Valve releases the original Half-Life for Mac

Fifteen years after its release in 1998, Valve Software's groundbreaking first-person shooter Half-Life has made its Mac debut. While its sequel, Half-Life 2, and other games based on Valve's later Source engine have been available on the platform for years, the original Half-Life has remained beyond the reach of Mac gamers without resorting to Boot Camp or other workarounds.

Half-Life is still listed as being Windows-only on the Steam store, but we've confirmed that the option to download it for Mac does appear when selecting the game from within your Steam library. Being such an old game, it runs very well on lower-end systems.

You can buy Half-Life for US$9.99 from the Steam store, but you might just find that you already own a copy since the game has been included with various Mac-compatible compilations even though it was only made available for the platform today.