For all of its many faults, 2020 has at least one thing going for it: We’ve seen more of Valve’s Half-Life franchise in the last two months than in the 13 years before combined. It started in late March when the studio released Half-Life: Alyx, the first new entry in the series since 2007, and continues this month with a behind-the-scenes look at Ravenholm. Half-Life diehards will know Ravenholm as the unreleased Half-Life spin-off developer Arkane Studios was working on before releasing Dishonored. Thanks to a new documentary from Noclip that details the studio’s history, we finally get to see the game in action. We learn that the story of Ravenholm started with System Shock and Thief: The Dark Project designer Warren Spector. Partway through the mid-aughts, Spector’s Junction Point studio, which went on to work on Epic Mickey, was working on a prototype for a new Half-Life 2 episode. Notably, the prototype included a weapon called the “magnet gun,” which Spector said allowed for “really freeform” gameplay. At some point, Valve gave the reins of the project over to Arkane. It’s there that the game started to take shape.
