this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2025
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The article says it’s a 2002 laptop and says it would have been “significantly out of date” when Half-Life 2 launched. Half-Life 2 launched in 2004. So that’s 2 years. He’s also reduced the resolution to 512x512 - less than half the original resolution - and hasn’t recreated several of the lighting effects.
I don’t know what unoptimised games this is supposed to be a middle finger to specifically, but it strikes me that it wouldn’t be considered particularly out of the ordinary to find a modern game that could run on a 2023 machine at less than half resolution and with significantly reduced lighting effects.
TBF, at the time, 800x600 was a pretty standard resolution. For gaming on a low-end PC, you might go down to 640x480 to get a better framerate, which wouldn't look too bad on a CRT.
Sure, I’m just arguing against the framing of this as “he got this super-graphics-intense programme to run on a PC which would have been considered a relic at the time”, when actually he ran significantly downgraded graphics on a PC which would have been 2 years old at the time.