Half-Life 2: 20th Anniversary Update

In 2007 when The Orange Box was released, Half-Life 2 took forever to load on my dual-core Athlon 64 X2. It would run but the levels would take a solid minute to load. At the time I figured it was some incompatibility with the multiple cores as that was still rare and a lot of other software gave me trouble with it at that time.

I tried to play it much more recently, maybe six or so years ago on an Intel MacBook before they broke 32-bit, and once again even on modern hardware the game took FOREVER to load.

Maybe this is just my experience? I haven't heard anyone else complain about the terrible load times?

Do you mean the start menu screen where they render a level in the background because why not?

  +map_background none

No go back in time and relive a joyfull hl2.

I don't think dual core was that rare in 2007. Conroe was released the year before. For gamers, dual core was the standard at that point (at least from what I remember of the time).

This was my experience too. IIRC they raytrace the lightmaps for the whole map on demand during loading instead of baking them ahead of time. But I might be misremembering