Planet Half-Life

» see planethalflife.gamespy.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Counter-Strike arrived in my life the way it arrived in most Turkish lives, through an internet cafe. Between roughly 2002 and 2005 that was the whole room: rows of machines, one map, everybody shouting. At home the connection was a modem and the game files were somewhere else, which meant getting a mod or a map onto your own machine was an evening's project rather than a click. The Planet sites were where that project started. Planet Half-Life was the biggest of them.

It began in May 1998 as contaminated.net, a small fan page about a game that had just come out, run by Kevin Bowen under the name Fragmaster. GameSpy bought it, and on 27 April 1999 it relaunched as Planet Half-Life. Ownership eventually sat with IGN and its GameSpy subsidiary, but the staff were volunteers throughout, which was normal for the network and is most of the reason the network worked.

The front page was daily news about Valve, patches and whatever the modding scene had shipped that week. Behind it sat reference sections built by people writing for nothing: walkthroughs and multiplayer strategy breakdowns, all of it covering Half-Life and then Half-Life 2 and the games that had grown out of them. A wiki was added on 11 June 2006. Public game servers ran from 2006 to 2012 hosting Counter-Strike and Team Fortress 2, which meant the site was not only writing about the game, it was somewhere you could go and play it.

~ the case file ~

~ the climb ~

The Planet Network was GameSpy's answer to a question nobody else had a good answer to in 1999: what does a fan site do once it outgrows a free host. GameSpy bought the good ones, gave them real infrastructure and an ad sales team, and let the volunteers keep running them. PlanetQuake, Planet Unreal, RPGPlanet, StrategyPlanet and a long tail of others sat under the same roof, and Planet Half-Life ended up the largest of the lot.

That size came from timing. Half-Life shipped in November 1998 and its mod tools turned it into a platform, so the game had a permanent supply of new things to write about that no other title could match. A site covering one game found itself covering a dozen.

~ what it hosted ~

The piece that mattered most was the least visible. Planet Half-Life gave free web hosting to mod teams. In 1999 a group of unpaid people building a total conversion had no budget and no way to distribute a fifty megabyte file to strangers. The Planet sites solved that, and the mods that came out of the Half-Life scene in those years went on to become products with studios behind them.

So the correct way to read the site is as infrastructure rather than as commentary. When it went, what went with it was hosting and an address, not opinions. The opinions were replaceable and the address was not.

~ what really happened ~

There was no closing post. The last update on Planet Half-Life is dated 13 August 2012, and after that the page just stopped changing. That timing is not a coincidence: GameSpy Industries had been sold to the mobile developer Glu Mobile that same month, splitting the technology business away from the media one. In February 2013 Ziff Davis, which had bought IGN, shut down the secondary sites including the whole GameSpy network. GameSpy's multiplayer matchmaking servers, a separate thing entirely, went dark on 31 May 2014 and took online play out of a long list of older games with them.

The subdomain still resolves today and returns nothing at all, an empty response with no page behind it. That is a rarer state than a parked domain and slightly worse: the address works, and there is no longer anything on the other end of it.

~ what replaced it ~

Every part of what Planet Half-Life did still happens, and none of it happens in one place. News went to the big sites and then to YouTube. Reference material went to per-game wikis. Forums went to Discord, where they are not indexed and not archived. Mod hosting went to Steam Workshop and ModDB, and mod hosting is the one piece that came out of the transition better than it went in.

What did not survive was the shape: a single volunteer-run address that was simultaneously the news, the manual, the file host and the server list for one game. That shape existed because bandwidth was expensive and search was bad, so somebody had to gather things in one spot. Both of those problems got fixed, and the thing they had produced stopped having a reason to exist.

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