Prospero

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Prospero was one of Valve's first game designs, slated to come out shortly after Half-Life. The game emphasized exploration, an intricate storyline, and combat via "psionic" powers. Influences would have included the video game Myst and the works of Jorge Luis Borges. The protagonist of Prospero (known as "The Librarian" or "Aleph") underwent a series of design changes during the early development of the game. One iteration relied heavily on the use of psionic amplifiers to augment her innate abilities.

As the design of Quiver started to take over some of Prospero initial goals, Prospero evolved into a massively multiplayer game. It was also intended to be distributed with a mix of official and user-created worlds that could be accessed through an in-game library, and each game would be running on its own server. Online distribution, server browser, a friend finder, user-created content and other concepts initially conceived for Prospero would eventually find their way into the Half-Life series, Steam, and Valve's support of fan-made modifications.

Trivia

 * "Prospero" is the Italian, Portuguese and Spanish version of the first name "Prosper", which comes from the Roman name "Prosperus", which means "prosperous", "fortunate" or "successful" in Latin.
 * In the Half-Life sound files folder (Steam version), the music files commonly known as "Dimensionless Deepness", "Steam in the Pipes, "Threatening (Short)", "Traveling Through Limbo" and "Vague Voices" are named "prospero01" to "prospero05", which could imply that the tracks were initially made for Prospero.