Half-Life: Alyx

Half-Life: Alyx
Active since 2020-03-26
Mysterious looping radio stations within Half-Life: Alyx.
Type	Official
Creator	Valve
Discovered	2020-03-26

Main Page > List of Investigations > Half-Life: Alyx

Half-Life: Alyx (commonly abbreviated HL:A) is a game created by Valve. The game was released on March 23, 2020. This page aims to document the secrets that players discovered within the game. Tyler McVicker produced a video on his Valve News Network channel that summarizes the initial hints in the game well, and can be watched here.

Numbers Station

On 2020-03-25, two days after the game had been released, players began to take note of a mysterious "numbers station". The signal from this numbers station can be received by a radio near the start of the game. Players flocked to a Reddit thread to share their theories discoveries.

Reversed Audio

On 2020-03-26, players noticed that some of the audio played on the numbers stations could be reversed to yield robotic messages. Here are the relevant pieces of audio:

Original Audio	Reversed Audio	Transcription
radio_number_station_terminator_synthy_01.mp3	terminator_01_reversed.mp3	SW TX UY
radio_number_station_terminator_synthy_02.mp3	terminator_02_reversed.mp3	SPTQU
radio_number_station_terminator_synthy_03.mp3	terminator_03_reversed.mp3	XYZ
radio_number_station_terminator_synthy_04.mp3	terminator_04_reversed.mp3	OL PM QN
radio_number_station_terminator_synthy_05.mp3	terminator_05_reversed.mp3	KH LI MJ NK
radio_number_station_terminator_synthy_06.mp3	terminator_06_reversed.mp3	H I F JK
radio_number_station_terminator_synthy_07.mp3	terminator_07_reversed.mp3	D EA FB C

The Terminal Website

Players noticed that a newspaper found throughout the game called The Terminal (which can also be found in Half-Life 2) included a link to their website, theterminal.online. The website appears to only be a parked domain and has no indications that it is related to the ARG as of right now.

Northern Star Radio

A radio found next to an interactive piano at the Northern Star hotel also plays a numbers station that differs from the numbers station heard on the radio at the start of the game. Players suspect the numbers station is linked to the piano somehow, but nothing has been confirmed.

The numbers station plays a seemingly random string of eight pairs of letters and numbers separated by either "and" or a static sound called "connector_low" that appears to be piano notes. After it has played eight, it randomly plays one of the terminator_synthy files.

Looking at relevant files like the soundevent file, players can see that the number and letter combinations played by the radio are seemingly completely random except for three set number/letter combinations that appear more often but still in a random order: A14, D7, and V4. The randomness has been confirmed by reviewing logs from multiple players recording the sequence from the radio.

The radio looks similar to actual Soviet-era radios. The radio's texture can be found here, and a picture of the radio model can be found here. The words at the top are various Soviet cities.

The radio can be moved around, but when it is moved it appears to stop working. Some players speculate that the radio may start working when placed in specific locations, similar to the Portal 2 ARG.

Audio Spectrograms

Nothing has been found in the spectrograms of any of the audio files.

Northern Star Hotel Tag

A hotel tag that can be found in the game has the number 0451 on it. This is likely only a reference to 0451 being the first passcode you use in the game Deus Ex, which has also been used in other games as a tradition.