Radio City 17

In 1999, Xatrix Entertainment released a first-person shooter called Kingpin: Life of Crime. The game concerns the character of Thug, who after a beating from two gangsters goes on an enraged rampage across the retrofuturistic Radio City. At the time it was heavily criticized for its intense violence and common use of foul language, and even rejected by certain retailers due to the recent Columbine High School shootings. However, the game grew a cult following in the years since and has retrospectively been praised for its attempts to blend light RPG elements with the classic shooter formula, environmental interactivity, art direction and tounge-in-cheek humour.

Two members of Xatrix at the time were Viktor Antonov (lead artist) and Aaron Barber (level designer). Following Kingpin's release, they were poached by Valve Software to work on the sequel to their recently successful debut game Half-Life. The game would involve a stylized city much like Kingpin, and their expertise would ensure it was pulled off well.

Of course, that city became City 17 and evolved from a Gotham City-style American metropolis to the Warsaw Ghetto-inspired Eastern European locale - but during the early days of Half-Life 2 the aesthetic of the city owed much to Kingpin. This project was a means of exploring the connective tissue between the two games.

Four very early levels from the leaked 2003 build of Half-Life 2 were used as a basis, ported from Source to Goldsource and had every world texture replaced with equivalents from Kingpin. Goldsource was chosen due to its similarity with the Quake 2 engine which Xatrix had built Kingpin on. Much of the world geometry required tweaking and optimizing, both due to Goldsource's limits and also to clean up sloppy work on the original maps. Ambient sounds from Kingpin were added to complete the illusion.