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Warren Spector's Ravenholm

This small unassuming map set in Ravenholm holds one of the most fascinating backstories in Half-Life I've ever read. It has been cleaned up, enhanced and opened up by yours truly to be preserved on the Garry's Mod workshop.

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The information here has been shortened for your sake. If you want to know more, I have linked a page to Combine Overwiki that goes into more detail.

This map came from the 2005 - 2007 era of Half-Life, when Valve had plans to continue Half-Life with Episode 3 and Episode 4. Valve outsourced a Ravenholm episode to Junction Point Studios, a company established by Warren Spector (creator of Deus Ex) and Art Min (ex-Valve employee). The project was eventually cancelled by Valve, which Arkane would then pick up afterwards.

I found this to be so fascinating to me. Not only because I had never heard of this project apart from Arkane's Ravenholm, but that it is also one of the few pieces of media during this time period in Valve left over and still playable. I also found more left over content in the map such as unused buttons and even an extended section of the map behind the playable area. This map was intended to be much larger but eventually left unfinished.

This map was unearthed as a part of the Half-Life 2 Episode leaks sometime in 2017. It had been fixed up by a user on the HL2 Beta site which they kindly provided the .vmf in their download. I simply cleaned it up for sandbox usage and enhanced the lighting. I can't leave a piece of history like this go unnoticed and not preserved.

Full Combine Overwiki Page [combineoverwiki.net]


Valve and Warren Spector - original design
Original fixed files [hl2-beta.ru]
Slartibarty's Slammin' Source Tools [knockout.chat]