Half-Life 2: What is 'The Thing'?

Rainy day video. Today, I look at the enigmatic 2004 Half-Life 2 maps known only as "The Thing."

[unoriginalperson]

Someone should and *can* remake "The Thing" now that everyone has 50 PhDs in the source engine

[LucaTheStar]

2:14 This transition is 100% flawless and I love it.

[indigodotradio]

It only goes to show the dedication of the Source Engine community that someone was able to make a fairly well made (for the time) campaign for a leaked version of Half Life 2. Quite impressive.

[MrGunzngirlz]

It reminds me of the early HL:A campaigns, made before any tools were available.

Very charming.

[AShift-iong]

Half-Life Inside actually used to have early community-written documentation and tutorials of HL2 beta tools, but they wiped them after game's release due to being "obsolete", so Donald had somewhere to learn from.

[JackBradley]

The thing felt like such a surreal experience first time. I don't even know how to explain it, it just doesn't feel right, I mean that in the best way possible. I also love the entire aesthetic of "The thing". And I feel like the mediocre lighting job really makes it feel more eerie. That's also something I love in older games, when the lighting and textures aren't super great but that adds to the charm of those old games like Cry of Fear and F.E.A.R. Great video Richter!

[Sournale]

I’ve been fascinated by half life 2 beta for so long I thought I knew most of the things about it, turns out there is still more to learn behind the development of a game almost 2 decades ago.

[Chumtoad_JPEG]

I am so glad somebody Covered this mod. I really want more people to play this mod and was sad that no youtubers have covered it to give it its much needed recognition.

[MarikoRawralton]

I wish there was enough content online to warrant someone talking about the cancelled "Prospero" game Valve was working on before Half-Life in 1997.
It was a really weird early platformer, supposedly heavily influenced by the story "The Aleph" by Jorge Luis Borges, centered around something like a large library in open space with passage ways that lead to vastly different worlds. From the few screenshots I've seen online, the camera looked a lot like the thirdperson camera used in Source engine.
Gabe Newell once stated his most influential game was Super Mario 64, so I'd imagine the game was probably attempting to imitate the way paintings revealed the worlds inside, much like the Aleph in Borges's revealed all places in the world at once.
Fun fact: Two tracks in Half Life 1 are theorized to have been taken from Prospero's development because they have a different prefix from any other songs in the game.

[scrithen]

Dawg that cut from getting hit by a tub thrown by a zombie to the next scene is one of the best cuts ive ever scene

[TemplarBlonic]

2:15 That was a seamless transition. Nicely done!

[DudeTheNinja]

I was gonna jokingly say "The Thing is the Jellow Ant" but in terms of the actual map pack it really is a jellow ant.

Honestly this is impressive for something made with buggy unfinished tools that were never meant to exist on a version of HL2 that wasn't meant to exist. If I had the motivation or incentive I'd consider maybe remaking this, would be a fun challenge to replicate the gameplay with the modern Source Engine.

[JangoFb]

Seeing someone make a "The Thing: Remaster" with modern HL2:E1 and E2 assets, with modernized beta assets that aren't buggy or broken in general would be really cool. Maybe even some additions to the campaign of The Thing to spruce it up some

[inkmime]

I kind of love the, as you said, extremely dream-like feel the whole thing has. The level design is absolute steam of consciousness I love it.

[ecksdee]

I’m not a big half-life fan, but the knowledge that someone scraped together a (relatively) competent level before the entire game came out, is just really cool
(also the fact you can just kill the rebels is pretty funny)

[FishMannsk]

It's not true that there was no info. There was. I was creating it by my self :D

And basucally HL: Inside was the one of the fewest sites there this kind of information was.

We put a lot of work by that time to make it possible and because in Russia it was simplier to get and use this stolen builds (they was selling this copy in regular PC shops) there was no competition for us. And there was no official information so everything that we learned was related to some reverse engieneering. And because a lot of us was having an experience of modding for Half-Life 1 by the time - it wasn't that hard to learn how all this stuff worked. But still It was very interesting. Becasue we were pioneers.

I still have some documents with tutorials that I made, but most of them I believe was lost, becase we had a fight with my sister and she deleted all of my files from the computer to take a revenge to me. So all I have is some files from backup's that I've made. But some of the articles are still exist at source-inside site.

Ufortunately cant provide any links. YouTube keep deleting my comment because of this.

Anyway I've cheked some of my files on my disk and the last article that I made using Beta version for this site was created at 27 of May 2004, just couple months before the release xD

I was even making my own project by that time. Which was very ambitious and it was called "Operation Broken Arrow: Seven Hour War". I think there's still our web site exist with some screenshots. The mod was suppose to be a prequel for the game and the place of action was Russia xD I mean I started to make a prequel even before HL2 was released. I was something around 19-20 years old by the time :D Man I was so stupid ahahah xD

I don't remember this map that you showing and its author tbh, and because the community was very small - probably I knew this guy but it was so long ago so I don't remember already.

Yeah. It was great times. Now Im 36 and Im working at professional game industry :D

[hyperthetical]

imagine finding out someone made a mod for your game that you havent even released yet

[maxwell]

The Thing movie is based on a book called The Thing.

But I love The Thing map. It's interesting!

[dohvaakhindemo]

0:42 When that robot voice said 16 I had to rewind to make sure I wasn’t hearing wrong

[ElephantsDoingCrack]

Amazing video Richter! I didn't think the video would come out today