Half-Life 2’s 20th anniversary documentary shows off unseen Episode 3 footage

A documentary celebrating the 20th anniversary of Half-Life 2 has shown off development footage of the cancelled Half-Life 2: Episode 3

The new documentary, which can be viewed below, was produced by Secret Tape, a production arm of the popular crowd-funded documentary studio Noclip.

The documentary follows the development of the 2004 PC game and features interviews with the majority of the game’s most prominent developers, including Valve boss Gabe Newell.

The documentary concludes by discussing why a third episode for Half-Life 2 was announced but never released. The Half-Life 2 team largely credits the need to work on other Valve titles at the time as part of the reason the episode was never released.

“I think we were six months in on it when we moved to Left 4 Dead,” said David Speyre, an engineer on Half-Life 2. “We put down episode 3 to go help Left 4 Dead.”

“By the time we considered going back to Episode 3, the argument was made that ‘well we missed it,”” he continued. “We could have definitely gone back and spent two years to make episode 3.”

Valve president Gabe Newell said: “My personal failure was being stumped. I couldn’t figure out why doing Episode 3 was pushing anything forward.”

Alongside the documentary, Valve has released a series of updates for Half-Life 2, which is now free to own on Steam for a limited time.

“Every map in Half-Life 2 has been looked over by Valve level designers to fix longstanding bugs, restore content and features lost to time, and improve the quality of a few things like lightmap resolution and fog,” said Valve.

Half-Life 2 now includes the complete Episode One and Episode Two expansions along with the base game. They’re accessible from the main menu, and you will automatically advance to the next expansion after completing each one.

Developer commentary for Half-Life 2 has also been added to the game on PC, alongside Steam Workshop support.