Half-Life 2: now playable for free from the browser, without Steam or downloads
Half-Life 2 can now be played directly from the browser, without installing Steam and without downloading a single extra megabyte. The credit goes to slqnt, a high school student who took about three months to transform Valve's iconic shooter, normally sold on Steam for $9.99, into a web page playable from any computer, from the comfort of home to the school’s computer lab.
The project was announced on X by the developer himself on June 25, 2026, and is online at hl2.slqnt.dev. Just open the link and press New Game to find yourself at Black Mesa East: on PC, with Chrome, the frame rate exceeds 60 fps consistently. The port also works on smartphones, but touch controls are almost nonexistent; to move, you really need to connect a keyboard.
The online reaction was immediate: within a few hours thousands of players tried the port, sharing screenshots and impressions on social media. Some joke that Half-Life 2 is now ready to circulate in every school computer lab, thanks to the ease with which it starts from a simple link, while others hope that this initiative paves the way for similar projects dedicated to Valve classics.
Half-Life 2 on the Browser: Some Adapted Assets and Sacrificed Facial Animations
The technical foundation did not come from scratch. Slqnt was inspired, upon a friend's suggestion, by a Portal port made by another developer known as weliveinhell, which was built on nillerusr/source-engine, a modified version of the Source engine code that ended up online in 2020 alongside the Team Fortress 2 leak. On that basis, slqnt was able to utilize a rendering method called ToGLES: the engine speaks OpenGLES, the language of Android apps, and Emscripten translates it into WebGL2 within the browser. Therefore, most of the graphical work was already prepared.
The real manual labor was on the assets. The version of the engine used does not read files from the 20th anniversary re-release of Half-Life 2, so slqnt had to switch to the steam_legacy branch of Steam, extract the game’s VPK files, and break them down into individual .data files for each map in order to stream them into the browser.
Among the most notable sacrifices is the facial animation system, one of Half-Life 2's technical highlights upon its debut in 2004. It crashed the port so frequently that the developer chose to turn it off completely: the G-Man delivers his opening monologue, but with a motionless face. The dev log published by slqnt lists other problems that have been gradually resolved or are still open, such as redirects for saves to Emscripten’s filesystem, non-functioning batteries and med kits, Alyx's gravity gun not appearing in inventory, NPCs dying for no reason, and headcrabs not dealing damage. Even the crouch key has been remapped to C, as CTRL kept activating browser shortcuts.
The question remains online: is Valve aware of the project? The operation relies on not-so-clear source engine code and game assets, a gray area that could lead to sudden removal. Valve has always shown tolerance towards the modding community, and in the meantime, the developer continues to release fixes to make the port more stable. Running an old FPS inside a web page has almost become a sport in itself: before this port, it had already happened with Portal 2 transformed into a small web server, with Doom running solely on CSS rules, and the first Half-Life made playable on a 2007 Nokia. Slqnt, in his own way, adds to this list with a result that runs better than many of its predecessors.