The Black Box Valve planned on releasing an additional compilation for Windows entitled
The Black Box, which would have contained only the three new games released as a part of the Orange Box—
Half-Life 2: Episode Two,
Portal, and
Team Fortress 2.
The Black Box was later cancelled for retail and only made available through
Steam exclusively to owners of certain
ATI graphics cards, who received a voucher for a free copy of
The Black Box. During development, the simultaneous release of two game compilation packages with different content combinations was touted by Valve as a new direction for the game industry.
Gabe Newell, co-founder of Valve, said, "
The Black Box and
The Orange Box represent a new approach to publishing multiple products on multiple platforms." After first discontinuing
The Black Box, however, Valve released all the new material for individual download via Steam.
The Black Box was to be priced lower than
The Orange Box which would have made it $39.95 on PC and $49.95 on console in the U.S. if it used
The Orange Box launch price as a baseline. To compensate for the cancellation of
The Black Box, Valve offered gift subscriptions to Steam users who had previously purchased
Half-Life 2 or
Half-Life 2: Episode One and then purchased
The Orange Box so that they could give their second copies of those two games as gifts to people added to their Steam Friends list. Still, the cancellation of
The Black Box sparked complaints from game critics and consumers alike, unhappy that they were obliged to pay for games that they already owned. It also raised concerns among those who had bought the ATI
Radeon HD 2900 XT graphics card, which came with a voucher for
The Black Box, but Valve clarified that only the retail version of
The Black Box had been cancelled. While Valve never expressed its reasons for this decision, industry writers speculated that it might have been to increase profits on retail copies or to avoid customer confusion between similar game packages and their availability across the platforms.
PlayStation 3 version While the Windows and Xbox 360 versions of
The Orange Box were developed and published by Valve, the development of the
PlayStation 3 port was outsourced to the
Electronic Arts studio
EA UK. In an interview with
Edge magazine before the game's release, Valve co-founder Gabe Newell commented, "I think the people who have
The Orange Box on the PS3 are going to be happy with their game experience. We've done the PC and 360 versions here and EA has a team doing the PS3 version – and they'll make the PS3 version a good product; EA got the job done in putting a lot of people with PS3 experience on the project. But I think it's harder to get it to the same standard as the 360 and PC versions". Despite this, he noted that Valve will probably handle PlayStation 3 versions of its products in the future. In a preview of
The Orange Box in November 2007,
1UP.com revealed numerous problems with the late
beta build of EA's PlayStation 3 version of
The Orange Box, citing pervasive
frame rate issues which, they claimed, "at best merely hinder gameplay and at worst make the experience downright unplayable."
IGN's Hilary Goldstein disagreed, writing that although EA "is one of the worst offenders when it comes to porting games to the PS3," the frame rate issues were not bad enough "to make me throw my controller in disgust." On January 3, 2008, IGN reported that Valve employees had created a
thread on Valve's
website forums for players to list the problems they had encountered and to suggest fixes, which caused speculation that a
patch was being planned to address the issues in the PlayStation 3 version, such as the frame rate issues, the connection problems in
Team Fortress 2, and the slow loading times in
Portal. A patch for the PlayStation 3 version was later released in North America on March 19, 2008, and in Europe a short while after that; however, it made no mention of fixing frame rate issues or slow loading times.
Region-specific versions Valve deactivated accounts with
CD keys that were purchased outside of the consumer's territory in order to maintain the integrity of
region-specific licensing. This generated complaints from North American customers who had circumvented their Steam
end-user license agreement by purchasing
The Orange Box through cheaper, Asian retailers. Some customers who then purchased the game a second time from a local vendor experienced difficulty adding the new CD key to their accounts in order to activate their newly purchased games and also had trouble communicating with Steam's customer support team about this problem. Doug Lombardi of Valve stated, "Some of these users have subsequently purchased a legal copy after realizing the issue and were having difficulty removing the illegitimate keys from their Steam accounts. Anyone having this problem should contact Steam Support to have the Thai key removed from their Steam account." The German version of
The Orange Box is set to a low violence mode in order to comply with
German laws regulating the sale of violent video games. Blood effects are replaced by sparks and bullet wounds are replaced with dents as if the characters were metal robots. Additionally in
Team Fortress 2, instead of body parts being scattered after a player's character is blown apart, various items such as hamburgers, coils,
rubber ducks, and
Chattery Teeth appear (known as "sillygibs" by the community). Characters from different classes leave different items and different ratios of these items when killed by explosives. In the
Half-Life games, bodies fade away after the death of
non-player characters and the blood has been altered to a gray color.
Soundtrack The soundtrack for
The Orange Box consists of music that Valve employees composed for
Half-Life 2: Episode One,
Half-Life 2: Episode Two,
Portal, and
Team Fortress 2. It also includes the original version and an exclusive remix of "
Still Alive", both by
Jonathan Coulton. It was released on December 21, 2007, and is sold by the official Valve Store,
Amazon.com, and digital music services such as
iTunes,
Napster, and
eMusic. A more-complete version of this soundtrack that also includes music files from
Half-Life and
Half-Life 2 was released on Steam as part of the
Audiosurf package. "Still Alive" was subsequently released as a free downloadable song for the
rhythm game Rock Band on March 31, 2008.
Promotions Pre-purchasing of the Windows version on Steam began on September 11, 2007. Those who pre-purchased via this method received a ten-percent discount and were able to play the
Team Fortress 2 beta starting on September 17, 2007. The original PC version of
The Orange Box came with
Peggle Extreme, a ten-level playable demo of
Peggle Deluxe, which contained levels with graphical themes of games contained in
The Orange Box. However
Peggle Extreme was later made free to download for anyone with a
Steam account and is not included in the current PC version of the Orange Box on Steam.
Half-Life 2: Lost Coast is also technically included with the PC version of
The Orange Box, as it was offered as a free download to all owners of
Half-Life 2. And as of 2024 is listed as a part of the Orange Box after
Lost Coast and
Half-Life 2 Episodes One, and
Two were integrated into
Half-Life 2 as a part of its 20th anniversary update. The same is true for
Half-Life 2: Deathmatch, which is now included with
Half-Life 2 following Half-Life 2's 20th anniversary update. == Reception ==