The colossal amout of work that goes into developing a game that we will never see is astonishing.

Sure, you've got your coding and all of that, but that's a topic for another post. What I mean is all of the unused, forgotten, or accidental materials that get cut before the release of the game. Like the original story of Half-Lfie 1. The story the game had in the early part of 1997 is that it's 2003, six years in the future, and you're a weapons research scientist that opens a superamplified portal drawing power from a Cold War-era nuclear warhead to an alternate universe, and when aliens come spewing out, you have to fight for your life while the other scientists, security guards, aliens, and even the friggin' CIA try to kill each other on top of you. The CIA in particular is important, since they're about to detonate some explosives in the same building as the nuclear missile from earlier that will wipe out the west half of the United States, so you have to stop them, and also free the alien slaves from their masters and command them into battle against their former owners.

Just that should have made you go "Huh" if you've never read it before.

And other than people into gaming at the time and people who have spent enough time looking for that information to know about it, like me, nobody will ever know that. It just blows me away. The page is currently still up, too, as of 3 June 2016, so you can look at it here. If it stops working, the page has been archived many times, so just pop the link into the Internet Archive and it should work.

And that's not all. In fact, the whole damned game is technically Half-Life 2 in a developmental sense - that means that at least seven Valve-made Half-Life games have ever existed. Half-Life, Half-Life 2 (1998), Half-Life Air Exchange, Half-Life Borealis Control, Half-Life 5 (2004), Half-Life 6 (2006), and Half-Life 7 (2007). That is, based on how different each version was from the last. Allow me to go off topic for a second, but there are four Valve HL games officially released, and two of them are just thirds of the same game. Suck on that "Half-Life 3 is never coming out" people, you've had it since 2006.