The Power of Valve armed with Half-Life.

At this year's VGAs, industry-gem Reggie Fills-Aime gave a grand speech making it plain that video games are now the most prevalent, profitable, and important form of entertainment. This is something that we veteran gamers have always known would come to be, and this fact was predicted by Gabe Newell and used as his reason to drop out of Harvard and change the industry in ways no one else could.

A lot has happened in the recent months. Go back in time to before the announcement of Alyx. Any time a popular news article or youtube video came about about VR, the comments were mostly hate for VR. Double down on that for the Half-Life: Alyx announcement. Fast forward to today? Completely different. Instead of "VR is dead" or "It's just a fad" we get "Looks like it's finally time to buy a headset" and "@#$% I'll never get an Index!". It seems as though today, the VR nay-sayers are few are far between, and when they poke their heads out of their holes they are shoved back in as people bellow praises for what's being done for VR.

This is the power of Valve, and Half-Life is its weapon; this is power. The inner core of Half-Life isn't the G-Man, crowbars, the HEV suit, headcrabs, or even the endless stream of "can't count to 3" memes. We don't need a new Half-Life game because we need know what happens after EP2 (although it sure-as-shit wouldn't hurt, valve!!). It's not superior physics, story, pacing, style, sound, interactive narrative, or AI. Yes Half-Life has these things, but they all culminate in something that nothing else can do: Completely transform the way the industry looks at games, and pushes us to evolve to the next level.

Is HL:A going to do this? Time will tell, but we can already see a complete turnabout in our culture and the game isn't even out yet.