Valve to release Half-Life 2 for Mac on Wednesday
To promote the release, Valve, the developer of the Half-Life series, released a video Tuesday echoing Apple's iconic "1984" commercial, which introduced the Macintosh platform to the world in what many have heralded as the greatest television advertisement of all time.
Valve's take on "1984" features the character Alyx Vance throwing a crowbar — a trademark weapon in the Half-Life series — through a screen projecting the image of another character, Wallace Breen, playing the role of "Big Brother" from the ad. The short clip, rendered with the Source Engine that powers the game, ends with the message "Half-Life 2 on OS X, 5.26.2010."
As part of the staggered rollout of Steam for Mac, Valve plans to release new titles every Wednesday, each designed to highlight specific functionalities of the Steam platform on Apple hardware. The first collection of titles included Portal, which was available to play for free for a limited time.
Portal was be the first of Valve's Source engine based games available on the Mac. Valve has also made native OS X support for the Source engine available to licensees for use in their games. The company has also made its Steamworks suite of publishing and development tools available on the Mac platform, including product key authentication, copy protection, auto-updating, social networking, matchmaking, anti-cheat technology, and more.
Steam is digital game distribution platform which has more than 25 million users and offers access to 1,100 games on the PC. Valve has said it will treat the Mac as a "first-tier" platform, meaning new major titles developed for the PC will release day-and-date with the Mac.
For more, see AppleInsider's additional coverage of Steam for Mac:
63 Comments
Um... I dont think its a Wrench, just sayin
Loved this game. Thinking that once they start making inroads on the mac, others will follow. With luck, I have purchased my last PC graphics card!
Interesting the Half Life 2 is coming before Team Fortress 2 even though it was the later that had a beta program. Not that I'm complaining.
http://store.steampowered.com/news/3865/
Conveniently, Portal just received an update which seems claims improved performance. It's good to see that the Source Engine is continuing to be refined for Mac.
Hopefully this is free like Portal was hahaha.... one can dream...
Portal was a great concept but it was way too short. Clocked it in 5 hours and most of that was just double tracking to see if I missed something. Great advertisement for Source though.
Hopefully HalfLife 2 is longer and more engaging.