So, a couple of days ago, I have stumbled upon this on youtube. It's a series of videos on little-known Half-life mechanics and easter eggs - some HL2 videos, mostly of the original tho. And some of them quite simply left me amazed. So much dedication went into creating the original half-life, and most people didn't even notice vast majority of that stuff! I will now post the vids I found the most interesting so you don't have to dig trough everything:

Roach AI Demonstration. Apparently, roaches actually have far more thought-trough AI routines than just 'run away from the player'

Vortignaut combat traits - the combat AI of vortignauts. I have usually killed them before noticing any of that, not mentioning the cut features.

Houndeye Sonic Attack Behavior - again, didn't notice any of that, they were dead before I really could.

How to feed a bullsquid - yes. You can.

Houndeye curiosity - a little thing, but it's still fantastic that somebody put that in.

Vortigaunt healing itself - and from what I have gathered, not only Vortigaunts did that.

So... Yeah. That. I mean... Wow, well done, Valve. If you take a look around the linked channel, there are actually vids from various alpha versions of HL as well

Interesting, I was aware of a few less evident and cut features back in the day, especially when I tried zillions of different mods, some of which restored some of the cut content or played around with the rather subtle features (and even brought back stuff that was specifically mentioned in previews but removed from the released version), still, seems that the videos describe some stuff that I didn't know of. The vortigaunts' ability to resurrect dead mates is interesting in that in Half-Life 2 they show similar features (particularly in Episode 2).

Will definitely check out all the videos. Thanks!

Edit: Huh, the Akira reference is interesting. I first watched the anime soon after I got Half-Life and of course also instantly noticed the similarity in the elevators, wasn't aware that it's supposed to be a direct reference by Half-Life, though. It's funny since these kinds of elevators have been later adopted by a whole bunch of games.

Yeah, it does suggest that healing abilities were intended by Valve all along. Well to be perfectly honest I would not take those videos all that seriously, after all it is just a guy on youtube. He does make good points tho.

Well, he proves that it's an Akira reference, though. For one, he shows that the area at the bottom is taken directly from a frame in the manga and makes a side-by-side comparison in the video, plus he shows that the elevator object is actually called akira_elevator or something like that.

Hard to reanimate corpses when they scare you away. I wonder if that's why these features were ditched.

Well I could see reanimation and being scared of corpses being both implemented and then cut at different stages of development, so the two mechanics might never have encountered each other Bloody hell, you're quite correct, I should have watched the video a bit more closely the first time around. That's a carbon copy - and the name is a dead giveaway

That was quite entertaining. Always loved the little details in Half Life, brilliant game.

That's some really cool stuff. It's amazing how much detail went into things that almost nobody will ever notice.
I was shocked by the bullsquid one. I can't believe that is a real thing... I'm reinstalling Half-Life just to try that out.

Speaking of Vortigaunts, am I the only one who think they look like the Mor-Taxians from the old War of the Worlds TV series? (they retconned out the Martian thing, the aliens are from the planet Mor-Tax in the TV-series)

Even more bizarre is that implementing that kind of stuff is bound to cost a lot of time and development. Just... The sheer amount of dedication Valve has towards its games is astounding

Yeah.... Except they do a game every 10 years. And they can't count to 3, as it seems...

Dude's great, has a great series on obscure FPS games.

How such features and such content came to be becomes pretty clear when you read the game's postmortem. I haven't read it in years but IIRC the different departments and even individuals had a lot of independence and would often come up with something by themselves, give the stuff to other members/departments and let them think of ways how to put it to use in the game. I think the amount of little interesting features that could be found throughout different versions of the game and also the final one are largely a result of that kinda open and largely collaborative design process.

That would be a problem if the games got old but they really don't.

Daww, and I was so happy we have all collectively ignored the troll