Of all the first-person shooter franchises on the market, very few have made as a big a mark on the genre as Half-Life; today marks a full twenty years since Valve’s standout career began with a title that single-handedly changed gaming forever. In 1998 it stood strong next to other heavy hitters like The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Metal Gear Solid, yet when considering its place on the PC market, Half Life marks the final chapter of an important era in gaming history; the golden age of the first-person-shooter in the 1990s where all the big franchises made their debut with emerging 3D technology. Kicking off with Wolfenstein 3D in 1992 then followed up by Doom in 1993 and Quake in 1996 all from ID Software, Half Life is the ultimate peak of this FPS design milestone, merging excellent gameplay with the introduction of seamless cinematic storytelling.
As a developer making their first push into the industry, Valve Corporation had difficulty getting the game to market; most publishers passed on Half-Life, calling it too ambitious for a debut title. A report by Gamasutra reveals that at first the title was mediocre at best, not offering much outside of some occasionally interesting enemies and level design. The developer decided to start over, using a system known as the Cabal Process. In this mode of development, Valve’s relatively small number of staff regularly transferred across different tasks as opposed to specialising in a specific area, which included QA testing. In addition, the production of the game engine GoldSrc would also keep the team busy. All the way through, they kept the same philosophies throughout development; that both the player and the world should react to each other alongside a careful pacing that briskly introduced new elements and gameplay scenarios without overwhelming the end user. Despite a rocky production that ended with an error in the source code that had to be fixed quickly, Valve’s Half-Life was released on the market to superb critical and commercial acclaim.
A classic PC shooter is defined by rapid gunplay that punishes slow and static movement, light platforming and puzzle segments alongside a wide variety of weapons all carried at once by the player character. While Quake III: Arena in 1999 and Unreal Tournament 2004 also made use of faster movement speeds and precision-based weaponry, Half Life was the final purely single-player title in this classic era before the turn of the millennium. From that point onwards, shooter sequels would work to become more cinematic and the gameplay that formed the genre in the nineties would shift. While the consoles slowly caught up in the genre with Goldeneye 007 on the Nintendo 64 and Halo: Combat Evolved on the original Xbox, the PC would maintain a strong following. The likes of Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Doom 3 and Quake 4 would all go in different directions from their predecessors, adopting slower, more methodical gameplay broken up by story-based cutscenes. The game’s sequel, Half Life 2, trimmed many elements from the original game, but ended up revolutionising the genre again in terms of both organic storytelling, gameplay physics and detailed facial animations. It took the original title’s opening train ride and extending its seamless techniques across the entire game.
Speaking of said opening sequence, Half Life’s opening is one for the ages; part tutorial and part streamlined introduction to the Black Mesa Research Facility, Gordon Freeman, PhD in Theoretical Physics is late for work and the day’s itinerary? An experiment that goes catastrophically wrong, opening a bridge between dimensions and allowing countless hostile aliens to cross over. From the moment you start a new game, Half Life is focused on immersing the player; to quote Gabe Newell, the founder of Valve Corporation: “Our hope was that building worlds and characters would be more compelling than building shooting galleries.”. There are no cutscenes or breaks in the action; you see everything unfolding through Gordon’s eyes, his silent mannerisms allowing the player to inhabit his character with flexibility. Once the protagonist picks up the iconic crowbar, Half Life begins in earnest with the chapter: “Unforeseen Consequences”.
What follows is an eleven-hour rollercoaster ride where level variety, environment interaction and challenging combat coalesce into a phenomenal campaign. As Gordon Freeman, you’ll fight your way through the cavernous depths of Black Mesa across eighteen chapters, acquiring new weapons and battling new foes as you go and manipulating the game’s environment to reach the next chapter. It’s a network of futuristic experiments, helpless scientists and eventually a platoon of marines sent in to clean up the mess. Replaying the game, you’ll find quite a few references to other popular entertainment entries. The headcrabs are riffs on Alien’s face-huggers, the constant crawling through vents is ripped straight from John McTiernan’s Die Hard and the fight with the Icthyosaur in the shark cage is a nod to Jaws. On the opposite end of the spectrum, you’ll find a dark humour personified by scientists getting killed for their silly behaviour in all sorts of grisly ways. As you work your way up to the surface, new obstacles such as automated turrets, operating machinery and radioactive areas impede Gordon’s progress, but some of the most dangerous adversaries in this opening act are the US marines. The HECU (Hazardous Environment Combat Unit) may be out of their depth when battling alien forces, but they’ve also been sent to wipe out every scientist and on Black Mesa’s payroll. They don’t go down easy as their high damage threshold and solid artificial intelligence make them a challenge to fight; they’ll move to flank Gordon, lob grenades liberally and fall back when low on health. Some will even drop grenades at their feet on the verge of death in a desperate bid to take you out. Once Gordon finally reaches the surface, he’s immediately forced back underground by the onset of military air strikes.
All of this wouldn’t work without standout gameplay and Half-Life works hard to ensure every armament has a purpose. The pistol and shotgun are accurate but slow-firing, the magnum and crossbow deal high damage at range and explosives including grenades, C4, laser mines and the RPG dish out considerable area-effect damage. More advanced experimental weapons like the Tau Cannon and Gluon gun are powerful but chew up ammo quickly and finally you have oddball weapons like the Hivehand (Which is literally an arm ripped off an alien soldier) and the Snark bug which can be used to distract enemies Simultaneously the large gallery of enemies is extremely varied in their behaviours and weaknesses; they range from small headcrabs (which can be killed with a couple of crowbar swings) to hulking gargantuas that must be destroyed using parts of the environment as opposed to conventional means. All alien enemies will pursue Gordon relentlessly, meaning you can rarely hunker down behind cover in these moments.
The way Half Life layers set-pieces is just as seamless as its story and the gameplay switches up its pacing to deliver new gameplay scenarios that not only challenge the player to act differently but also flesh out the Black Mesa facility. The level of variety in Half-Life’s design is still unmatched by most first-person shooters; you’ll utilise a rocket test plant to kill a giant tentacled beast, hop on a long-reaching rail system to travel around the facility and eventually come to a residue processing plant. From here (after escaping a trash compacter and retrieving your weapons), the game’s scale opens to deliver a biolab with advanced weapons and eventually the surface level which has been turned into a warzone. “Surface Tension” is easily the game’s most extravagant moment, seeing Gordon go from taking on groups of alien foes to massive military vehicles generates a larger scale that makes the player feel incredibly small amid the chaos. Eventually the military begins to pull out due to heavy losses and Gordon makes his way over to the far side of Black Mesa, the Lambda Complex. It’s here that the player receives the final mission; killing the creature keeping the portal between dimensions open. After a brief load of training in teleportation technology and obtaining a long jump module for the HEV suit, Gordon dives into the portal and the final portion of Half-Life begins.
Xen is the epitome of other-worldly in its appearance, a seemingly endless void of floating platforms, flying manta rays and alien plant life. The long-jump module is essential here as Gordon leaps from platform-to-platform, begrudgingly with fall damage still present. Healing is done via pools of blue liquid and while this is the home of many a foe fought throughout Black Mesa, there’s still new enemies to battle. The player takes on a gonarch; a very phallic looking final form for the headcrab, before warping his way to an alien factory. A claustrophobic network of winding tunnels in which the alien soldiers are manufactured. Once through there, Gordon finally reaches the source of the game’s opening catastrophe, the Nihilanth. This is the only traditional boss encounter in the game and while the fight is challenging, the times the creature unavoidably teleports you away does hamper the pacing. It’s obvious that Valve needed a means for the player to refill their ammunition in other parts of Xen but getting out of these external areas and back to the boss fight can be very tedious.
On that note, Half Life doesn’t make the mark in every area when held under scrutiny; while the platforming does break up the pacing nicely, there are moments of cheapness. At the end of the chapter: “Blast Pit” there’s a large pipeline that collapses beneath you; the player must land precisely on the table of health packs or Gordon dies instantly, resulting in a fair amount of frustration. During “Surface Tension” there’s an air vent sequence filled with deadly snark bugs, who are very difficult to kill without taking damage. The final portion of the game that takes place in Xen is also quite jarring as the player needs to adjust to a new set of gameplay rules and a greater sense of disorientation. These moments stick out because in every other aspect, Half-Life’s pacing, gameplay and story reach near-impeccable levels. It is, as Gamespot put it in 1998; “The closest to a revolutionary step the genre has ever taken”.
Still, the ending certainly makes up for a somewhat frustrating final encounter; the destruction of Nihilanth finally closes the portal between dimensions but Gordon does not return home. Instead he is picked up by the elusive G-Man, who remains one of the most mysterious and cryptic characters ever created for a video game. Players with a keen eye will notice the smartly dressed figure at Half-Life’s opening, discussing the experiment with a scientist and quietly observing the player from a distance at several points throughout the campaign. He offers Gordon a choice; step into the portal to work for him and his unseen employers or die, a rousing conclusion to a harrowing ride.
The legacy Half-Life left can be seen in several areas; future entries in the franchise, other FPS games, the expansions Opposing Force, Blue Shift and Decay (All developed by Gearbox Software from 1999 to 2001) and the fan remake Black Mesa. On top of all these expanded efforts, the game’s modding community took off from day one, generating countless creative ventures from Counter-Strike to They Hunger. By stamping itself onto the gaming scene from day one, the Half-Life franchise would explode in popularity at a rapid pace. Even after twenty years, the game that started it all is still a blast to play through. Half-Life may be long past its prime with Valve having all but left the development scene in favour of pure business but without their first release in 1998, they never would have achieved an ounce of their success. It will continue to be celebrated for years to come.
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