Close to the 20th anniversary of the original release, German gamers can now celebrate in an original manner: they are able to play legally now an unedited version of the Half-Life game made by Valve. According to Polygon, the game was been removed from the ‘list of objectionable media’ enforced in Germany, which is administered by the Federal Review Board for Media Harmful to Young Persons.

Half-Life, on the black list

Though it wasn’t banned per se, Half-Life has been long placed on this list, together with other titles, such as Doom and Red Faction. This translates to the fact that the developers could not publicly advertise the games or sell them to anyone who wasn’t 18 years of age. However, people are grateful that the game was taken out of the list because Valve released an unedited version. Moreover, it’s free to download in this region.

Up until now, gamers in Germany could buy and play a particularly edited version of this shooter game. Among the changes, we can see the fact that all humans have been replaced with robots. As such, they spew oil and not blood, plus when you struck them you get to hear a mechanical clank.

At this point, we don’t know why the developers decided to give green light to this project after all this time. Even so, it seems that this move is part of a larger tendency. Bethesda seems to have enrolled in this trend too, since last year they also released Doom without any edits.

If you remember, last year we could see that the THQ shooter called Red Faction would be a premiere on the German market. In a similar way to Half-Life, Red Faction was initially placed on the list in 2003 because of its really graphical violence.