Half-Life (video game)
Half-Life is a 1998 first-person shooter game developed by Valve Corporation and published by Sierra Studios for Windows. It was Valve's debut product and the first game in the Half-Life series. The player assumes the role of Gordon Freeman, a scientist who must escape from the Black Mesa Research Facility after it is overrun by aliens following a disastrous scientific experiment. The gameplay consists of combat, exploration and puzzles.
Valve was disappointed with the lack of innovation in the FPS genre and aimed to create an immersive world rather than a "shooting gallery". They developed using GoldSrc, a heavily modified version of the Quake engine, licensed from id Software. The science fiction novelist Marc Laidlaw was hired to craft the plot and assist with design. Unlike other games at the time, the player has almost uninterrupted control of the player character; the story is mostly conveyed through scripted sequences rather than cutscenes.
Half-Life received acclaim for its graphics, gameplay and narrative and won more than 50 PC "Game of the Year" awards. It is considered one of the most influential FPS games and one of the greatest video games. By 2008, it had sold more than nine million copies. It was ported to the PlayStation 2 in 2001, along with the multiplayer expansion Decay, and to OS X and Linux in 2013. Valve ported Half-Life to its game engine, Source, as Half-Life: Source in 2004. In 2020, Black Mesa was released, an unofficial fan-made remake of Half-Life developed by Crowbar Collective using the Source engine.
Half-Life inspired numerous fan-made mods, some of which became standalone games, such as Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat, and Sven Co-op. It was followed by the expansion packs Opposing Force and Blue Shift, developed by Gearbox Software, and the sequels Half-Life 2, Episode One, Episode Two and Half-Life: Alyx.
Gameplay
Half-Life is a first-person shooter that requires the player to perform combat tasks and solve puzzles to advance. Unlike most FPS games at the time, which relied on cut-scene intermissions to detail their plotlines, Half-Lifes story is told mostly using scripted sequences, 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, Gordon Freeman, 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 briefly appear on screen as the player progresses through the game. With the exception of short loading pauses, progression throughout the game is continuous, with each map directly connecting to the next, although levels with teleportation are an exception.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.
The player is occasionally assisted by security guards and scientists. The guards fight alongside the player, and both guards and scientists can assist in reaching new areas and pass on plot information. Alien enemies include headcrabs, bullsquids, vortigaunts, and headcrab zombies. The player also faces hostile human soldiers and Black Ops assassins. Half-Life includes online multiplayer support for both individual and team-based deathmatch modes. It was one of the first mainstream games to use the WASD keys as the default control scheme.
Plot
At the underground Black Mesa Research Facility, the theoretical physicist Gordon Freeman participates in an experiment on a crystal of unknown origin. This triggers a "resonance cascade", which greatly damages the facility and teleports in hostile alien creatures. Venturing to the surface, Freeman discovers U.S. federal government soldiers have been dispatched to cover up the incident by killing humans and aliens alike. A scientist instructs him to make his way to the Lambda Complex to stop the alien invasion.Freeman kills a giant creature inside a rocket engine test facility and uses an underground monorail to reach a rocket silo. He launches a satellite to help the Lambda team, but is captured by soldiers and left for dead in a trash compactor. Escaping through a waste treatment complex, Freeman travels through a part of Black Mesa filled with alien specimens, collected long before the resonance cascade.
Overpowered by the aliens, the soldiers withdraw. Freeman fights across their military base to reach the Lambda Complex, where he discovers secret teleportation technology. There, scientists inform him that a powerful alien creature is preventing them from closing the portal. They teleport him to the alien dimension Xen to kill it.
Freeman encounters dead scientists who teleported there before him. He kills a large alien, the Gonarch, and finds a factory that manufactures alien soldiers. Finally, he enters the Nihilanth's lair and kills it. Freeman is detained by the G-Man, a mysterious agent who claims his "employers" wish to hire Freeman. If he accepts, Freeman is placed into stasis; if not, he is teleported to his death.
Development
, based in Kirkland, Washington, U.S., was founded in 1996 by the former Microsoft employees Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington. For their first product, Valve settled on a concept for a horror first-person shooter game. They did not want to build their own game engine, as this would have created too much work for a small team and Newell planned to innovate in different areas. Instead, Valve licensed the Quake engine and the Quake II engine from id Software and combined them with their own code. Newell estimated that around 75% of the final engine code was by Valve. As the project expanded, Valve cancelled development of a fantasy role-playing game, Prospero, and the Prospero team joined the Half-Life project.Half-Life was inspired by the FPS games Doom and Quake, Stephen King's 1980 novella The Mist, and a 1963 episode of The Outer Limits titled "The Borderland". 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. 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, which represents the decay constant in the half-life equation. According to the designer Brett Johnson, the level design was inspired by environments in the manga series Akira.
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. Sierra gave Valve an advance of around $1 million in exchange for 30% of the revenue and 100% of the intellectual property; the rest of development was funded by Newell and Harrington. Valve first showed Half-Life in early 1997; it was a success at E3 that year, where Valve demonstrated the animation and artificial intelligence. Novel features of the artificial intelligence included fear and pack behavior.
Valve aimed for a November 1997 release to compete with Quake II. 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. Playtesting produced "lukewarm" responses. Sierra would not agree to extra funding, so Newell took out a loan to fund additional development to rework the game.
Valve 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. 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. 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.
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. 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.
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. Laidlaw said his contribution was to add "old storytelling tricks" to the team's ambitious designs: "I was in awe of . It felt to me like I was just borrowing from old standards while they were the ones doing something truly new." 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. For example, he conceived the opening train ride after an engineer implemented train code for another concept.
Valve initially planned to use traditional cutscenes, but switched to a continuous first-person perspective for lack of time. Laidlaw said they discovered unexpected advantages in this approach, as it created a sense of immersion and enforced a sense of loneliness in a frightening environment. Laidlaw felt that non-player characters were unnecessary to guide players if the design had sufficiently strong "visual grammar", and that this allowed the characters to "feel like characters instead of signposts". An early version of Half-Life began immediately after the disaster, with the environments already wrecked. Laidlaw worked with Johnson to create versions of the lab environment before the disaster to help set the story. He said: "These were all economical ways of doing storytelling with the architecture—which was my whole obsession. The narrative had to be baked into the corridors."
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. 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-Lifes success, and was reused for Team Fortress 2 from the start.
Much of the detail of Half-Life development has been lost. According to 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. The revised version of Half-Life shown at E3 1998 received the Game Critics Awards for "Best PC Game" and "Best Action Game".