Original Half-Life is Free This Weekend to Celebrate 25th Anniversary

Valve has issued a 25th Anniversary Update for the original Half-Life alongside a new hour-long documentary celebrating the game. As part of the celebration, Half-Life is available for free this weekend and the entire franchise is on sale with deep price cuts on Steam.

(Note: Sorry I’m late to the party on this one: I flew home on Friday and spent all day Saturday moving, so it’s been a bit busy.)

“We launched Half-Life on November 19th, 1998,” a news post to Valve’s Steam explains. “We are very proud of what we built back then and we remain extremely grateful for the community of players who have been enjoying it ever since. The game hasn’t received as much attention in recent years as many other titles in our catalog, so we thought this milestone was a great opportunity to spruce up the player experience and add some fun new ways to play the game.”

Valve has a rich history of ignoring the millions of people who are still Half-Life fans, so this sudden turnaround is all the more poignant: This new version of the OG game has been “restored, augmented, and revitalized” with updated graphics settings that help it make sense on today’s PCs and support for controllers, Steam Deck, and Steam Networking.

There’s also a ton of new content, including that hour-long documentary, four new multiplayer maps, three older multiplayer maps that were in the “Half-Life: Further Data” CD, original main menu artwork, some early prototype player models from the alpha builds of the game, the original Half-Life demo, the original Valve Intro video, and a lot more.

As noted, the OG game is available for free this weekend and all of the other games in the franchise are on deep sale discounts. For example, you can grab Half-Life 2 for just $0.99, Half-Life 2 Episode 1 for $0.79, Half-Life 2 Episode 2 for $0.79, and Half-Life: Alyx for $20.39. Half-Life 2 Opposing Force, Blue Shift, and Deathmatch are all $0.69 each, and the Half-Life Complete bundle, which includes all the older (non-Alyx) games plus Half-Life 1: Source, is just $6.55.

You can learn more about the Half-Life 25th Anniversary Update on the Half-Life website. But be sure to check out the sale first.