Half-Life (video game)

In this scene, the player must bypass a dam reservoir guarded by an AH-64 Apache attack helicopter, a squad of marines, and a gun emplacement.

Half-Life is a first-person shooter (FPS) that requires the player to perform combat tasks and puzzle solving to advance through the game. Unlike most of its peers at the time, Half-Life uses scripted sequences, such as a Vortigaunt ramming down a door, to advance major plot points. Compared to most first-person shooters of the time, which relied on cut-scene intermissions to detail their plotlines, Half-Life's story is told mostly using scripted sequences (bar one short cutscene), keeping the player in control of the first-person viewpoint. In line with this, the player rarely loses the ability to control the player character, who never speaks and is never actually seen in the game; the player sees "through his eyes" for the entire length of the game. Half-Life has no levels; it instead divides the game into chapters, whose titles flash on the screen as the player moves through the game. Progress through the world is continuous, except for short pauses for loading.[3]

The game regularly integrates puzzles, such as navigating a maze of conveyor belts or using nearby boxes to build a small staircase to the next area the player must travel to. Some puzzles involve using the environment to kill an enemy, like turning a valve to spray hot steam at their enemies. There are few bosses in the conventional sense, where the player defeats a superior opponent by direct confrontation. Instead, such organisms occasionally define chapters, and the player is generally expected to use the terrain, rather than firepower, to kill the boss. Late in the game, the player receives a "long jump module" for the HEV suit, which allows the player to increase the horizontal distance and speed of jumps by crouching before jumping. The player must rely on this ability to navigate various platformer-style jumping puzzles in Xen toward the end of the game.[3]

For the most part, the player battles through the game alone, but is occasionally assisted by non-player characters; specifically security guards and scientists who help the player; the guards will fight alongside the player, and both guards and scientists can assist in reaching new areas and impart relevant plot information. An array of alien enemies populate the game, including headcrabs, bullsquids, and headcrab zombies. The player also faces human opponents including the Hazardous Environment Combat Unit (HECU) Marines and black ops assassins.

Half-Life includes online multiplayer support for both individual and team-based deathmatch modes.[1]

Theoretical physicist Gordon Freeman arrives late for work at the Black Mesa Research Facility. As part of an experiment, he pushes an unusual crystal into a machine, called the anti-mass spectrometer, for analysis. The spectrometer explodes, creating a "resonance cascade" that severely damages the facility and opens a portal to another dimension, Xen. Surviving scientists urge Gordon to head to the surface, where he defends himself against hostile Xen creatures and the HECU (Hazardous Environment Combat Unit), a special unit of United States Marines sent to cover up the incident by killing all of the hostile aliens and any Black Mesa personnel they find.

Heading to the surface, Gordon learns that scientists from the Lambda Complex may have found a way to close the portal. Gordon travels to the other end of the facility to assist them. Along the way, he activates a rocket engine test facility to destroy a giant tentacled creature and uses a disused railway system to reach and launch a satellite rocket. After he is captured by the marines and left for dead in a garbage compactor, he escapes and makes his way to an older part of the facility. There, he discovers Xen specimens collected before the incident. Overwhelmed by the alien forces, the HECU Marines pull out of Black Mesa and begin airstrikes. Scaling cliffs, navigating destroyed buildings, and traversing through underground water channels, Gordon arrives at the Lambda Complex, where scientists learn the portal is being forced open on the other side by a mighty entity. They have developed teleportation technology that allows Gordon to travel to Xen, where he is tasked to stop the entity.

In Xen, Gordon encounters the remains of researchers who ventured there before him and Gordon defeats the Gonarch, a huge egg-laying headcrab. At a factory creating alien soldiers, he enters a portal that sends him to a vast cave. There, Gordon confronts the Nihilanth, the entity maintaining the rift, and destroys it. Gordon is summoned by the mysterious G-Man, who has been watching his progress in Black Mesa and praises him. The G-Man explains his "employers" wish to employ Gordon. If Gordon refuses, he is teleported to an area full of alien soldiers to be killed immediately. If Gordon accepts, the G-Man congratulates him and places him into stasis to await his next assignment.

Valve, based in Kirkland, Washington, was founded in 1996 by the former Microsoft employees Mike Harrington and Gabe Newell.[5] For its first product, Valve settled on a concept for a horror first-person shooter (FPS) game using the Quake engine licensed from id Software.[6] They also licensed the Quake II engine, and combined code from both engines with their own,[7] adding skeletal animation and Direct3D support;[5] Newell estimated that around 75% of the final engine code was by Valve.[7] As the project expanded, Valve cancelled development of a fantasy role-playing game, Prospero, and the Prospero team joined the Half-Life project.[8]

Half-Life was inspired by FPS games Doom (1993) and Quake (1996),[9] Stephen King's 1980 novella The Mist, and a 1963 episode of The Outer Limits titled "The Borderland".[10] According to the designer Harry Teasley, Doom was a major influence, and the team wanted Half-Life to "scare you like Doom did". The project had the working title Quiver, after the Arrowhead military base from The Mist.[11] The name Half-Life was chosen because it was evocative of the theme, not clichéd, and had a corresponding visual symbol: the Greek letter λ (lower-case lambda), which represents the decay constant in the half-life equation.[9] According to designer Brett Johnson, the level design was inspired by environments in the manga series Akira.[12]

Valve struggled to find a publisher, as many believed the game was too ambitious for a first-time developer. Sierra On-Line signed Valve for a one-game deal as it was interested in making a 3D action game, especially one based on the Quake engine.[13] Valve first showed Half-Life in early 1997; it was a success at E3 that year, where Valve demonstrated the animation and artificial intelligence.[14] Novel features of the artificial intelligence included fear and pack behavior.[15]

Valve aimed for a November 1997 release to compete with Quake II.[16][17] By September 1997, the team found that while they had built some innovative aspects in weapons, enemies, and level design, the game was not fun and there was little design cohesion.[16] The company postponed the release and reworked every level. They took a novel approach of assigning a small team to build a prototype level containing every element in the game and then spent a month iterating on the level.[16] When the rest of the team played the level, which the designer Ken Birdwell described as "Die Hard meets Evil Dead", they agreed to use it as a baseline.[16] The team developed three theories about what made the level fun. First, it had several interesting things happen in it, all triggered by the player rather than a timer so that the player would set the pace of the level. Second, the level responded to any player action, even for something as simple as adding graphic decals to wall textures to show a bullet impact. Finally, the level warned the player of imminent danger to allow them to avoid it, rather than killing the player with no warning.[16]

To move forward with this unified design, Valve sought a game designer but found no one suitable. Instead, Valve created the "cabal", initially a group of six individuals from across all departments that worked primarily for six months straight in six-hour meetings four days a week. The cabal was responsible for all elements of design, including level layouts, key events, enemy designs, narrative, and the introduction of gameplay elements relative to the story.[16] The collaboration proved successful, and once the cabal had come to decisions on types of gameplay elements that would be needed, mini-cabals from other departments most affected by the choice were formed to implement these elements. Membership in the main cabal rotated since the required commitment created burnout.[16]

The cabal produced a 200-page design document detailing nearly every aspect of the game. They also produced a 30-page document for the narrative, and hired the science fiction novelist Marc Laidlaw to help manage the script.[11][16] Laidlaw said his contribution was to add "old storytelling tricks" to the team's ambitious designs: "I was in awe of [the team]. It felt to me like I was just borrowing from old standards while they were the ones doing something truly new."[18] Rather than dictate narrative elements "from some kind of ivory tower of authorial inspiration", he worked with the team to improvise ideas, and was inspired by their experiments.[18] For example, he conceived the opening train ride after an engineer implemented train code for another concept.[18]

Within a month of the cabal's formation, the other team members started detailed game development, and within another month began playtesting through Sierra. The cabal was intimately involved with playtesting, monitoring the player but otherwise not interacting. They noted any confusion or inability to solve a game's puzzles and made them into action items to be fixed on the next iteration. Later, with most of the main adjustments made, the team included means to benchmark players' actions. They then collected and interpreted statistically to fine-tune levels further.[16] Between the cabal and playtesting, Valve identified and removed parts that proved unenjoyable. Birdwell said that while there were struggles at first, the cabal approach was critical for Half-Life's success, and was reused for Team Fortress 2 from the start.[16]

Much of the detail of Half-Life's development has been lost; according to the Valve employee Erik Johnson, two or three months before release, their Visual SourceSafe source control system "exploded". Logs of technical changes from before the final month of development were lost, and code had to be recovered from individual computers.[19]

Half-Life was released in November 1998.[25] The revised version of Half-Life shown at E3 1998 was given Game Critics Awards for "Best PC Game" and "Best Action Game".[17] Valve released two demos for Half-Life. The first, Half-Life: Day One, contained the first fifth of the game and was distributed with certain graphic cards. The second demo, Half-Life: Uplink, was released on February 12, 1999, and featured original content.[26] A short film based on Half-Life, also titled Half-Life: Uplink, was developed by Cruise Control, a British marketing agency, and released on February 11, 1999.[27] The film's protagonist is a journalist who infiltrates the Black Mesa Research Facility, trying to discover what has happened there.[28]

Half-Life was censored in Germany to comply with the Federal Department for Media Harmful to Young Persons (BPjM by its German abbreviation), which regulates depictions of violence against humans. Valve replaced the human characters in the game with robots, replacing blood with oil and body parts with gears, among other changes. In 2017, BPjM removed Half-Life from its list; to acknowledge this, Valve released Half-Life Uncensored, a free downloadable content pack, that reverts the censorship.[29]

Half-Life 2 was announced at E3 2003 and released in 2004. The player controls Freeman 20 years after the Black Mesa incident in the dystopian City 17, where he joins a rebellion against an alien regime. It was followed by the episodic games Half-Life 2: Episode One (2006) and Half-Life 2: Episode Two (2007).[112] After canceling a series of other Half-Life projects, Valve released Half-Life: Alyx in 2020.[113]

• Official website