Way back in the Summer of 2003 ATI (now AMD) announced the 9600 PRO / 9800 XT line of graphics card and said they would include Half-Life 2. Subsequently Half-Life 2 was delayed by Valve from its originally announced release date of 9/30/2003. As a result ATI simply included a coupon and it was assumed the game would follow shortly. A story about this is here. In it ATI details on 10/25/2003 that they are throwing in some older games to make up for the delay.
Fast forward almost a year to 10/18/2004 and the game finally has gone gold as can be seen here. The game was finally available to those with coupons more than a year after most had bought their video cards. In the meantime the cards they bought had aged quite a lot for video cards.
Now today ATI/AMD has officially announced that they are bundling Half Life 2 : Episode 2 in the Black Box package which also includes Team Fortress 2 and Portal with their latest graphics cards. A picture of the voucher is here. This game has already seen various delays and is currently slated for Quarter 3 2007. Why ATI is doing this again who knows.
At this point I just hope something doesn't happen to delay the release of HL2: EP2 even further. It will already have been close to 3 years since the initial release of HL2 and the second of its "episodic" content. HL2 episodes are even worse than Sopranos in their release schedule.
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