As part of Valve’s celebration of Half-Life 2’s 20th anniversary, the studio has announced that it will release an updated and expanded version of Half-Life 2: Raising the Bar, a superb art book that covers the development of the legendary first person shooter.
“Nearly two decades since it first went out of print, Raising the Bar is set to return with an expanded second edition—offering a comprehensive look into the creation of Half-Life 2,” Valve wrote on the official 20th anniversary webpage. “Originally published in 2004, this book captured the story of Half-Life 2’s development but missed the episodic content that followed.
“This new edition concludes the Half-Life 2 development story, with never-before-seen concept art from Episode One and Episode Two, along with ideas and experiments for the third episode that never came to be.”
I had a copy of Raising the Bar back in the day, and I remember pouring over it for hours at a time, bringing it on roadtrips, and coming back to passages again and again in the hopes of better understanding this game that had captured my imagination.
There’s a section about Half-Life 1, and I remember loving Chuck Jones’ more cartoony, lighthearted designs for the game. One of the coolest bits was a collection of side-by-side photos of the real life face models Valve used in Half-Life 2 and their in-game counterparts. Even if you’ve never read Raising the Bar yourself, a lot of the collected knowledge about Half-Life 2’s development in the fan community has come from the book, and you’ve likely come across photos or snippets from it on one of the game’s many wikis or forums.
Which is also why the prospect of the Episodes getting the same treatment is so exciting: When the new Raising the Bar comes out, we’re set to have our knowledge of their development expanded in a big way. Valve has not yet indicated when in 2025 the new Raising the Bar will be released, nor where we’ll be able to purchase it—Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and wherever books are sold would make sense, but I also wouldn’t be surprised to see Valve offer it directly through Steam in a similar way to the Steam Deck.
But if you’re craving more Half-Life development esoterica in the here and now, Valve has you covered: The studio has put out a two hour documentary about the making of Half-Life 2, as well as footage from its earliest public demo that was long thought lost.