Which date in 1999 was "Action Half-Life" first released?

I remember briefly playing a Half-Life mod called "Action Half-Life" in 1999 in one of the few LAN "parties" I ever attended.

I have fuzzy brain pictures of a night-time city environment drenched in blue lighting, a garage, and sniper rifles.

I have made numerous searches such as "Action Half-Life" original release date, but search engines seem to have dropped the entire concept of returning search results that have anything to do with the search query, so I find nothing of value. The closest thing I find is the year "1999", but nothing more accurate than that.

All videos I find on YouTube of the mod/game ring no bells whatsoever. It looks nothing like I remember it from my memory. (No, I'm not confusing it with "Action Quake 2"!)

Can you help me find the exact date when this mod was first published?

mods half-life

Best Answer

The first capture of the then official Action Half Life/AHL website (ahl.action-web.net - later on ahl.telefragged.com [that logo looks familiar :)]) that can be found on the WayBackMachine is from the 10th of October 1999 (here), and the first entry on that page is from the 17th of February that year, which talks about the Beta 3 version:

[...] "on to the news: There is no news. Beta 3 will be comming 'REAL SOON NOW' aka 'WHEN IT'S DONE'. I really couldn't say more than that. It's pretty stable at this point. Some annoying bugs here and there."
[...] "You will see AHL beta 3 soon. And eventually v1.0 as well."

(The 'Pre-August News' link at the bottom of the page seems to lead to earlier entries, but the WayBackMachine's earliest snapshot of that link is from 2002.)

Although February 17th 1999 is the earliest date I can find that shows activity on the mod, the mod likely already started being developed in late 1998, directly after the release of Half-Life.

The first publicly available release, however, seems to have been on the 16th of March:

"Hey Action fans. Tonights treat will certainly make you spasm. hehe

The time has finally arrived, I bring you: Action Half-Life! Yes, Tonight at 8 pm EST (for europeans: thursday morning 1am GMT) I will start the release party on chat.planetquake.com channel #actionhalflife. At that time I will release the last trailer, and an hour later, you will have Beta 3!

Let the games begin!"

Although this is again about the Beta 3 version, I presume this is considered to have been the official release of the mod.

^{A couple more useful (?) links:
The team behind AHL's Director's Cut:
https://ministryofaction.net/
An overview of the original mod:
https://web.archive.org/web/20110811061356fw_/http://ahl.telefragged.com/manual/index.html}