I downloaded an ISO of it a while ago and played through maybe third of the game. I found it to be very playable. People always mention the long load times, but it's worth mentioning that long load times were much more common back then. (Although Half-Life on DC was even longer than usual.)
Also, I hate to be nit picky, but the blog post linked here manages to be weirdly wrong about two things and it's barely one paragraph long, lol.
Half-Life is one of the most successful video games of the early 2000s.
Ahhh, 1998. One of the best years of the early 2000s.
Half-Life was everywhere... except one notable place: Sega's Dreamcast. It has been a mystery as to what happened with a game destined to have a port on every possible platform.
Half-Life was a PC exclusive until the PS2 port in November 2001, ten months after the Dreamcast was discontinued. The PC and PS2 versions are still the only official versions to this day. Half-Life is not known for being on every platform. Was the author thinking of Doom, one of the best games of the mid 70s?
You are correct about the release year. If one were being pedantic I suppose it would be correct to say that thanks to multiplayer and mods, Half-Life was a popular PC game/engine all throughout the early 2000s. Come to thinl of it, there are probably still people playing CS 1.6 today.
That's as many as the two most recent Battlefield games have combined right now. Battlefield 2042 currently around 8,000 and Battlefield V at 6,000. I'm sure console players would boost the Battlefield numbers quite a bit, but still. That's pretty cool.
I swear I downloaded and played Half Life for the DC back when I had the machine. I think it was Blue Shift which was originally going to be on the DC first (as an exclusive?).
It was perfectly fine to play but I guess due to hardware limitations, the areas in which you played weren’t that large and loading times off the CD was quite slow.
I felt the same way. I could’ve sworn I played it on Dreamcast a few years ago, but when I asked my buddy (who’s a giant gamer) I was corrected that it never hit DC.
Why? It was just a PC on the inside with a slimmed down Windows 2000 variant as the OS. Storage concerns aside, it was probably a very straightforward port, just rip out the Steam bindings, and it probably ran pretty immediately.
No, this would make it much simpler. No translations, differing architectures, or OS bindings to struggle though. Asset and compilation tweaks, and controller bindings, and that’s a large portion of the work.