Enlarge / The familiar hallways of Black Mesa can be made new with some generative lighting. (credit: Valve)

Half-Life is a legendary game, a title that was ahead of its time in its storytelling, mechanics, and technology. Graphically, though, it can’t help but look extremely 1998. A new, free ray-tracing mod makes the PC original a lot more compelling to revisit.

Sultim Tsyrendashiev, working on GitHub as sultim-t, has worked on graphics upgrades and ports of many games and tools, including the Serious Engine and Quake. The Xash3D: Ray Traced project, now ready for public use with Half-Life 1, tweaks an alternative version of Half-Life‘s Source engine to add a custom path-traced renderer. The tech that moves applications from fixed to real-time path tracing is interesting and promises even more ray-traced nostalgia kicks to come.

But what most of us are interested in is how it works in Half-Life. It’s very pretty, and while the effect is mostly subtle, it can steal the show in big moments (sorry, tentacle giant that needs to go). I played through the first level and a bit into the second one with the mod installed, and I visited a few other levels with map warp cheats (though I quickly died in most since I couldn’t get weapon cheats to work). The textures aren’t upgraded (unless you do so yourself with other mods), but modern-day lighting can make a big difference in how some of the game’s areas look.