Their work is almost immortal, their games timeless. In Valve's world, time takes on a different meaning. It looks fantastic after all this time, and it's the oldest entry of the lot. Entire essays have been written about Half-Life 2, so I won't bore you with more, but I dare you not to be delighted by the electric pop of your pistol the first time you depress the trigger, and the jangle of static as a Combine guard slumps to the floor. Dipping back in, what's remarkable is how little the component parts have aged. (That figure today is almost certainly much higher). The idea of new, gleaming titles housed inside that box is a complete anomaly.Īnomaly or not, The Orange Box sailed into Christmas and by 2008 had sold a reported 3 million copies. But the other half of the world seemed deeply confused, and understandably so." Lombardi points out that, even today, compilations are traditionally aimed at hobbyist collectors: you find a bunch of old games stitched together, or an old game re-released in subpar fashion. We heard things like 'we must be crazy to offer all that content in one box' and 'the best value in gaming'. "About half the world got it right away, be they on console or PC. Still, hindsight is 20-20 and there was no way of telling whether an odd orange box with cover art depicting a bespectacled scientist and a gun-toting meathead would make a lick of sense. The latter will always be remembered as a stopgap between better products, but this value-for-money deal was shaping up nicely. It blew the dust off 2004's Half-Life 2, gave it a polish, and set it down in the package alongside Half-Life 2: Episode One. Those issues were resolved by having the other two games in the same box."
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Portal seemed like an entirely new kind of creature, one that challenged us to figure out how to convince players to buy a comedy wrapped inside a first-person puzzle game - and the length of Portal varied tremendously depending on if you were wired to 'think with portals' or not. Team Fortress 2 had no single player component, and Episode 2 had no multiplayer.
As such an AAA title at that time needed to have 10 hours of single player content, a multiplayer component, etc. Games were still $50 and sold primarily at retail.
"The Orange Box made sense in terms of 'rounding out the offer' for what was a different games market in 2007. Lombardi explains Valve's thinking at the time, and why it was a product that covered the proverbial bases. "The idea started to gain traction and the three teams, in effect, became one." "Instead of trying to decide which game should go first and thereby setting an arbitrary priority of shipping one over another, the idea of shipping all three together was raised," Lombardi notes. "It would be awesome to say we planned The Orange Box all along," Doug Lombardi tells me, "but it was really more of a creative solution to having three really different products ship at the same time." By 2007, Valve was working on Half-Life 2: Episode 2, the continuation of Gordon's saga, Team Fortress 2, a multiplayer shooter and Portal, a complete unknown.
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Valve serves the PC too, for it is October 18 - a day of celebration - and everyone should feast. Besides a brief dalliance with the original Xbox and the PlayStation 2 - which produce pale imitations of its best work - Valve has remained faithful to the PC.Īnd then, in a flash, five of them arrive at once neatly packaged morsels for a new generation reared on Microsoft's sophomore console. For years they have been starved of Valve's delicious, full-bodied courses, forced to watch from the bleachers as Valve mixes a unique blend of kinetic first-person with extraordinary tech.
Console owners tap their fingers in barely contained impatience.
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