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Half-Life 2: Raising the Bar - A Behind the Scenes Look: Prima's Official Insider's Guide Hardcover – 12 Nov. 2004
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·A forward by Valve founder Gabe Newell
·Hundreds of art, design, preproduction, and other art pieces crammed into the book
·Over a dozen key members of Valve's staff interviewed
·Officially approved by Valve
·Behind City 17 and other locations
·The development of the Source engine
·A rogue's gallery of beasts, characters, and monstrosities
·Key weapons development revelations
·A tour of many of the game's locations, from inception to completion
·Filled with art, screens, and anecdotes from the Valve team
- Print length288 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPrima Games
- Publication date12 Nov. 2004
- Dimensions22.61 x 2.29 x 28.19 cm
- ISBN-100761543643
- ISBN-13978-0761543640
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Product details
- Publisher : Prima Games (12 Nov. 2004)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 288 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0761543643
- ISBN-13 : 978-0761543640
- Dimensions : 22.61 x 2.29 x 28.19 cm
- Best Sellers Rank: 1,403,339 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- Customer reviews:
About the author

WRITER OF TALL TALES AND HEFTY STRATEGY GUIDES
After fleeing from a rusting, condemned, dry-docked German fishing trawler slowly sinking into the River Thames, Manchester-born author David S J Hodgson spent his formative career years writing for the UK's premiere video game magazines. After a stint at MAXIMUM magazine and the Official Nintendo UK magazine, he emigrated to the United States, where he joined the crew at the part-fraternity, part-sanitarium known as GameFan magazine. He wrote his first guide in 1996, and has authored over 100 official video game books. Highlights include official guides for Metal Gear Solid (1998), Half-Life 2 (2004), Zelda: Twilight Princess (2006), Fallout 3 (2007), Skyrim (2011-2013), WatchDogs (2014), Fallout 4 (2015), Witcher 3 (2015-2016) and Fallout 76 (2018). He also wrote The Improved Emperor's Guide to Tamriel (TESO Imperial Edition), and The Hero's Guides to the Elder Scrolls Online (2014). He lives in a shed overlooking Los Angeles with his wife, dog, and an eight-foot statue of Great Cthulhu.
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Raising the Bar is this celebration, with countless images from throughout HL2's Six-Year development. Concept Art, 3D Renders, Screenshots and brilliant Poster Art fill the book, accompanied by lines of annotation to give some background to the concepts. And what concepts: Half-Life 2 isn't merely a "good looking game" because it is realistically lit, textured and filled with super shiny surfaces (Like so many supposedly "good looking" games). Half-Life 2 is a wonderful artistic achievement because each and every area has been painstakingly researched, sketched and refined since the initial concepts were laid down by the story designers. Raising the Bar shows you all this: 6 years of damned hard work on paper. It's a testament to the quality of the game that the in-game screenshots aren't there to just fill space: They show the completion of a vision, and look as artistic as the primordial ink and pen concepts that spawned them. In addition, there are details of deleted scenes, with interesting short stories written by HL writer Marc Laidlaw and a few bits of general overview to the developing process. Admitadly, the book is a little thin on actual description of this process (It was originally heralded as a "Making of" Book, but it's now more of an Art Book), but you can still get so much out the images that it's all worthwhile. It all comes in a 288 page Hardback book with excellent print quality and production standards, making it an excellent-value collectable. Certainly a must for any true Half-Life fan, but it's more than that: Anyone with an interest in game design or pre-production art in any medium should own a copy.
The biggest shame is that, (as a Limited Edition) It won't be available for very long. Order your copy now: you won't regret it.
Great book though!
I now work in the games industry, and even after all these years looking back at the game and this book still makes me think wow. Valve really did raise the bar back then and now look at where they are.
Lovely art book, with some insight.
The book is lavishly produced, and is heavy on development ideas, showing just a fraction of the stuff they threw away. The overall impression the book gives is of a process of iterative experimentation that led almost by good fortune to something great.
The book shows how the game could very nearly have been awful, but there's very little here about "raising the bar". I'd have liked to see a more analytical treatment of the subject, and a few less pictures of beasties that never made it off the drawing board.
Worth having though for it's future second hand value.
I think it is fairly easy to sum up the book as being an insightful tour of the artwork and design process behind the story of Half-Life. Definitely not about the technology - although it is mentioned where relevant - but a compilation about the creative thought and work needed to build such an intricate game.
This book will please any person who played Half-Life 1&2 and was left with a sense of awe and passion for the ideas and world therein. If you ever wanted to know a bit more about all the things behind the story you will do well to study Raising The Bar.
Top reviews from other countries
The description matched the product, there were only minor blemishes on the dust jacket, and as far as I can see no blemishes on any of the pages.
The book itself is fantastic and a *must* for any true fan of the Half-Life series, giving deeper descriptions to the design of the NPCs, levels, atmosphere, etc. of Half-Life, Counter-Strike, and Half-Life 2. The images are of a high quality. I can highly recommended this rare book.
