 30," Newell says. "It was more like slowly pulling the thread of a sweater until eventually the whole thing falls apart." Newell now admits that by July it was "pretty obvious" the game wasn't going to ship in September. But Valve kept the change of plans quiet. No one outside the company knew the game was going to miss its widely publicized release date.

Except maybe the executives at Vivendi Universal Games. On July 29, 2003, Vivendi informed retailers that Half-Life 2's release date had been moved from September 30 to "holidays 2003." The fans on the Internet hit the roof. Had Half-Life 2 really been delayed? One webmaster e-mailed Newell for confirmation. He received a response that has now become legendary among Half-Life fans: "First time I've heard of this," Newell wrote. The fans read that response as Newell confirming the game was still on for September 30.

In the summer of 2003 the fans didn’t know if Half-Life 2 was really coming on September 30 or not.

In August, Valve continued to confirm the September 30 release date in a very public and direct fashion. On August 24, Valve said that the "release date's unchanged" and went so far as to confirm the game would come out worldwide on September 30. Perhaps the most telling comment, however, came on August 27, when Valve's Greg Coomer told a journalist at the ECTS trade show in London that, "It'll be tight, but Half-Life 2 is still on for a September 30 ship."

The fans began preparing for the gold announcement in early September. They started discussing what they would do on September 30. Would they take the day off from school? Call in sick to work? For months everyone had been anticipating the September 30 date. And while rumors kept swirling that the game wouldn't ship on time, Valve insisted it was right on schedule. Even as late as September 18, a Half-Life fan visited Valve and asked Newell about the September 30 release date. The fan must have been skeptical--wouldn't the game have to be in duplication by now to ship in only 12 days? Newell looked the fan square in the eyes and still wouldn't confirm the delay. But he hedged for the first time. "We'll see," he said.