Check Out This Legendary Gaming Artifact

What you see before you is something that legends are made of and the gaming industry as we know it was birthed from.

As you may have seen from our Top 25 PC Games list, the Half-Life series is kind of a big deal. Surprisingly, it almost didn't turn out that way. Half-Life was almost pushed out well before it was ready for primetime, and if it did, its quality would have suffered dramatically. Gabe Newell saw the situation as a potential disaster and pushed for an extension from publisher Sierra Entertainment who was funding the project. Additional development time was granted despite being rare at the time, and a little over a year after the printed date of the alpha copy above, Half-Life would release to some of the most positive acclaim ever.

The philosophy of spending adequate time to polish games before launch has carried with Valve and its CEO, Gabe Newell, to this day. It's one of the reasons Valve has one of the best track records of any gaming developer in the world. They went on to create Half-Life 2, Team Fortress 2, Portal 2, and many more, all of which were heavily polished and brimming with charm.

When you look at the image above, you aren't just looking at a CD, or even an early copy of Half-Life; what you're looking at is a keystone in gaming history.

Now where's that Half-Life 3?

[Image Source]