GameSpot's The Final Hours of Half-Life

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HEAT.NET

Part 1 - Introduction
Part 2 - The Microsoft
Millionaires
Part 3 - The Valve
Difference
Part 4 - Reassembling
the Pieces
Part 5 - Squashing the
Final Bug

Part 5 - Squashing the Final Bug
"Personal hygiene is at an all-time low," warns John Guthrie, standing in the hall at Valve late in the evening. For the members of Valve, priorities lie elsewhere. The sounds of multiplayer matches resonate through the halls, but once again, Mike Harrington's office is silent. He's still working on solving the last few bugs, along with Yahn Bernier, Valve's software development engineer and former patent attorney.

Engineer Yahn Bernier works to solve the final bug in Half-Life.
Standing in the hallway outside Harrington's office, his wife Monica jokes that she had to work at Valve so she'd have a chance to see her husband. In his office, the wonderful view of the Lake Washington out the window has morphed into a deep, black hole. Harrington probably wishes that his monitor was black too - that would mean he was done coding. Not quite yet.

Harrington, taking a break from programming, turns around and stares at his white board detailing the "Days to Ship."
Harrington now has a beard, which has slowly developed over the week as he's worked nonstop on finishing the game. On the wall opposite the windows, there's a white board that lists "Days to Ship." They're all marked off. Valve was supposed to be done the game on Monday. It's now Thursday, and the pressure on Harrington to finish is enormous.

Meanwhile, the rest of the team waits and tries to adjust to its new-found freedom. "Gabe urged us to say our good-byes to Half-Life and prepare to see our baby go out into the world," explains Marc Laidlaw.

The white board in Harrington's office lists "Days To Ship"
"People who had been working 24 hour days were suddenly sitting about hollow-eyed and wondering what to do with themselves."

It's ironic, but true. While a few programmers such as Harrington and Bernier worked away on the final lines of code, the rest of the company didn't have much to do. The art had been rendered, the sound effects recorded, the levels designed, and the manual finalized. Physically exhausted and emotionally spent, all they could do now is wait and wait for the last elusive bug to be squashed.

Level designer John Guthrie and animator Steve Theodore discuss some of their favorite levels in the game.
Finally, the Valve team finds the error in the game that has been preventing multiplayer games from functioning correctly. It's a one-line fix - so simple, yet so elusive. A new "release candidate" CD is quickly burned and sent off for final tests. As Newell explains, "[There's] a 48-hour cooling off process where everybody makes sure you haven't done anything silly, like forgotten a file."

Valve thinks it's done. As Marc Laidlaw put it, "People were escorted to that strange, half-remembered place called home to reacquaint themselves with something known as their life (or in some cases, their wife)."

Aaron Stackpole lifts a new computer into the testing ring to make sure Half-Life plays on a wide array of machines.
Gabe Newell sits in his office and remembers his last game of multiplayer. "I was sitting here testing multiplayer, and I was thinking, 'Damn, this is really cool!'" he says. "At the end of other projects, I'm usually more neutral about them when they go out the door, with an acute awareness of everything you'd like to have added. [I don't feel like that] with Half-Life."

Gabe Newell fondly recalls a multiplayer game he had the previous night.
Most of the other Valve members go home and test out the multiplayer support over the Internet. They all wait as Sierra's test department checks over the game to make sure it's ready to go to a factory where hundreds of thousands of CDs will be replicated and shipped to stores in time for Thanksgiving.

They wait.

Chuck Jones and Steve Theodore read an e-mail declaring that Half-Life has been approved for production.
On Saturday, November 7th, the fateful e-mail comes down the pipeline: the release candidate has been approved for replication. Half-Life is done. "We were all in a state of shock [when we got the e-mail]," says Laidlaw.

Now, the Valve team would reassemble once more in the office to celebrate the game and officially declare it gold. And they'd finally lay into that piñata.