FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

HALF-LIFE NAMED BEST PC GAME OF ALL TIME Award-Winning Action Thriller from Valve and Sierra Tops PC Gamer's All-Time List, Again

Bellevue, WA (August 31, 2001) - Half-Life(r), the blockbuster game developed by Valve LLC and published by Sierra, was named "Best PC Game Ever" in the October 2001 issue of PC Gamer. For the second time in a row, the world's best-selling PC games magazine tips its hat to Half-Life.

"It would have been easy to look at some recent spectacular games or back at the classics but Half-Life has done it all," said Rob Smith, editor in chief of Imagine Media's PC Gamer magazine. "In the years since its release, Half-Life hasn't just changed the way first-person action games are made and played, it's changed the gamers' expectations of what a game should be, or can be."

Half-Life has won more than 50 Game of the Year awards from publications around the world and has sole over 2.5 million copies worldwide. Blending action, drama, and adventure with stunning technology, Half-Life creates a frighteningly realistic world where players need to think smart to survive and telling friend from foe is no longer a simple matter of humans vs. monsters. Gamers are given opportunities to wreak havoc--in true action-game fashion--but they are also challenged to explore and strategize.

"It is ironic, given this award, how much Half-Life has grown over the last two and a half years thanks to the internet community," said Gabe Newell, president and founder of Valve Software. "From the support of the Web sites, the Cyberathlete Professional League's adoption of the platform, the huge number of servers (15,000+), to all the great mods that have shipped or are in development, the overall experience of a Half-Life player is much better than when it first shipped."