The port team was part of EA Bright Light. That team also did Hasbro Family Game Night, among other things. At the time, they were on the third floor of Onslow House in Guildford, with the Harry Potter team. Criterion were (still are?) on the second floor. Three of my housemates worked in Bright Light, I was downstairs in Criterion.

This comparison of 3 different versions is really fun to see. Can we expect a Doom 3 one in the near future?

Half Life 2 actually has a lot of LODs, especially for meshes that are reused a lot, they were just very hard to notice. For example, the trash can has around 6 on PC. They were much more incremental than anyone would bother to do today, and the way they were stored on disk was really chaotic, parts of lowres LODs would be used to reassemble the high LODs as a form of compression. You literally can't just directly load the highest LOD, you have to reassemble it by working your way up the LOD chain.

My first experience of Half-Life 2 was on Xbox, I remember buying the Official Xbox Magazine as a kid which had a special on Half-Life 2 with an awesome cover (I still have it). Then a few years later I saw the game at Comet for like £2 and I asked my dad to buy it for me and he did. What an amazing experience, it made me love games in a different way. Years later I built a PC and replayed it. This game has a special place in my heart for sure.

Dude I love these retro time capsule episodes you guys do! It's amazing to see how far we've come and looking back. Some games still hold up, Half-Life 2 is one of them! More please!

honestly the water section of the game is one of my favorite parts it was so relaxing to be traversing over all that water collecting items etc. the sunset was so nice to look at even when you start going through the tunnels and have to solve that lil puzzle to get the items out of the basket. so good.. alright well... I guess I'm playing the game over tonight

I know people love breakdowns and testing of new games' performances but this kind of thing is your all's best content. Great video!

Its a shame you guys didn't touch upon the audio differences between game versions. The Xbox version ironically has the best audio despite lowest sampling due to its built in hardware audio processing. Dr. Breen's speeches in the trainstation and square sound absolutely amazing and really give you a felling of being in a huge room, with the audio echoing. The apartment sections also have phenomenal audio, as loud noises can be heard from flowing through the small hallways. I really wished someone would find a way to force or emulate these audio effects onto the PC version. The PS3 version also has some distorted voice lines (take a listen to Gman's initial speech lmao)

My first sustained experience of HL2 was the XBox version, and, while I recognised it wasn't running as smoothly as it did on my friends' PCs, I was really stoked to be able to play it at all.

This is absolutely my favorite Digital Foundry video thats > 30 min in length, the discussions and the game are both very enjoyable. You three should make more content like this!

It looks like their process of lowering the polygon count is similar to the "decimate" tool in Blender. You essentially move a slider and it starts to combine vertices together.

I was a PS2 and GCN owner when I saw the 2003 E3 demo for Half-Life 2. It blew my mind so much that I bought an Xbox just to play it (my family did not have a PC other than an old iMac) Little did I know I'd be playing it at like 15 FPS but I still loved it.

the fact they managed to put this on the og xbox is pretty crazy when you consider hl2 was pretty impressive when it came out.

My first time playing this was actually on the original Xbox. It was amazing to me back then. I later watched my friend's dad play it on PC and after Garry's Mod came out, I had to get one and join Steam myself! I'm excited to watch this.

Half Life 2 recently had a complete VR conversion mod and it's absolutely awesome! PLays like a native VR game and it even has full steam worskhop support for mods.

You've inspired me to fire up Orange Box on my Series X. Such a timeless, classic game. I love the introduction to the city, the bleak Eastern European design. I also love the two vehicle sections in the game, exploring off the beaten track, every nook and cranny of the map had a story to tell. It's funny that Valve disliked the PS3 so much around the time of Orange Box, yet were happy to release Portal 2 on Sony's console and give everyone a free Steam code. I wonder how much money Sony slipped Gabe for that change of heart ;)

In an alternate universe Gordon, Barney, and Kleiner are all playing Digital Foundry 2.

That quote from Gabe is hilarious considering how a few years later they were very buddy buddy with Sony for the release of Portal 2. I mean if you bought the PS3 version of the game, you got a free copy of the Steam version.

I'm a janitor at a school and after hours I'll place lettuce heads in random lockers so the next day there is lettuce in a locker

man i really love Retro time capsule videos we need more time capsule videos I've watched all of the time capsule videos again and again and i know its really hard and time consuming to make these type of videos so thank you Alex and DF team really appreciate this :)

I had this on a 7800GT. Some of the best game experiences of my life. Half Life 2 and its associated online games gave so much.

Hearing the joy of you guys exploring this one is making me want to play it all over again.

Never stop doing these kind of video's guys! Amazing stuff.

What a damn bone-chilling intro. Fantastic game, cant believe it's been almost 20 years...

I love these videos and I love these three guys! It’s like meeting up with old friends :) Thanks guys

This video fills me with joy because the OG Xbox "slideshow" version was the first time I played HL2, it blew my mind even in its choppy state, and by the end of 2005 you could play Doom 3, HL2 and Halo 2 all on the same system! the OG Xbox was a great console for sure :D

A Xbox 360 version running on Series X at 2160p comparison would have been fun too!

Portal 2 source engine on PS3 and orange box PS3 is such a big jump in performance its insane. It's clear the PS3 version only uses the single cpu core and the RSX for all its rendering. No SPU's even touched

You should do a comparison between the different versions of Resident Evil 4, there are significant diferences between GC and PS2.

Back then I had a P4 2.8GHz/HT with 512MB of RDRAM and a Radeon 9800pro ... ran great!

I absolutely love these videos guys, keep em coming!

One strong memory of playing this in November of 2004 was having my first experience with motion sickness from an FPS game. Water Hazard with what would have been high settings on my PC back then couldn't maintain the smooth framerate when it went from the tunnel to the first open area. Ended up with some nausea and slight headache until I figured out to lower details.

These comparisons are very interesting to see how far tech has come. Thanks for putting this together guys.

You guys are awesome! I was grinning when Rich needed explanation about the blue ball reference :) I am jealous of how you guys make a living but also happy to see you guys doing what you love. Keep in coming Digital Foundry.

Thank you for this bit of retro video. You guys make these clips very much fun to watch. Sorry Rich had a hard time with the PS3 version. One point to consider is that any OG Xbox was probably hooked up to a standard tube TV of the day. And this might have looked really good on a tube TV with its 480i NTSC output. One other thing to note regarding the PS3 version vs the Xbox 360 version: the PS3 did not have DD5.1 Live which the 360 version did have. The only way to get surround from the PS3 version was to set it to 5.1 PCM or 7.1 PCM which was only possible through HDMI and not every receiver had that. Many surround receivers still had only an optical input or a coax input for digital surround, and so not having that DD5.1 was kinda sucky. Whoever ported the game either completely missed this important audio feature, or didn't know how to make it work. Anyway, more vids like this please 🙂

As someone who was there when HL2 released, I’m amazed and delighted that it remains relevant this far into the future.

Early on in this video you quoted the system requirements for HL2; but you took the ones from the steam page, not from the back of the box! The steam page is for when the games got updated with the Orange Box engine and brought up to spec for that; but the original system requirements were a 1.2ghz Pentium 3 and 256MB of RAM! The original Xbox being able to squeeze the entire game onto 64MB of ram is really impressive but the performance gap between 1.0 HL2 and the orange box HL2 is pretty immense and is worth stating.

This video is so trippy to me, I'm so happy and thankful you guys made this. I first played Half-Life 2 on PC when it first came out and played the hell out of it. Years later I only had an Xbox and wanted to replay HL2 so I played that version of the game and boy the differences were wild. It never occurred to me *why* the changes needed to be made because I didn't know what I do now. Thank you.

I’m loving these videos!! More of this type of content.

Just installed it after ages and playing it on my 4k set with dldsr and it still holds up considering it's suchhhh an old game. An absolute classic

I really want to see Half Life 2 on Nintendo Switch now. I think it could probably run close to a locked 60 at 720p at least.

"If people are still watching" - I watched it all the way to the end! These laid-back "just hanging out and playing" type videos are some of my favorite DF content!

I love this! Good banter, fascinating comparisons, comfortable vibes, it's just nice!

These are awesome!! Honestly, I'm a huge nerd for these kind of time capsules of redesigning games to run better on weaker hardware that was prevalent at the time, I feel like you could make an entire channel dedicated to looking at ports like this, the PS2/Dreamcast Half-life 1 ports, the Xbox Counter-Strike ports, etc... PSP ports of PS2/PS3 games would also be amazing for that purpose, like the PSP port of Star Wars Battlefront 2!

Amazing video. Please have more Rich in future episodes, he's hilarious to me.

I love these vids with all you commenting and exploring at the same time.

Keep doing the time capsule videos, they're great! Binging all the retro pc vids.

"Look: There's a representation of the frame time graph of the PS3 here" really got me

Was playing The Orange Box on Series X a couple months ago and was really impressed with how good it looked.

Love you guys, keep making contents like this!

1:03:20 You can actually attach to ladders in HL2 by simply facing them and then pressing E: when you do this, you can climb them but cannot fall off or leave them until you press E again. You can also use the ladders the old fashioned "run up or down and try not to fall off" way as well.

I first played this game on the Xbox, and was amazed at how it just seemed like the system was hanging on for dear life while running it. I loved it for what it was and knew that, one day, I'd be playing a much better version on the next gen consoles. Of course, I got a PS3, so...

My first experience with HL2 was on the OG XBox. I loved every second of it.

Great vid!! So much work has been put into making this xbox conversion, really awesome stuff. 1 thing I always wondered about hl2: if memory serves, in the early trailers it haD dynamic lightmaps for effects like gunshot flashes illuminating the environmental textures. In the final game only some objects like boxes would get lit, but not the walls or ground textures for example. I wonder why those were cut

These videos are amazing. I'd definitely like more of these.

These are my favourite DF videos. Great work as always.

This is a delightful episode! A load of insightful information, a bit of nostalgia and a bit of laughs. It was a pleasant, even calming, experience for me

More videos of the three of you playing games together please, these videos rock :)

"Leon doesn't know how to enter or exit houses properly." - digital foundry

This game is the reason why I explore every corner of every game I play. The game that started it all

Still playing HL2 in 3d nvidia vision with 3 screens, and still looks fantastic. There is an upgraded graphics version on Steam available from a 3rd party developer.

This video is comedy gold! Please do more of these in the future.

guys I so love your videos like these one because every time it feels like I'm hanging with my friends in early 00's with a new game

The Xbox demo disc for Half-Life2 was my first experience with this game. I played through the entire thing in one weekend when my Dad rented the game for me from Blockbuster, lol! 3 years later my grandpa bought me a gaming Acer laptop and I was finally able to run the game at max settings, 60 fps. Regardless, I must say, the Xbox version was a phenomenal port.

Just think… the OG Xbox ran doom 3 also.. Such a good machine.

so interesting that yall post this just when I downloaded them all yesterday to play the Cinematic mod in 4k hahaha

These are my favorite videos you do!

Loved that “Gabe was right” at the very end. 😂 Awesome playthrough guys, I thoroughly enjoyed watching this as HL2 is one of my favourite games of all times

Ok but why not xbox 360 on the orange box?

You guys ever notice how the PS3 version of Orange Box HL2 had weird audio pitching errors?

Awesome video! One of my all time favourite games,and one of the quirkiest ports I ever owned! Just fascinating how this was able to run on OG Xbox.

I've played the whole Orange Box collection on ps3 and had a great time. It was considered a terrible port, and it had obvious issues like audio glitches throughout. Still, it was perfectly playable and the games are excellent. It's maybe not ideal, but it wasn't nearly as bad as people who never played it made it seem.

I died at John’s mention of ‘Xbox exclusive loading screens’ 🤣 Love this content, keep up the great work team!

Love your passion guys. 1 hour of content on almost 20 years old game.

Love these videos! I'd really like to see older PC games that have different APIs compared. See if the glide version looks different then the metal version and what have you

Another great video to watch for today!

OG Xbox Port is nothing less than phenomenal considering the hardware...

11:22: I’d have to imagine the missing door on Xbox is to prevent a scenario where the player is looking through both that door and the door to outside, potentially rendering more geometry than the poor old Box could render.

Loved this! Don't remember whether I had this at launch, on my old Athlon XP 1800+, or only got it after upgrading to the E6600 as featured here, but damn, that really was an exciting time to be into this shit. The physics alone was a revelation.

Awesome seeing you guys cover the og xbox version finally. Do you think you'll cover Riddick Escape from Butcher Bay on og xbox? I remember one of you offhand mentioning the dynamic res system in that game a while ago...

Fun fact: One of main game designers who worked on "Half-life 2" is of Bulgarian origin, this is why there are so many references to typical Bulgarian stuff in the game, such like the tall concrete buildings in the first stage taking inspiration from those found in Sofia, the capital city of Bulgaria; the hills populated with plenty of steep old houses next to the river (a reference to Veliko Tarnovo, the old capital city of Bulgaria, and the Yantra river), the red "Petrol" logo seen at the 19:00 minute (an actual Bulgarian oil company whose old logo was exactly the same at the time), etc.

I loved my ps3, its what got me buying the ps4 - originally I was an xbox user, OG and then 360 but that died on me.... red ring , microsoft pissed me about so I ended up getting the ps3 - had some great, great games and was blown away compared to how things looked on the 360. Might have been a nightmare for the developers, but from what I remember, the games were fab.

this is such a great idea for a video, you guys are G's

Mkre of these videos , I think this could be a new series for the channel. Really enjoy them.

This has been the most interesting retro time capsule video to date because of the platforms you picked. It's absolutely amazing what they achieved on the Xbox given its meager specifications, and the PS3 version is fascinatingly bad, but the Orange Box engine upgrades are fascinating to see in comparison to the original PC version. Kudos!

The original Xbox version is a masterpiece of porting.

Great content guys!

I have been asking for this for years, thank you.

Not really a fair comparison to put the OG Xbox against the PS3 when generationally it's rival was the PS2. Just shows what a masterpiece the OG Xbox port was

Fences blocking you from going over a few steps is because they likely removed something you would only see removed if you walked a few steps over - to save on memory.

wikipedia says EA Bright Light (formerly EA UK) ported it. the source is an old news article with Doug Lombardi explaining the delay of the ps3 version. he directly says EA UK was handling the port.

Original xbox version was played on a CRT by most people like myself. I played it on a 32 inch 4:3 with component cables. It made games like that look so much better than modern flat panels

These are my favorite DF videos for sure.

I love this. My first play through of hl2 was on the og Xbox. It’s really neat to see it compared to other versions, I remember being really impressed with it back in the day 😂

I love these Time Capsule episodes. Chronicles of Riddick or Starcraft 64 vs the PC port.

Interesting video! Now I will wait for the rumored Switch port of this game and see how that hold (or doesn't hold) up! Given how good the portal port was; you would think it would be a good one.

This was a treat. Thanks, guys!

I've been waiting so long for that doom 3 video

One of my fav FPS games of all time!!!!! great DF!

Man I’m really enjoying these time capsule vs console videos