Get Your Free TVs!



Get Your Free TVs! was the very first Half-Life 2 test level to be created in 2001 when the team had only a rough script of the game, some concept art and was experimenting the new technology. It consisted in a test sequence designed to highlight all the new technology created for the game and test the NPCs and physics. It was not to be included in the final product. Based on a transition engine set halfway between the original GoldSrc engine and the Source engine, this sequence was the real start of the game development.

Description
The concept was to simulate a street war between rioting citizens and the Metrocops sent to contain them. Such a sequence would test the engine's ability to create a vast, believable world and lifelike characters. There would be APCs and tanks rolling down the streets. Citizens would throw Molotov cocktails at the vehicles, which would then explode. Other characters would start looting stores and yell, "Get your free TVs!" There was even a hand-to-hand fighting system so the Metrocops and citizens could get into fistfights.

Trivia

 * The citizens had the original "gas mask" design shown in Raising the Bar and in the E3 map "Strider".
 * The small map can be found in the WC mappack.

External link

 * "The Final Hours of Half-Life 2", Page 7: Zombie Basketball, on GameSpot