“The Half-Life community is one of the most creative and talented gaming communities out there,” the founder of LambdaGeneration – who simply goes by "Alex" online – tells me. “Some of the stuff we cover just blows my mind. Whether it’s a group of people spending almost two decades recreating the original game in a modern engine or someone spending three months on a fan film, I am always taken aback by the sheer dedication people have for the series.”
Half-Life fans are a dedicated bunch. Even in the absence of content from Valve, the series has thrived with mods, community content, and unofficial games such as Lambda Wars and Black Mesa. Half-Life: Alyx didn’t fully reignite the torch, but it helped to keep the flame fans have managed to carry all these years flickering. There were community forums of like-minded individuals sharing each other’s work, news websites specifically catering to Valve fans after Episode 3 faded into obscurity, and then there was LambdaGeneration. While others emphasized what Valve was up to, this blog was all about what fans were doing. It started out as a website before transitioning into a Discord server and a Twitter page. Now, it’s a full-fledged social network in the making. I’ve long followed LambdaGeneration, so I was ecstatic when it reached out to me about an interview for the new initative. This group has always been the go-to place to find what the community is up to, or to uncover hidden gems – a new resource like this is a total game-changer.
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Specifically, I talked to Alex, the founder of LambdaGeneration, all about his brand new venture into the territory of social networking. In just one week, LambdaGeneration amassed 1,000 users – and that number is still growing. This includes fans, creators, developers, and the staff keeping the cogs whirring. The site fills a growing fissure in the Valve community, something in between archaic forums and the more meme-heavy Reddit. There are pages for news, modding, fan art, films, music, lore, and memes, letting you find whatever you want without any hassle. Otherwise, you can sort by trending, new, and top. There are user profiles, social media links, badges, and more, combining the best elements of different social media sites to create a Valve-centric juggernaut.
“The concept for LambdaGeneration was simple – we wanted to create a site that would share all of the amazing fan content the Half-Life and Valve community make,” Alex says.” At the time, most Valve fansites were focused on official news and there weren’t any news sites dedicated to things made by the community. I remember being frustrated seeing some really cool stuff scattered around various forums just going unnoticed, and I wanted to fix that.
“Ironically, our first few articles were about Team Fortress 2, but this didn’t seem out of place at the time as Valve’s games were heavily intertwined and arguably a single community.” For context, Team Fortress and Counter-Strike started as fan-made Half-Life spin-offs that Valve eventually roped into its own official library. Fans and mods have always been at the epicenter of Valve’s business model – hell, Portal started out as a completely different game by a whole other studio before joining the Half-Life universe. With how integral the community has always been to Half-Life, it’s no surprise that it’s managed to retain such strength in spite of a lack of official content. “Contrary to what people may think, LambdaGeneration actually grew during Valve’s silence," Alex explains. "Many of the news-oriented sites that once overshadowed us started to struggle – many just gave up. The community, however, did not.”
Some of the sites Alex is talking about were centered around maps, while others focused on larger overhauls. There were also a few that dug into leaks, rumors, and speculation, propping up the fans who were trying to sift through Valve’s silence to find answers. Alex was driven by all of these approaches to bring everything together into one central hub for all things community. “One huge inspiration was PlanetPhillip.com, now RunThinkShootLive,” he tells me, “The site posted reviews of single-player Half-Life maps. I could see how much of a positive impact that had on the community. People were inspired to create Half-Life maps because they could see others making cool stuff and they knew their effort would not go to waste. There seemed to be room for something that could do the same for everything else in the community like fan art, fan films, music, and mods.
“Moving to Twitter and YouTube was a must to survive. I love old-school websites and forums, but it’s hard to keep them alive in the modern internet era. We actually used Twitter early on to promote articles on the original site but, over time, we transitioned to posting directly in smaller bites, which worked well for us.”
LambdaGeneration has now come full circle, returning to its website roots but with all the modern bells and whistles. “The concept for the new community platform is the same as the original website – it’s a place to share and discover Half-Life and Valve community content,” Alex says. “I’m not a writer or journalist: the original website ran on WordPress but I was always open to other mediums, so – in my head – turning it into a social platform felt like a natural progression. I came up with the idea in 2015. I could see how traditional blogs like ours were struggling as people moved to social media. The idea was to make something easy to use and run by the community. We’d seen others get their own dedicated apps and platforms like Doom with the Slayers Club and Star Wars with the Jedi Council Forums. We also love the idea of making a modern version of Planet Half-Life, which was a popular community-oriented fansite back in the day. We want to fill the void that is left.”
Alex's point is an important one. I occasionally jump to Reddit to find out what's going on with the community, perhaps to discuss some wild theories about the G-Man after a long day of bunny-hopping through the waterways of Half-Life 2, but the subs are drowned in memes. So, I go to Twitter, where it's near-impossible to find any structured form of discussion. ValveNewsNetwork offered a bit of respite, giving 16-year-old me something to look forward to when leaks came out about HLVR, the precursor to Alyx, but it wasn’t very community-oriented. All in all, the only spot to find community content in a neat package was LambdaGeneration, but even then it was curated by fans – what was being lost in that process? LambdaGeneration’s new social media platform addresses all of these issues.
“Reddit feels quite outdated,” Alex tells me, “I personally find it hard to use, and I know many others do too. We wanted to build a modern site, more in line with the easy-to-use interface that people have come to expect from platforms like Twitter. The Half-Life subreddit also has a huge amount of meme content and while I enjoy a good meme, we want to appeal to serious content too. For example, last week we added a 'Fanart of the Week' section to our sidebar. We also noticed that a lot of people shared their work on our Discord and while it is great for discussion, it’s not intended for long-term archiving due to how quickly things get buried. We wanted to create a platform that was fully public, organized, and search engine-friendly.”
The platform is not quite finished yet, mostly because there are plans to expand and breathe more life into it. “We have a lot of plans for the platform,” Alex says. "Everything you see has been coded by just two people. I have a background in design and front-end web development. David – our CTO – is an ex-military software developer and created the system and servers behind it all. Our most requested thing right now is a native app, which we plan to work on later in the year once we feel the website is more complete. For now, we have sub-communities for major Half-Life games, mods, and topics in the work. We’re also releasing new features every week. Last week, we added mentions. Now we’re working on multi-image posts.”
Currently, there is no way to financially support the self-funded fan-site, but there are plans to perhaps open a Patreon in the future. It’s an exciting prospect – projects like this are what have kept me such an avid fan of Half-Life all these years. LambdaGeneration seems like the inevitable next step in this saga, a hot-spot for Half-Life devotees to enjoy – I’m curious to see where this will all be in a year’s time.
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