 The announcement of Half-Life Alyx raises a lot of interesting questions. Why make a new Half-Life game now? Why make a prequel to Half-Life 2 rather than the wondrous, mythical Half-Life 3 that everyone's been craving? Perhaps the biggest question of all? Why on earth did Valve decide to make Half-Life Alyx a VR exclusive? The answer is simple. They didn't. Valve didn't begin with the intention of crafting a new chapter in the Half-Life Mythos and then decide to make it exclusive to virtual reality. Instead, they set themselves the lofty goal of creating the biggest, most beautiful, most well-crafted virtual reality game of all time. The idea of setting it in the Half-Life universe came afterwards. Let's rewind a little. Many people accuse Valve of ignoring game development in favour of reaping massive profits from sales of games on Steam. This isn't entirely true. Valve has never really stopped working on developing games. They've simply been working in VR. Valve collaborated extensively with HTC to create their Vive headset, which launched in 2016. It's clear that many people at the company expected the Vive to really take off for VR to be the next big innovation in gaming. To that end, a team at Valve created what they anticipated would be a system seller, the must-have game for the Vive. The lab is a collection of experiments and experiences set deep within the bowels of Aperture Science, amid the world of portals, propulsion gel and personality spheres. Critics and players alike loved it, but Valve was a little taken aback by the feedback they received. When sales of the Vive lagged, many people said that the system still lacked its big must-have release. This confused many of the staff members at Valve, as they'd assumed the lab was this kind of title. Clearly they'd misunderstood what people wanted. VR games only go out with small audience due to the limited player base, and as such, many game studios see these titles as a potential waste of resources. You can spend a lot of time and money working on a virtual reality game, but if nobody has a headset, you won't recoup your costs. So, many VR games are made as cheaply as possible to mitigate the risks incurred by their development. This unfortunately only serves to make VR seem less appealing, as the games very obviously lack the meat that the players find in other titles. In this regard, the lab is no different. It's a series of mini-games rather than a single, sprawling narrative. A small team at Valve recognised that, unlike most VR developers, they have far more resources at their disposal. It would be possible to make a big, well-polished AAA game at Valve, and they didn't necessarily need it to turn a profit right away. So they set to work, not entirely sure of what kind of game they were going to make. A multiplayer game was out of the question. The limited install base for VR technology meant that this wouldn't be very much fun. In the end, they only really had two options. Should they make another Portal VR game, or something with Half-Life? Ultimately, Portal was ruled out. Aperture science is too full of teleportation and bouncing around and flying through the air. The team were worried it would make players feel really sick in virtual reality, and they probably had a point. So then, was it time? Were they really going to make Half-Life 3? Oh no. No, no, no, no. That was far too intimidating. They were a tiny little team, and the prospect of actually starting work on Half-Life 3 seemed terrifying. Better to do something smaller, something self-contained, something that didn't have to live up to decades of expectations. Which is not to say that the assets they were making couldn't be used for a future game, but that was beside the point. The team settled on building a prequel to Half-Life 2, telling the story of popular character Alex Vance. Initially, they created test gameplay using older art assets, and in glorious Valve tradition, they set heaps upon heaps of playtesters loose on it to see what they did. They were surprised. Players lingered in spaces a lot more than they expected. The sheer novelty of the Half-Life universe in VR left players wanting to explore every inch of the game world. It was clear that the team needed to approach Half-Life Alex with an emphasis on the game as an experience. They spent time figuring out different ways the player could interact with the world. How best could get the most out of motion controls within virtual reality? Initially, the team entertained the possibility that the game could be released on a traditional PC platform as well, with support for keyboard and mouse. The more they played around with motion controls though, the more they felt that this would water down their efforts on creating an innovative VR experience. For the sake of making Half-Life Alex the ultimate virtual reality game, they had to focus specifically on how it would play in VR. Anything else would make the gameplay novelty superfluous. As the project gained traction, more and more people joined the project. Over the course of several years, this secret endeavour grew into a major release for Valve. Now, finally, their work has been unveiled to the public. The game has been announced for release in March 2020, so you can look forward to playing it in March 2021? After all, this is Valve we're talking about. Well done. Here come the test results. You are a horrible person. That's what it says. A horrible person. We weren't even testing for that.