'Half-Life 2' Is Now Playable On The Nintendo Switch (Because Of Hackers)

Valve just released the Portal Companion Collection, a bundle containing the entire portal series, which is just hype wording for a package containing Portal 1 and Portal 2. Let's not knock it, though, because those two games rock and they come with a glorious surprise. Yeah, as soon as it came out, a hacker named OatmealDome found a lot of Half-Life 2 code and assets hidden inside the game. Dome claims it could be leftover code from the version of the game that Valve made for the Nvidia Shield system, but what really matters here is that they also found a way to bring Half-Life 2 to the Switch. Now, our readers are probably thinking that this process took a while, but the Portal Companion Collection came out on Tuesday, meaning that OatmealDome only needed 24 goddamn hours and a box of scraps to get the game to work on the Switch.

OatmealDome claims that the game isn't complete, that some maps are death traps, but it's playable and, more importantly, it plays surprisingly well. Here's hoping they're able to fix most of the major issues (our calculations say that 2 hours should do the trick), or that they inspire Valve to port the whole thing for the Switch.

Interestingly, this isn't even the first time the code of Half-Life 2 ends up in weird places, with the first time being the infamous ‘03 leak that had the game’s entire source code showing up online. It had catastrophic implications for the development of the game, forcing the team to delay it for one whole year – and to set up a hilarious plan to catch the hacker behind it.

Top Image: Valve