Half-Life 2 Soundtrack

Kelly Bailey composed numerous short pieces of original incidental music that are interspersed throughout Half-Life 2. Also, several tracks from the Half-Life soundtrack were re-titled and carried over, some of them remixed. Energetic techno tracks tend to back significant battles. Atmospheric synthesizer pieces enhance key plot and exploration moments and reinforce feelings of adventure, isolation, or melancholy in the player.

The limited-edition Half-Life 2 "Gold" package included, among other exclusive extras, a CD soundtrack. Although the CD contains several exclusive tracks, it does not include all of the music released with the game. Using an appropriate program, it is possible to extract all audio tracks heard in-game from the "source sounds.gcf" archive file. Tracks 44–56 in the list below were not released on the CD and can be obtained by this method. The soundtrack (save the CD version of tracks 1 and 34) was also included in the game directory of both the full and demo Audiosurf releases on Steam.

Trivia

 * The name Triage at Dawn is a reference to the very situation the player finds himself at the point it is played - Triage of Winston at dawn break.


 * "Triage at Dawn" is incorrectly said to be based on the track "Path of Borealis," supposedly from the Half-Life 2 Beta. This is completely incorrect, as there is no such thing as a track titled "Path of Borealis" in the playable Half-Life 2 Beta files or any other leaked files. "Path of Borealis" is actually a remix of "Triage at Dawn" with a remix of "Radio" also overdubbed in the middle and at the end of the track made by DJ Dain, named "That Long Train Ride", the song title being apparently based on a note featured in a map of an early Half-Life 2 journey found in Raising the Bar. It was one day presented by a gamer nicknamed "Black Mantis" on the Half-Life 2 Beta oriented Father Grigori Forums. There he pretended he received the track directly from Valve, which was a lie. After that, the lie was spread to the Facepunch forums. Today many players think "Path of Borealis" is a track from Valve, here crediting it to Kelly Bailey, there to Viktor Antonov, who is not even a composer. Many videos of it can be found on YouTube, crediting it as being from the Half-Life 2 Beta, and fixing that lie now appears to be impossible. The track is also used as the game menu music for the mod Obsidian Conflict, where it is also incorrectly named "Path of Borealis" and incorrectly credited to Antonov in the mp3 tag.


 * The title LG Orbifold is a theoretical physics geometry term mentioned by Dr Kleiner while checking teleporter parameters moments before teleporting Alyx.


 * The title Zero Point Energy Field is a reference to the "Zero Point Energy Field Manipulater" (Gravity Gun).


 * The title Xen Relay is a reference to Dr. Mossman's speech about how they control a Xen Relay.


 * The title Tracking Device is possibly an ironic reference to the fact that HECU and Combine have been using the tracking device in Freeman's HEV to easily track and ambush him during the events of Half-Life and Half-Life 2.


 * The title Something Secret Steers Us is taken from the Vortigaunt quote "Something secret steers us both. We shall not name it."


 * Oddly, even though the song is called Highway 17, the song plays in Sandtraps, which is the chapter after Highway 17.


 * If Radio is played backwards, one can slightly hear a woman saying "Gordon, can you hear me? Gordon, can you hear me?" or "G-man, can you hear me? G-man, can you hear me?"


 * The name Radio is perhaps derived from the similarity of the sound to an old or out-of-tune radio, and that, with the backwards "Gordon / G-man, can you hear me?" makes an explanation - someone trying to contact Gordon or G-man with a badly prerecorded message (recorded backwards and with the high-pitched tone over it).


 * Radio can also be heard in the film 28 Days Later (at 00:26) and in Silent Hill: Shattered Memories as a song called "Ice".


 * At low speed, the track "Dark Energy" sounds a similar to "Pulse Phase".


 * The track "Lab practicum", can also be heard during the G-man's Source engine demo in the E3 2003 tech demo of Half-Life 2.