September 30, 2004, comes and goes, and Half-Life 2 isn't quite done. It's now October 13, and there are only a few dozen bugs left to fix. What's taking so long? The problem is that more bugs keep cropping up every day because of the unpredictable physics gameplay. "We started telling people, 'OK, if we just stop testing we won't find anymore bugs and we can finally ship this thing,'" Guthrie jokes as he sits at his desk and tests one of his maps for what must be the 10,000th time.

As the day wears on, the bug count keeps decreasing. Newell, sensing that today might be the final day of development, begins reflecting on how this compares with the final hours on Half-Life. "It's like the difference between being a wide receiver and a running back," he says. "The first project was this total Hail Mary, catch-in-the-end-zone-with-no-time-left adrenaline rush. This one was much more slamming away bit by bit, a few yards at a time." Finally, though, Valve is almost in the end zone.

A design cabal at Valve discuss one of the last remaining bugs.

On the night of October 13, the team prepares a version of the game that everyone thinks could be the final one. After a night of testing, both Valve and Vivendi are confident that the game is officially done--no more bugs are in the database, and every employee is enrolled in Club Zero. Newell sends an e-mail to the team to announce that more than five years of development has come to a close. Half-Life 2 is done. There's a tremendous sense of relief. And there's excitement about what comes next: the ceremonial whacking of the piñata.