The Memory, Light and Real Architecture Behind Half-Life 2
In the first part of this story, I wrote about the strange sensation of walking through Sofia and recognising a city I had never previously visited. A worn façade, an old tramline, an entrance disappearing into darkness or a network of cables above the street could suddenly return me to Half-Life 2. It was as if City 17 had quietly prepared me for Sofia years before I arrived here.
But the connection goes deeper than architectural resemblance.
City 17 was not created simply by collecting photographs of Eastern European buildings and transferring them into a computer game. It emerged from the memories of a man who had grown up inside Sofia, left Bulgaria as a teenager and later reconstructed parts of the city through distance, exile, design and imagination.
The deeper one looks into Viktor Antonov’s work, the clearer it becomes that Sofia contributed more than buildings to Half-Life 2.
It gave City 17 its light, historical layers, infrastructure, melancholy and understanding of power.
Antonov Finally Answered the Question
For years, players have debated where City 17 is supposed to be located. Russia, Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, Serbia and Bulgaria have all been suggested. The game provides no definite answer, and that uncertainty was clearly intentional.
However, Viktor Antonov himself gave a remarkably direct answer when asked which European cities he had researched.
“It was based on my childhood city Sofia in Bulgaria,” he wrote, before explaining that the design also contained elements from Belgrade and St Petersburg.
That distinction is essential.
Antonov did not say that City 17 was geographically located in Sofia. He said that it was based on Sofia. One is a question of fictional geography; the other concerns artistic origin.
City 17 remains an invented city in an unspecified part of Eastern Europe, but the emotional and architectural starting point was Antonov’s childhood capital. Belgrade, St Petersburg, Budapest, Paris and other cities were subsequently added to the mixture.
Sofia was therefore not merely another name on a long list of possible influences. It was the first layer of the city.
A Childhood Spent Behind the Façades
Antonov grew up in Sofia during the 1970s and 1980s, when Bulgaria was governed as a communist one-party state aligned with the Soviet Union. Bulgaria was not part of the Soviet Union, as some simplified accounts suggest, but political, cultural and architectural life was heavily influenced by Moscow and the Eastern Bloc.
Antonov later described the Sofia of his childhood as a place where time appeared to have stopped around 1945. Parts of the city felt empty, unfinished or frozen between different historical periods.
For a curious child, that environment became an enormous territory of exploration.
He entered abandoned construction sites, climbed onto roofs and investigated courtyards, streets and dangerous urban spaces. Long before “urban exploration” became a recognised cultural phenomenon, Antonov was learning how a city functioned behind its official exterior.
This explains one of the most distinctive qualities of City 17.
The player is rarely kept on the grand boulevards. Gordon Freeman is pushed through stairwells, attics, kitchens, laundry rooms, drainage systems, industrial passages, rooftops, railway areas and backyards. The city is experienced from inside its body.
Antonov did not see architecture as a collection of decorative façades. He was fascinated by chimneys, sewers, tunnels, machinery and everything that allowed a city to breathe, move and survive.
City 17 feels real because it was imagined by someone who wanted to know what existed behind the walls.
The City as a Living Creature
Antonov studied transportation and industrial design, but his approach to fictional cities was almost biological. He described the city as a character or creature rather than a passive background.
That philosophy changed how City 17 was constructed.
The buildings had to appear connected even when the player could explore only a limited part of them. Streets needed to suggest destinations beyond the playable area. Railways, canals and tunnels had to look as though they belonged to a larger transportation system. Industrial structures needed to appear capable of performing actual functions.
Much of this work was not intended to be noticed consciously.
A player may never stop to analyse why a courtyard feels convincing or where a railway line might continue. Nevertheless, the relationships between the structures create a subconscious impression that the city existed before Gordon Freeman arrived and will continue beyond his field of vision.
This is one reason City 17 still feels unusually coherent more than two decades after the release of Half-Life 2.
It was designed as a place before it was designed as a game level.
The Carefully Constructed Light of City 17
Architecture alone does not explain why Sofia can suddenly feel like Half-Life 2. The light is equally important.
Antonov revealed that considerable attention was given to the angle of the northern European sun and the moisture in the atmosphere. He wanted to produce a romantic but unsettling science-fiction environment in which beauty and horror could exist simultaneously.
This helps explain the peculiar emotional temperature of City 17.
The city is not permanently dark. It is often illuminated by soft, pale sunlight. The sky can be bright while the streets remain cold. Long shadows fall across worn plaster and concrete. The light feels like early autumn: still carrying traces of summer but already warning of the coming winter.
Anyone who has walked through Sofia during late September or October may recognise this quality. The sun sits lower above the city. Old yellow, green and grey façades briefly become warmer. Tram wires cut black lines through the pale sky. Courtyards remain in shadow even when the boulevard outside is illuminated.
A familiar Half-Life atmosphere can appear without a single building being an exact match.
Sometimes City 17 is present in Sofia simply because the light falls at the correct angle.
A Fictional City Built from Real Photographs
Valve’s designers did not depend entirely on memory. Extensive photographic reference material was collected from Bulgaria, Romania, Russia and other parts of the region.
These photographs documented more than famous landmarks. They captured apartment entrances, worn walls, electrical installations, industrial buildings, courtyards, streets, windows and ordinary urban details. Their purpose was not to advertise the cities but to provide materials from which a believable fictional environment could be constructed.
This reference archive is important because many of the photographed places have since changed.
Sofia has undergone considerable renovation and commercial development. Bulgaria joined the European Union in 2007. Historic façades have been restored, newer buildings have altered the skyline and entire neighbourhoods have become more expensive and polished.
City 17 consequently preserves something that no longer fully exists.
It contains a distorted digital memory of Sofia around the turn of the millennium: after the collapse of communism but before the city’s more recent transformation. The textures, colours and visible wear belong partly to a specific historical moment.
Half-Life 2 is therefore not only science fiction.
It has unintentionally become a digital time capsule.
The Railway Station That Came from Several Countries
The railway station at the beginning of Half-Life 2 is one of the most recognisable locations in gaming. Yet it demonstrates why searching for a single real-world City 17 address will always be misleading.
Early versions of the station were influenced by Budapest’s Nyugati railway station. The final design also drew heavily from Gare d’Austerlitz in Paris, near where Antonov had lived after leaving Bulgaria.
The station is consequently Hungarian, French and Eastern European at the same time.
Its narrative function is more important than its precise nationality. It introduces the new political order without requiring an explanation. Passengers are monitored, luggage is searched, people are separated and a giant screen broadcasts the voice of Dr Wallace Breen.
The player understands within minutes that transport is no longer a form of freedom. It has become part of the machinery of control.
This is architecture performing political storytelling.
Belgrade Inside City 17
Another identifiable source is the Overwatch Nexus, the fortified government building attacked by the Resistance. Its exterior was strongly inspired by the National Assembly of Serbia in Belgrade.
The resemblance is supported not only by appearance. Several digital models connected to the location contain the word “parliament” in their file names.
That choice was effective because the building already carried the visual authority of a national institution. Valve could then place alien barriers, weapons and surveillance systems around it without destroying its original symbolic meaning.
The Combine does not always replace human architecture. It occupies it.
This is one of the central ideas behind City 17. Existing railway stations, banks, apartment buildings and government offices are absorbed into a new system. Alien structures attach themselves to the human city like technological parasites.
The horror comes from seeing familiar civic spaces used for unfamiliar forms of power.
Bulgaria Became Even More Visible in Half-Life: Alyx
When Half-Life: Alyx was released in 2020, players in Bulgaria immediately noticed that the Bulgarian connection had not disappeared with Antonov’s departure from Valve.
They found Bulgarian writing on products and posters, familiar electrical boxes, street telephones, building details, apartment courtyards and objects resembling those used in everyday Bulgarian life. Players have also compared parts of the City 17 map with Sofia’s street network and identified several close architectural matches.
These discoveries do not officially prove that City 17 is geographically Sofia. Valve continues to treat the location as a composite fictional city.
But they demonstrate that Bulgaria remained inside City 17’s visual DNA.
This is particularly significant because Antonov was no longer directing the project. The artistic language he had established was strong enough to survive without him. Future designers returned to Bulgarian references because those details had become part of what made City 17 recognisable.
Sofia was no longer merely Antonov’s source.
It had become part of the Half-Life universe.
A Memory Shaped by Exile
Antonov’s relationship with Sofia also deserves a more personal interpretation.
He left Bulgaria at seventeen and joined his father in Paris. His father was a political dissident who had received asylum in France. Antonov therefore carried the visual memory of his home city into an entirely different cultural environment while still very young.
Distance changes memory.
We do not remember a city as a complete map. We remember fragments: a particular stairwell, the smell of an entrance, the colour of winter light, a tram passing a building, a rooftop, a government monument or the silence of a courtyard.
City 17 can be understood as a reconstruction made from these fragments.
It is not Sofia as recorded by a surveyor. It is Sofia remembered by someone who left, combined with Paris, Belgrade, Budapest, St Petersburg, political history and dystopian fiction.
Perhaps that is why the city feels emotionally real even when its geography is impossible.
It was assembled in the same way that human memory assembles the past.
The Man Who Turned Memory into Architecture
Viktor Antonov died in Paris on 7 February 2025, only two days after his fifty-third birthday.
His death gives this story another dimension. The man who transformed his childhood memories into one of gaming’s most famous urban environments is no longer able to explain where memory ended and invention began.
What remains is the city.
City 17 continues to influence game developers, filmmakers, architects, photographers and visual artists. Its importance does not come from futuristic spectacle but from its foundation in recognisable human life. The alien occupation becomes believable because kitchens, homes, railways and courtyards existed first.
Antonov understood that oppression becomes more powerful in fiction when it invades something ordinary.
He also understood that resistance needs the same ordinary spaces. Apartments become shelters. Back rooms become meeting places. Railways become escape routes. The old city remains alive beneath the structures imposed upon it.
Walking Through Two Cities at Once
When I now walk through Sofia, I am sometimes moving through three different places simultaneously.
There is the present city around me: changing, modernising, struggling and continuing.
There is Antonov’s remembered Sofia: the city of his childhood, preserved through fragments of architecture, atmosphere and light.
And there is City 17: the fictional occupation zone through which I travelled as Gordon Freeman long before I ever came to Bulgaria.
These places are not identical, but they overlap.
That overlap is the real Bulgarian reality behind Half-Life 2. It cannot be reduced to a list of matching buildings or a claim that City 17 secretly occupies a particular point on the map.
The connection is deeper.
Sofia provided the memories. Eastern Europe provided the historical layers. Antonov provided the imagination. Valve turned them into a world that millions of people would enter without understanding where they had arrived.
Today, walking beneath Sofia’s tram wires while the autumn sun falls across an ageing façade, I sometimes experience that same impossible recognition.
I am standing somewhere for the first time.
Yet part of me has already been here.
Game designers: before you invent another world, walk through the one already around you.
Look behind the façades. Enter the courtyards. Study railway stations, industrial areas, cables, worn walls, shadows and the ways political power shapes public space.
The most convincing fictional worlds are rarely created from nothing. They are found, observed, remembered and transformed.
Viktor Antonov did not create City 17 by escaping reality. He looked more deeply at Sofia and combined architecture, personal memory and political history with science fiction.
Your next game world may already exist in a neglected building, factory, small town or street you pass every day.
Leave the screen for a while. Take photographs. Listen. Explore.
Do not simply copy reality. Understand it—then rebuild it into somewhere players believe has always existed.
By Chris...
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