One of the most iconic video game boxes of all time is The Orange Box, a bundle that included Half-Life 2, both of its episodes, and two little unreleased games you might have heard of: Portal and Team Fortress 2. It was a staple on video game store shelves for years thanks to the sheer quality of the games inside, and it was easily recognizable thanks to its unique coloring. As you can guess from the name, it was bright orange. But that almost wasn’t the case.
In a TikTok (spotted by PC Gamer), former Valve writer Chet Faliszek recalled that The Orange Box was almost something way more boring: white. Of course, it had to be orange because the Half-Life series uses a lot of orange, but how did white get into the conversation?
Feliszek recounted a meeting where two executives pitched a “stately” and “beautiful” white box for the Half-Life 2 and Half-Life 2: Episode 1 release (the other games were added later). He said it had “nothing on it” except for maybe the game’s name.
Get your weekly teardown of the tech behind PC gaming
“Going into the meeting the box is the most important thing possible because it’s going to talk about the game on the store shelves. We’re not even trusting Steam yet… this is like 2007. The box is gonna be the most important thing, and we have to convey value in the box,” he said. The people pitching the box design had other ideas.
@chetfaliszek Replying to @oliverwilliamwalker
♬ original sound – chetfaliszek
Of course, the developer side at Valve that was in the meeting didn’t accept that.
“We were all like, ‘This is stupid, this is just dumb.’ And these were senior people pitching this, right? … and, oh my god, the ridicule they’re getting for this idea.”
“Everybody who’s been working and crunching, This is our relief valve… I’m using a bunch of puns here, blow off steam and make fun of this as a way to get this out of our system,” he continued.
The people would go on to help with the now iconic Left 4 Dead box art, so they weren’t laughed out of the office permanently, but Feliszek says it’s an example of how Valve encouraged people to collaborate across teams and work together on projects, creating some of the best first-person shooters of all time. You can see a lot of this, along with other anecdotes from the company’s history, in the recent Half-Life 2 documentary, released for the game’s 20th anniversary.