How Half Life 1 for Mac Was Canceled At the Last Minute

[ArtOfWarfare]

First thing I did after finishing Half Life 2: Episode 2 on my Mac, I looked for Half Life: Source. It's nowhere to be found (for Mac, anyways.)

I also haven't been able to find this mod, Minerva, for Mac either

http://store.steampowered.com/app/90000

 

[lpetrich]

I was disappointed also -- I remember that cancellation.

I remember once getting a Playstation 2 to play Half-Life on, and I completed the game on it, big baby and all. The controls took some getting used to, I must say.

More recently, I had a Wintendo machine that I played HL1 and HL2 on. But it's now broken, though I scavenged its disks.

I now have an Intel iMac that I run VMWare Fusion on, creating a virtual Wintendo machine. I successfully installed Steam in it and played HL1, Opposing Force, and Blue Shift on it. The 3D acceleration worked fine -- none of the software-rendering pixelation.

Has anyone else here been successful with VMWare or Parallels?

 

[huntercr]

So, valve didnt publish the game because... a sales figure? what douchebags...

No, it was the publisher, Sierra. They had set unrealistic sales goals.

Similar stories have happened to a ton of other awesome video game companies where the publishers basically killed them off because they were no longer cash cows.

EA, Activision, Sierra, etc devoured so many companies over the years.
They aren't inherently evil,just... greedy.

People don't realize how Companies like ID, Blizzard, and Valve became so powerful because they successfully got away from the choke chains of their "masters" and self published. I personally think this was only possible because of the internet.

How many amazing companies did not survive is the sad part.

 

[DesmoPilot]

So, valve didnt publish the game because... a sales figure? what douchebags...

Apple flat out lied to Sierra in a rather huge way.

 

[rufwork]

After shipping costs and actually finding retailers willing to stock it it wouldn't be worth it. Especially since they would have had to pay for patches/bug fixes for a few years.

It would have obviously cost them more than it was worth...otherwise it would have shipped (they aren't idiots you know )

That's my point. Heineman's leaving something out. It can't just be that 50k wasn't enough units, can it? How does Valve get a bigger black eye than id, who has supported the Mac (though Q3 was a debacle, apparently) for years?

Was Valve just being pissy to spite the person at Apple that promised 500k?

 

[djgamble]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPod; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_1 like Mac OS X; en-gb) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8B117 Safari/6531.22.7)

Interesting... I always had this conspiracy theory that M$ paid them not to release it for the iMac (which was hot and new at the time.) When they bought Halo this confirmed my theory at the time.

Looks like I was wrong... oh well. Another thing I can bury.

I remember wanting HL soooo much at the time because all my PC friends had it. I then played it MANY years later, and todoay still have no idea what all the hype was. We got Quake and Unreal... they both smash HL.

 

[The General]

I'd rather they give us Half Life: Source than the original. And yeah, it wouldn't need any porting if you use a Mac that is more than 12 years old. Half-Life came out in 1998. They wouldn't be able to just release what they had back then and expect anyone to be able to play it.





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[VoR]

I don't really play games any more, but I honestly don't think there's ever been a better competitive fps than the half life mod, team fortress classic.
Graphics are probably a 'bit' dated now, and the player base non existent? I think HL:source should have been released a long time ago, on any platform

 

[Hellsum]

I was lurking around for a while but now I had to register just to link that:

http://www.blackmesasource.com/

It's a Source mod (almost) made by an independent team re-making entirely Half-Life 1 with the new source engine...and since the Source engine has been ported to OSX...well... we'll have soon our Half-Life 1 with cool graphic!

enjoy

 

[baryon]

Amazing and sad story. But now that Valve is releasing everything for the Mac, why the HELL can't they dig up the almost finished code for HL1 for Mac, and just ******** release it? Apparently it requires almost no work at all, just a copy/paste!

I play an illegal hacked version of HL1 run through Crossover Games (the legal version does NOT work correctly with Crossover), and at every OS X update something changes, it ran fine until the last update, now the HUD is all weird in the game, for example. Just because it's an old game, I still think it's one of the best games in the world, and I think Valve should release it, and make it so that all the mods are also compatible with it. It would run fine with emulation, it would not need to be ported, I just want OFFICIAL support for it, that's all, because right now I have to do these crazy hacking things to get it running properly on my Mac.

 

[baryon]

I was lurking around for a while but now I had to register just to link that:

http://www.blackmesasource.com/

It's a Source mod (almost) made by an independent team re-making entirely Half-Life 1 with the new source engine...and since the Source engine has been ported to OSX...well... we'll have soon our Half-Life 1 with cool graphic!

enjoy

The Source engine has indeed been ported, but the SDK has NOT been ported to OS X just yet. This means that the Black Mesa mod will NOT support Mac unless Valve releases its OS X SDK, AND the Black Mesa team uses it to port its mod. So don't be happy just yet!

Just in case, buy Crossover Games while it's 50% discount (a few more days) by using this code: NEWVERSION.

 

[LimeiBook86]

This would have been big back in 1998. I remember when I had a Mac when I was younger I never got to play any of the PC games my friends had. No Counter-Strike, No Half-Life, etc...

I had Unreal Tournament thankfully, but it would have been huge to have a big game like Half-Life also on the Mac. Then possibly Counter-Strike would have been added as well, among a slew of other titles that used the engine. It would have been awesome to play it back then, hell I'd love a Mac OS 9 port of it now to play around with.

I think this would have maybe put a bit of a push for Mac games. The iMac either out or about to come out, Apple was becoming healthy again, and a game like Half-Life could have revived gaming for the Mac a little bit. Fast forward to today we have Half-Life 2 via Steam and thankfully more games are coming to the Mac. While it's a good start it's still recovering over years of not too much support. Let's hope that changes, I still love my Mac and I always will, but I still have my PC tower for games.

 

[elppa]

After shipping costs and actually finding retailers willing to stock it it wouldn't be worth it. Especially since they would have had to pay for patches/bug fixes for a few years.

They had retailers to stock it. And they wouldn't be required to provide patches.

It would have obviously cost them more than it was worth...otherwise it would have shipped (they aren't idiots you know )

No, to me it sounded like a decision made out of anger than a rational business decision.

Apple was really pushing OpenGL and the Mac for gaming at the time. They were looking for every avenue they could to try and recover. As such I wouldn't be surprised if the person at Apple who came up with the figure was quite high up and still there now.

 

[Sdashiki]

Wheres the insider interview about how Bungie took a big ol truckload of cash from M$ to abandon the Mac platform that created Bungie from its beginnings...

HALO for mac...what would the world be like if that happened?

 

[kingtj]

As much as that sucked for Mac gamers ....

Especially in modern times, it's commonplace. Companies pay off developers to guarantee one title or another is an "exclusive" for their platform.

The "Bungie buyout" was perhaps one of the first times it happened, especially to a former Mac developer -- but with the current crop of game consoles? It's a constant issue. They did it with Grand Theft Auto, for example, and there were plenty of leaked videos of the "Alan Wake" game running on the Playstation 3 before that got canceled and it was made an XBox exclusive.

Unlike a lot of people, I don't really fault anyone for what happened either. It's just business, and good for Bungie's people if that move made their developers more wealthy. You can't take away the great stuff they did for the Mac in the beginning, no matter what they eventually went on to do.

Wheres the insider interview about how Bungie took a big ol truckload of cash from M$ to abandon the Mac platform that created Bungie from its beginnings...

HALO for mac...what would the world be like if that happened?

 

[57004]

Amazing and sad story. But now that Valve is releasing everything for the Mac, why the HELL can't they dig up the almost finished code for HL1 for Mac, and just ******** release it? Apparently it requires almost no work at all, just a copy/paste!

As someone else already pointed out, this was 1998. Mac OS X wasn't even out yet so this was a Mac OS 9 app, and the 'Classic' environment hasn't been supported for years. Also, all the API's have changed since. This wouldn't be a case of copy/paste, it would need serious rework.

By the way, regarding the other post about Black Mesa Source, it looks really cool but check out when the last news updates were (almost 1 year ago). This project has been around for years, and as it still is slated to be done 'when it's done', it may still be many years yet before you can get your hands on it. If at all. (and yes I'm hoping with you that it will come out some day)

The best bet for now is just Half Life Source. The original wasn't any better anyway.

 

[baryon]

As someone else already pointed out, this was 1998. Mac OS X wasn't even out yet so this was a Mac OS 9 app, and the 'Classic' environment hasn't been supported for years. Also, all the API's have changed since. This wouldn't be a case of copy/paste, it would need serious rework.

By the way, regarding the other post about Black Mesa Source, it looks really cool but check out when the last news updates were (almost 1 year ago). This project has been around for years, and as it still is slated to be done 'when it's done', it may still be many years yet before you can get your hands on it. If at all. (and yes I'm hoping with you that it will come out some day)

The best bet for now is just Half Life Source. The original wasn't any better anyway.

Yeah, it wasn't OS X, true, but using Wine or Cider, Valve could port Half-Life 1 to the Mac with a single click (literally). Half-Life 1 is very old and has very little system requirements, so even through emulation it would run perfectly fine. I know Valve doesn't want to "port" anything, but this could be an exception as there is no logical reason not to do it. Also, with emulation, there would be no issues with the hundreds of mods out there, as all the DLLs the people keep mentioning would pose no problem.

I love HL1 and I have struggled a lot with Crossover to get it to work, and it's illegal and all, but the performance is 100% perfect and there are very few bugs. I would pay for the game if Steam officially released it for the Mac.

Half-Life: Source would NOT work with the mods, as the mods were not written for the Source engine. So even if they do one day decide to port HL1: Source to the Mac, it would lack the mods that make it so awesome.

I hate when companies only think of the future and don't respect their own past software.

 

[neccoloup]

The leader of the Black Mesa Source project committed suicide (after posting his suicide note on the project's website no less) so it set it back to being vapourware even though there's some developers still left working on it, supposedly.

 

[hegor]

Nice video, another footnote in the bleak world of Mac Gaming history.

 

[czeluff]

Yeah, it wasn't OS X, true, but using Wine or Cider, Valve could port Half-Life 1 to the Mac with a single click (literally)

And with about 5 clicks, you could install Windows XP/Vista/7 onto your Mac and play the thing already.

Yeesh, this incessant push for 10+ yr old games to be re-written blows my mind. Just install the OS it was written for and enjoy. In the words of Steve Jobs,

"Just install Windows. Not that big of a deal."

 

[guitarpoplin]

in my eyes this seems to hard to believe.
they said it was suppose to come out in a couple of weeks. well what if the real reason behind it all was they pulled out and apple said hey the reason we said that number is because the mac app store, if half life 1 was able to be downloaded day 1 on the mac app store then they can probably get 500,000 with people reviewing it and it being the top 10.

and besides, what kind of company passes up on making a million dollars.
think about it.
50,000 copies + $25.00 game = 1.25 mill dollar game.

they paid for the staff already so why throw it out.

 

[k995]

in my eyes this seems to hard to believe.
they said it was suppose to come out in a couple of weeks. well what if the real reason behind it all was they pulled out and apple said hey the reason we said that number is because the mac app store, if half life 1 was able to be downloaded day 1 on the mac app store then they can probably get 500,000 with people reviewing it and it being the top 10.

and besides, what kind of company passes up on making a million dollars.
think about it.
50,000 copies + $25.00 game = 1.25 mill dollar game.

they paid for the staff already so why throw it out.

ANd how many of that 1.25 millio would be for valve? retail, distributor costs and profit and the vast part of that sum is gone then deduct costs to manufacture advertisement stocking, perhaps testing, bug fixes updates, the cost to maintain different platforms

At the end valve would have lost money if they only sold 50 000 copies.

 

[0098386]

More recently, I had a Wintendo machine that I played HL1 and HL2 on. But it's now broken, though I scavenged its disks.

What on earth is a Wintendo? Modified Wii?

Wheres the insider interview about how Bungie took a big ol truckload of cash from M$ to abandon the Mac platform that created Bungie from its beginnings...

HALO for mac...what would the world be like if that happened?

Personally, I think it would have remained a cult FPS and not have helped Mac sales very much.
But you've also got to consider how much it (possibly) had changed with the switch to Xbox. It's clear that Halo is just a port now, the controls and AI were simplified, level sizes restricted to the amount of RAM the console had at the time.

 

[kingtj]

But baryon, you don't seem to understand Cider ....

You can almost *never* just port a Windows app to run in OS X with "one click" using the Cider engine. Fact is, Cider has a lot of bugs and glitches they haven't fully addressed (though over time, it gets better). Even the big companies like EA that used it wound up selling game titles that really don't run as stably/reliably as the originals did in Windows. I've played several Cider ports of Windows titles, both official (like NFS Carbon) and "unofficial/illegal" (like Civ 4 and Half Life 2). In every single case, there was enough of an overall performance hit that even on an octo-core 2.8Ghz Mac Pro tower with upgraded Radeon graphics card, they didn't feel "fluid" or even stable. I own Need for Speed Carbon for the Playstation 3,and it's a FAR better gaming experience than that Cider-ized port in OS X, which is nearly unplayable in parts of it.


And Crossover? That actually IS the Wine emulator, except a version that's a little bit outdated, with a pretty face bolted onto the front of it. So when you admit that you "really struggled" to get HL1 going properly in it, that's the same thing Valve's people would have to do, if they wanted to distribute it to run under Wine. (Contradicts you statement that it'd be doable in one click.)

Yeah, it wasn't OS X, true, but using Wine or Cider, Valve could port Half-Life 1 to the Mac with a single click (literally). Half-Life 1 is very old and has very little system requirements, so even through emulation it would run perfectly fine. I know Valve doesn't want to "port" anything, but this could be an exception as there is no logical reason not to do it. Also, with emulation, there would be no issues with the hundreds of mods out there, as all the DLLs the people keep mentioning would pose no problem.

I love HL1 and I have struggled a lot with Crossover to get it to work, and it's illegal and all, but the performance is 100% perfect and there are very few bugs. I would pay for the game if Steam officially released it for the Mac.

 

[DesmoPilot]

and besides, what kind of company passes up on making a million dollars.
think about it.
50,000 copies + $25.00 game = 1.25 mill dollar game.

they paid for the staff already so why throw it out.

To a lot of companies a Million bucks is chump change. They threw it out because they were angry at being lied to, it was the principle of the matter.