I was going to begin this article by listing all of the awards that the original Half-Life has won, but I have a word count limit on this article so let me just name one: Best Game Ever. Period.

In 1998, Valve delivered Half-Life to the world. Gordon Freeman's fight through Black Mesa and Xen was revolutionary in so many aspects: interactivity, story line, NPCs, modding and multiplayer. Did I mention multiplayer? You can't argue with the fact that there are 10 times more people playing Half-Life and its popular CounterStrike mod at any time than any other game (according to GameSpy, at this moment there are 120,276 people playing Half-Life and the next closest is Call of Duty with 12,159 players). But, after Half-Life's original release, Valve was relatively silent about a sequel until last year just before E3. They announced Half-Life 2 with a Sept 30, 2003 release date and presented their technology in closed booth demos at E3. It was huge. Amazing. Ground-breaking. The tech demo showed the physics of the game with objects that had their own mass and sound, and Gordon was sporting a gravity gun, and the graphics were leagues ahead of the others, and and and....

Valve's silence has led to a lot of questions.

And then the fit hit the shan. Half-Life 2 was delayed. And then its code was stolen by hackers. And then the sleeper Far Cry was released with amazing graphics and physics. And then Unreal Tournament 2004 with brilliant multiplayer. And Steam, Valve's new content delivery system, was/is garbage. And the hype of Half-Life 2 died. Fans were bitter. People cried and whined. People who bought ATI cards with free Half-Life 2 coupons threatened lawsuits. Through no fault of their own, ATI looked like jackasses. And strangely, Valve was again relatively silent. But this year at E3 Valve came out again with closed booth demos, two of them. We saw them both.