It was the mid-to-late 1990s. Computers were becoming more popular, and computer games with them. In the early 1990s there was Myst. It was about the story, something like Zork but first-person. In 1996, there was Quake. It was about battling baddies, like its predecessors, Doom and Wolfenstein.
Around that time, Valve software must have licensed the new Quake Engine (the underlying software that created the Quake world on your computer). In 1998 they released Half-Life. It was in many ways a closer marriage of the first-person shooter with the story games and puzzle games that came before. Around a two-to-one ratio. Lots of action, but a bit more story than before. You had Non-Player Characters (NPCs), which are presences you don’t kill, either neutral or allied with you. You had movable boxes.
It’s a game that paved the way for a lot of the modern games.
Every discussion I saw prior to the announcement came to the conclusion that we probably wouldn’t see this happen. Most of those centered around Counter-Strike 1.6, which uses the same GoldSrc Engine as Half-Life. The feeling was that Valve would focus on their newest titles first, and worry about these oldest games later, if ever.
A few years back, Valve began opening up to the Apple Macintosh systems, and most of their new games made their way over. But never the old ones. With this release, those systems now have these oldest games too.
One wonders why. When the first news of Steam coming to Linux arrived, it was published that their title Left 4 Dead 2 was their vehicle of experimentation.
When the beta began, it was instead Team Fortress 2. That made enough sense, in that it’s free-to-play. It meant they didn’t have to give away a game that beta testers might have bought. It wouldn’t be costly to give the game to a few, in a small, closed beta. But when you open it up in the large, to a largely untested audience, it risks some loss.
Valve is very committed to the Linux platform, especially with the announcement of the forthcoming Steam boxes, basically set-top computers. They want to be as catalog-complete to help drive adoption. They also had the opportunity to hit two platforms at once, which wasn’t there when it was only Apple Macintosh.
Finally, with their flagship game sequels coming, they want to be able to have people play the original. There is a certain aspect to human psychology that values completeness. People want to have read every book, seen every episode. They want every achievement, to have left no stone unturned.
The question now is when we will see the rest of the Valve catalog for Linux. My guess is by summer. They probably don’t have as much work with the newer games which have all been ported to Apple Macintosh. There is some work, yes, but a lot of it will be simply replicating previous work. They are likely targeting those releases for the time when the Steam platform leaves beta.
Other tasks will take longer, including their plans to release their SDKs for Linux. That will mean porting work that hasn’t been done for the Apple Macintosh systems. These will be very welcome, as they will mean both new blood into the mod/mapping/development community and faster compilation of assets.