Now You Can Play Half-Life 2 in a Web Browser

Half-Life 2 is one of the greatest videogames in history, a technological tour de force at the time of its release in 2004. Today? You can run it for free in a web browser thanks to two enthusiasts and three months of work.

“Half-Life 2 is now playable in your browser,” writes slqnt, a main creator of the port, who describes themselves as a high school student. “Porting a game this popular and big was something I had never done before, but it helped me learn a lot of new things.”

This web port of Half-Life 2 is impressive and fairly complete, at least on desktop web browsers. It looks, sounds, and plays just like you remember it, with only one notable exception: Facial animations, which slqnt notes was one of the game’s most revolutionary features at its release, are disabled for stability reasons. There are some glitches, course, and it doesn’t support a controller, so you’ll need to summon those WASD and mouse/touchpad skills.

I also got the game to work in Safari on my iPad Pro, too, but touchpad navigation is difficult to impossible.

You can find the Half-Life 2 web port here. The developer says that ports of Half-Life 2 Episode One and Half-Life 2 Episode Two are coming soon. And if you still don’t own this game for some reason, the original PC version is on sale for just $1.99 on Steam as part of its summer sale. (The Orange Box is just $3.99, and the complete Half-Life bundle is only $5.34.)