A previously unreleased and long forgotten project by Valve is finally playable after thirteen long years of sleeping in the chambers. "Half Life: Threewave," a multiplayer first person shooter game wherein opposing teams capture each other's flags, was first discovered in 2003 when Half Life 2's beta was leaked. While the game was initially unplayable, it no longer is now with some fixes which made the game available for download for everyone.
Kotaku reports that some people from Valve News Network did an awesome job to cruise across the webs to find a certain file. That file was hidden amongst many others in the internet and is within a specific folder from the said leaks called "wmods" and "Half Life: Threewave" was sitting there. Valve News Network found the mod on a random FTP server in Vietnam, but such was not playable so they spent months working on the build so it can run.
It appears that "Half Life: Threewave" is a Valve-sponsored version of the Quake mod which skyrocketed it and its developer Dave Kirsch to popularity. Dave "Zoid" Kirsch was the genius behind what made Quake one of the most popular games of its era before he left the company to join Valve. Up to this day, Dave "Zoid" Kirsch still remains part of Valve and might be up to many amazing things in that big company.
Eurogamer reported that "Threewave" was conceived as a Capture the Flag mod for the original Quake game that became very huge for the PC gaming community. As the "Half Life: Threewave" video reveals, Valve itself went as far as this so that they could bring "Threewave" to "Half Life" too. The story of how this mod came to be is pretty amazing since the original "Threewave" mod for Software's Quake first came out in 1996. This was largely responsible for the popularity of the Capture the Flag mode which was phenomenal back in its time and was played by different players across the globe.
The result of all the work done is simply an incredible and stunning example of what can happen when fans put all their efforts to get something done. "Half Life: Threewave" is simply an amazing masterpiece, which still features the "Half Life" lambda amongst other aesthetics, still works and is available for download.