Half-Life 2 turned out to be more ambitious than we thought, only some of the more striking content was cut. The recent 20th Anniversary Update has added new developer commentaries to the game. Through this, the developers revealed that one of Half-Life 2‘s cut content involved a plane crashing into a high-rise building before the 9/11 tragedy happened in the US.
Valve’s level designer for Half-Life 2, David Riller, was the one who mentioned this massive edit to the game. He was one of the old devs Valve brought out again to provide some of the developer commentary for the recent Half-Life 2 update.
“I remember we were really ambitious at the beginning. I remember we designed, what, four cities at one point? Prague, Jerusalem, Chicago, Los Angeles, I believe. We had an Arctic base, an underwater base, an icebreaker ship, an airplane sequence that crashed into a high rise, which we cut right after 9/11.
We had several Combine bases in the Wasteland, we had the Air Exchange, which is where they were taking the atmosphere from Earth, we had a train depot, and so on,” recalled David Riller.
Based on the developer’s commentary, Half-Life 2 definitely could have been bigger. For those who can recall, the game mainly had one city, which was City 17. Players typically spend half the game within this city. Half-Life 2’s scope pre-release was also bigger and involved more real-world locations.
Valve even planned additional cities, such as City 40 and City 49 with different themes and landscapes. Apparently, it was a result of their “sophomore anxiety”. Many of them felt like they needed Half-Life 2 to surpass Half-Life.
9/11 Also Affected Half-Life 2
It also appears that Half-Life 2 was already in good shape three years before its 2004 release. The plane sequence was in the game already before the 9/11 incident which took place in September 2001. Of course, for obvious reasons, the plane crash sequence was sheared out of the game.
This cut content officially adds Half-Life 2 to the long list of games and movies that had to edit out content that resembled the 9/11 incident. It’s just that Half-Life 2‘s plane sequence was a little too identical.
In any case, Half-Life 2 devs eventually chose to snip out even more ambitious content after Gabe Newell (Valve’s President) kept asking about an update. It seems most of the bold and daring material that was trimmed would’ve made Half-Life 2‘s Orwellian focus a bit disjointed or too action-oriented.
For more details about the developer commentary, here’s a 2-hour compilation:
