Play Half Life at 70FPS on a Raspberry Pi

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Crowbar at the ready!

Half Life 1 on Raspberry Pi 4
(Image credit: ETA PRIME)

We are no strangers to PiKISS, Jose Cerrejon’s fantastic tool to simply add extra features to Raspberry Pi OS and Twister OS. PiKISS comes with a special section of installable retro games for the Raspberry Pi and in there Jose has recently added a fully playable version of Half Life configured for the Raspberry Pi 4 (via leepspvideo and ETA PRIME).

Half Life was a genre defining moment in FPS history, adding puzzles and a strong narrative to the genre. With PiKISS we can download and install the game on our Raspberry Pi 4 and try to escape the Black Mesa while running at up to 70 FPS!

Installation of PiKISS is via a single line of code in the terminal which will download the installer and then run via the terminal. Once installed PiKISS is found in the System Tools menu. In PiKISS look for the Games menu and then select Half Life to download and install. You do need to own a copy of Half Life for this to work, either a digital copy from Steam or a physical copy.

Once installed the game is all set to be played, so have your crowbar handy to fend off a headcrab or two!

Les Pounder
Les Pounder

Les Pounder is an associate editor at Tom's Hardware. He is a creative technologist and for seven years has created projects to educate and inspire minds both young and old. He has worked with the Raspberry Pi Foundation to write and deliver their teacher training program "Picademy".

5 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Jose Cerrejon
    Thanks for the mention. The game was free on Steam. You could get a copy at https://store.steampowered.com/news/57848/
    I encourage people buy the games on your desired gaming platform. PiKISS ask you if a copy of the game you want install is around your house.

    Be legal with that according with your country laws 😄
    Reply
  • TerryLaze
    Jose Cerrejon said:
    Thanks for the mention. The game was free on Steam. You could get a copy at https://store.steampowered.com/news/57848/
    Anytime there is a sale on steam the orange box drops to a couple of bucks.
    There is also the VALVE COMPLETE PACK that's a compilation that includes pretty much everything old that valve ever released and that also gets heavily discounted at every steam sale and it is a complete your collection thing.
    Don't ever buy a single valve game on it's own at full price,valve is a big boy they can handle the loss of profit.
    Reply
  • xombie4less
    I own Half-Life on Steam, but after 3 days I still can't find how to copy it from Steam to my Raspberry Pi 4. PiKiss is amazing, but when I get to the point of installing the game, entering Y at the ownership prompt takes me to a message saying that the game could not be found. I have looked all over Google, but every reference to running Half-Life using PiKiss is just a reprint of this article. Any help would REALLY be appreciated to get me into and out of Black Mesa!
    Reply
  • Jose Cerrejon
    Fixed Steam valve dir support. Please reinstall and copy your valve directory. I'll do the rest 😉
    Reply
  • muscl3_n3rd
    I'm unable to get this to work. I have a Steam copy I have purchased and I can play on Steam on my other devices. I run PiKiss after the install and it appears to install Half Life. The icon is in the Games menu and there are files and folders in a Half Life directory. However, when I try to run Half-Life, nothing happens. Nothing at all. Has anyone else experienced this? I'm running Raspbian (I've tried Twister too) with no luck.
    Reply