The Story Behind the Half-Life 2 Source Code Leak

About a year prior to Half-Life 2’s official release, someone had hacked into Valve’s servers and stole the source code for the game, and within no time, it was made available online for anyone to download, look through, and play. I remember being one of those to download the code at the time, because it was seriously exciting. After all, fans of the series had been waiting for what seemed like forever to play the game, so who could resist a download?

As much as fans ate it up to help tide them over to an official release, Valve was none too pleased. According to the company, that leak caused it great financial harm, although by looking at the incredible sales numbers and the fact that the game won over 100 Game of the Year awards… I am of the belief that it didn’t hurt the sales at all. Why would it? The game when leaked was incomplete and broken… no one is going to weigh something like that into their purchasing decision.

Though this leak has been easy to forget about over the years, at the time there was a lot going around at Valve to handle the leak, and even the FBI got involved. Eurogamer decided to catch up with the person responsible for the source code theft, Axel Gembe, to get a clearer idea of how that episode went down.

It turns out that Alex is not a malicious person, and he had no intentions of seeing the source code leaked across the Internet (rather, that was someone else he gave the code to in confidence). The interview with Alex goes through all of the details, beginning to end, regarding how he pulled it off, what happened afterwards and so forth. I won’t ruin any of it here, but if you are intrigued by this at ALL, I highly recommend a read; it’s a good one.

“The Valve PDC had an username “build” with a blank password,” he explains. “This allowed me to dump the hashed passwords for the system. At the time the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich offered an online cracker for hashes, so I was able to crack the passwords in no time.” “Once I had done that… Well, basically I had the keys to the kingdom.”