About

Where am I?

Welcome to our website! If it's your first time on our site, you may have no idea what it's all about, so we'll try to bring you up to speed through this page. HλLF-LIFE Project Beta is the oldest site dedicated to the unreleased or cut content of the Half-Life series on the entirety of the Russian section of the internet.

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Beta? Cut content? Old story line? What's that?

As previously stated, our site exists to discuss the content that Valve cut from the Half-Life series of games. Most of the discussion focuses on the content of the so-called “Half-Life 2 Beta”.
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Half-Life 2 Beta is an infamous build of Half-Life 2 that was stolen from Valve's internal network by hackers in 2003. You can read about this intrusion by clicking here. This content means a lot to many fans of the Half-Life series for a number of reasons. Most members are drawn to this content because of it's unique blend of discarded plot ideas, content, and features that were scrapped from the final build of the game.
In 2004, not long after Half-Life 2 hit the retail shelves, a book – named Raising the Bar – was released by Prima Games. This book contained a lot of information about the history of the game; cut locations, cut characters, cut plot devices, and hundreds of illustrations and concept art pieces produced for Half-Life 2 during it's development. 

Using these two main sources (The “Beta” of Half-Life 2 and the Raising the Bar book), we can imagine how the game must have looked like in it's various eras of development, starting from 1999 and ending in mid-2003.


Gotcha. What can I find on this site?

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You can download the Half-Life 2 beta, as well as several patches for it, mods for the beta, and loads of other beta related files.

We also have a forum, which lets you discuss the cut content of Half-Life 2, ask questions about Valve's cut content, and even get technical advice for the Beta. You can do this as soon as you have registered!

There are also a special sections on our forum for level-design, 3d modeling, and programming skills for the Source Engine. Feel free to show your work here for others to see.
The articles page contains some interesting things, such as various dialogue cut from Half-Life games, Marc Laidlaw's short stories and some other.
In the gallery page you will see screenshots, concept-art and other media of Valve's games.


How long has this site been around?

The site was founded in 2007, but the core of the site's administration was formed even earlier, in 2006. In those days it was almost impossible to find Beta content on the 'net, so our site was born!

It was intended as a site where people could always have a permanent link to the Half-Life 2 leak, and it also allowed people to discuss it's content. Initially, the site was designed with basic HTML pages, while the forum used the "Ucoz" engine. You can see how it looked down below. Following a period of technical refurbishment, the site was migrated to the “e107” engine, and the site's address was changed, too.

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Old site designs. Circa 2007-2008

The latest version of our site is designed to give the immersion of the old Steam graphic interface.

A long, long time has passed since then, and our site has gone through many periods of change. The infamous “Green titizen” meme was born out of our forums, and the English section of the forum was essentially a gulag that nobody would ever want to visit (sorry about that, by the way). We observed the creation of many mods during the lifetime of this community. The names of mods were limited to using the following keywords and combinations: Missing, Story, Old, Project, Atmosphere, Information, Concept, Dark, Lost.

There were some times when we thought that the cut content community was on it's last legs with the rest of the Half-Life community, and yet here we are; we are nonetheless alive and we continue to move on! Why? Just because!

If you have any questions, contact us via email: contact@hl2-beta.ru

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