Modders are getting Half-Life 2 running on the Switch – and it’s all thanks to Portal

A modder managed to bring Half-Life 2 to the Nintendo Switch and the reason for that is Portal. What does this have to do with Valve’s famous puzzle game? The new Portal Companion Collection is fresh out for the Switch and it appears to contain game data from Half-Life 2.

The modder and switch hobbyist OatmealDome, for example, made this discovery and shared his find on Twitter: “The entirety of Half-Life 2 (minus the maps and the music) is contained in the ROM,” says the inventor and further: “It could around remnants of [Nvidia] Trade Shield version.”

He goes on to explain this apparently quirky find, which isn’t as surprising as one might think: “I should note that there are at least some holdovers from Half-Life 2 in ROM, which is to be expected given that Portal 1 is just a fancy mod of Half-Life 2.”

Given how much data the two games appear to share in the first place, the discovery is less unusual.

So a very large part of the shooter seems to have already been hidden in the portal version and then it started immediately the modding workt: OatmealDome tried to import the missing Half-Life 2 maps to the Nintendo device via a modified Switch. This should result in a raw version of a Half-Life 2 port on the Switch, and voila: as a video clip on Twitter shows, it seems to have succeeded (at least roughly).

The shooter can be seen on the switch and apparently also playable, as OatmealDome explains, but of course not in a perfect version: “It crashes occasionally, it’s impossible to advance on some maps, NPC animations are broken, saving doesn’t work and the World cameras are placed at the wrong coordinates.” Still some construction sites, but hey: It’s already running.

Apparently, the challenge of tinkering with Half-Life 2 on the other platform alone attracted various modders, because under the contribution of OatmealDome, the ArTuRMV channel also shows another screenshot of a very rough switch version:

It looks like you get 2 1/2 games with the new Companion Collection, namely Portal 1 and 2 as well as half a Half-Life 2. Well… wouldn’t that be Quarter-Life then?