Geoff Keighley has become so ubiquitous as the face ofawards shows that don’t care about awardsthat most people forget he actually has done some pretty cool things. Since he started his career as a games journalist in the ’90s, Keighley has periodically returned to the profession via a series of reported features called The Final Hours. Some of these reports have taken the form of articles for GameSpot, likethis piece on Metal Gear Solid 2. But for more recent projects, Keighley has shifted to an interactive format. You can click through the development ofTomb Raider(2013),Titanfall,Mass Effect 3,Portal 2, and most recently,Half-Life: Alyxinappsavailable on Steam and iOS.
The Final Hours Of Half-Life: Alyx Makes Valve’s History Interactive
The Final Hours of Half-Life: Alyx is a terrific, thorough look at what Valve was doing during the nine-year gap between Portal 2’s launch in 2011 and Half-Life: Alyx’s release in 2020 — a period in which it didn’t release any new, full-length, single-player games.
There were a few other games that Valve worked on in some capacity during this time, too, like the bizarrely named Counter-Strike Nexon: Studio, which it co-developed, and Cloudhead Games' HTC Vive tech demo, Aperture Hand Lab, which it published.
This kind of behind-the-scenes access to a hugely important triple-A studio as it prepares to launch a new game is incredibly rare, and Keighley’s decision to put that information out in interactive format is even more unique. If you’ve ever wondered how Valve, one of the best developers of single-player games in the history of the medium, basically let a decade of its history lapse without any new contributions, The Final Hours of Half-Life: Alyx has answers. Final Hours is, at its core, a really fancy version of an article you could read in your browser. That is, apart from the timeline of Valve’s canceled games.
The timeline offers a wealth of fascinating information for fans of the studio, as you scroll through looking at all the things that Valve was making in the ten years the studio was in ‘The Wilderness’ — which is also the name of its chapter. You could read a paragraph detailing what games were in development at what times, but it’s another thing entirely to scroll through a timeline and see that there was a point in 2013 when versions of Half-Life 3,Left 4 Dead 3, an unreleased RPG, and a Minecraft-like voxel art game called A.R.T.I. were all in various stages of development. Oh yeah, and Dota 2, the one project from that period that actually saw the light of day.
The interactivity is otherwise mostly a gimmick. A headcrab might jumpscare you as you scroll from one chapter to another, and at intervals you will have to solve puzzles to unlock concept art. But the timeline points to a cool future where developers use the power of the medium to relay information in a way that makes it hit harder.
The Rise Of Interactive Documentaries
The real triumph of Final Hours is its access, not its innovation. That’s hard for anyone besides Geoff ‘World Premiere’ Keighley to rival. That’s why I would love to see developers produce these kinds of interactive documentaries internally, marshaling the powers of video games to relay information that only they have access to.
We’ve seen a few interactive documentaries released in the last year or so, but bothThe Making of Karatekaand Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story are about games made decades ago.Braid, Anniversary Editionhad incredibly thorough making-of features, but Braid is old enough to get its learner’s permit at this point. These thorough looks behind the curtain are rare, especially for recent triple-A games. Keighley’s The Final Hours of Half-Life: Alyx is a unicorn, an interactive, behind-the-scenes look at a game released just months after the game itself. It’s one-of-a-kind, and I want to live in a world where it isn’t.
