Half-Life
By Matt Warner / April 10, 2008
Please be aware that this review contains major spoilers.
First, a bit of history.
While Half-Life remains a pretty excellent game to play through, what really completes the picture is when you consider when it came out in addition to how.
'Cause here's the thing. The original Half-Life has been safely ensconced in the annals of gaming history at this point as not only the victor of, but the paradigm shifter for all late-'90s FPS development. It pretty much goes Doom, Half-Life, Halo. You can add Quake and Duke Nukem 3D in there as footnotes, though I assure you they were much bigger deals at the time. The Big Three are all anyone pretty much remembers at this point though, and Halo's biggest contribution was to take the genre to consoles in force, something GoldenEye had paved the way for but not really managed on the same scale.
At the time Half-Life was slated to be released, though, most PC magazines were yelling in bold about it, SiN, and Prey, which were to be the next generation of FPS games. Of the three, Half-Life seemed the most conservative, appearing to be just a standard pretty shooter, and Prey was the most mysterious, with very little known about it besides that it had good lighting and was going to attempt to pull off some clever things that couldn't be talked about. Most screenshots of it meanwhile just showed some blank stages with no enemies. Eventually, Prey would drop off the face of the earth and everyone would assume it was dead, only to resurface in 2006 as a finished title and be released to moderately positive reviews [Not from this website though. --Ed]. Where had it been all this time? The history of Prey is actually pretty interesting, but that's another article entirely.
SiN was usually pegged as the forerunner at the time; there were huge 19-page spreads in magazines, screenshots galore and all kinds of PR frippery that, adjusting for game-popularity inflation and the fact that this was a PC-only release, was roughly the equivalent of the Halo 2 fanfare for its time. The game was the spiritual sequel to the exceedingly popular Duke Nukem 3D, and promised an epic sci-fi storyline, ridiculous depth of interactivity, strong narrative and characters, and level design that removed the "levels" and allowed for a big, cohesive world, which was a new concept at the time.
It was then released on Halloween in '98 and was pretty much instantly forgotten after the holiday season had wrapped up.
Two reasons for this.
One, the game was buggy as hell, had minute-long load times for everything (including player death), and had fairly ridiculous system requirements for the time. The load times in particular were the real killer. Imagine if every time you died in Halo you had to wait a minute to a minute and a half. Really. Sit there and count off ninety seconds. That's a long time. That'll single-handedly kill a game right there. The very first Penny Arcade comic is, in fact, about this problem with SiN.
Two, Half-Life was released right after SiN.
When this sucker landed in review offices, several magazines had to invent new tiers of quality to express how good it was. I remember PCXL giving it an 11/10 and the entire review was basically them talking in stunned tones about how nothing was going to be the same now (and hey, they were right).
If you've never seen it, Half-Life starts with a long train ride, as your character, a theoretical physicist named Gordon Freeman, goes to work.
That in and of itself blew some minds right there. Nearly every FPS up to this point had just cut straight to the explody bits, often before the player even knew what was going on. Plot in an FPS was sort of viewed the same way one might view the plot to a porno. You had your overall themes to choose from, and your game was expected to fit loosely within one of them (sci-fi, horror, naughty nurses, whatever), but the actual script wasn't supposed to get in the way of the action. It was just there to give a rough rationale for what was going on and move things from one set piece to another.
Half-Life took gun porn and gave it purpose.
The entire half-hour introduction to the game sets the stage. You, as Gordon, head in to work, chat with your co-workers, and find out that you're to take part in some kind of experiment today that the other higher-up scientists speak in hushed tones about, mentioning that today's sample is particularly pure, and that the administrator went through "some lengths to get it". Once you're in the chamber, you begin activating a huge, impressive looking machine that's going to emit some rays through a sample of what appears to be some kind of huge gemstone.
As you might imagine, as soon as the gem hits the beam, all hell breaks loose.
Thus begins the game proper, but the long introduction and continually changing landscape from that point forward thrust the player into one of the coolest interactive action movies ever made. You don't have any clear-cut objectives; you're just trying to get the hell out of there, as other scientists you meet mention trying to get out of the lab and back up to the surface. It quickly becomes clear that your experiment ripped a hole through which assorted bad things are pouring out, everything from what appear to be alien soldiers to the memorable headcrabs, little tan-colored parasites that leap on people's heads and transform them into something else. And so it goes from there.
As you move towards the surface, you eventually discover that the military has been called in, but with strict shoot-on-sight orders for everyone involved. So not only are you fighting against the incoming aliens, but against human opponents as well looking to close down everything and eliminate all witnesses -- human opponents with really good aim and an irritating-if-impressive tendency to throw grenades to flush you out of hiding, displaying a level of A.I. that was unmatched for its time.
Eventually, you fight your way through the aliens and the military and find that the scientists in another section of the lab have a teleporter of their own, and have been sending people into this alternate world (dubbed "Xen") for quite some time now; this is simply the first time the aliens have managed to open a hole back in to Earth. One guess where you're headed for the endgame!
While the plot is honestly pretty juvenile and straightforward by the standards of pretty much any other medium, here it worked (and continues to work) because of how weirdly reserved it manages to be. Most games in the '90s were prone to really overblown, ridiculous storylines. It's a bit like how movies from countries without a long-established moviemaking industry tend to churn out films far more ridiculous than their Hollywood/West European/Japanese/Chinese counterparts.
So really, while plotwise Half-Life seems pretty unsophisticated in the light of what we're used to, consider the competition at the time: In SiN, your guy is an angry-looking black soldier-for-hire who's actually named "Blade", and the main antagonist of the game looks like this. Half-Life is already light-years more mature and I haven't even started to get into SiN's actual plot yet.
The plot is also surprisingly subversive in Half-Life, with lots of threads being intentionally dangled in front of the player as he moves forward. Frequently, you'd see a grey-suited man standing off to the side, watching. In fact, if you look for him, he starts showing up everywhere. You can never hurt him, and he never speaks. Just watches.
Other cryptic moments come from listening to the rantings of the final boss who you meet once you reach Xen. He'll prattle on in long, droning tones about how he's not even the real threat, and by killing him you're just bringing on the wrath of some obscure others who are responsible for making him look like he does (if you look closely, his lower half is all machines).
The ending is even more bizarre. The aforementioned grey-suited man appears out of nowhere and, displaying apparently reality-warping powers, explains in halting English that you've been quite useful in the outcome of the "Black Mesa incident" and would like to offer you a job (your alternative is to be fed to a bunch of aliens). He teleports you on to a train car, similar to the first one you stepped on at the beginning of the game, but this time moving through a star field with nothing else around you. The door opens and, if you step through it, the game simply ends. If you don't step through the door you get the slightly more conclusive ending of being stuck in a room with no weapons and lots of hostile aliens, so let's assume you go for option 1.
The other big thing Half-Life did here was establish something that would virtually come to define the entire genre, by having the first honest-to-God in-game cutscenes [In which case they are no longer cutscenes strictly-speaking, but you get his point. --Ed]. Never before (with the exception of SiN from a handful of weeks prior) had an action game featured scripted events that unfolded in front of you while you were playing.
Also notable, Gordon himself never speaks (and by extension neither do you). Characters will talk to you throughout the game, but you never respond. Likewise, the "camera" as it were is never taken from you. Everything unfolds as seen through Gordon's eyes, and that never changes throughout the entire game. All plot points, puzzles, and even cutscenes are presented in real-time and the game assumes you're physically looking at them in order to see them happen.
All this was, for the time, pretty revolutionary stuff. It's easy to go back now, especially after having played Halo or Call of Duty or any other big-name FPS, and miss the fact that Half-Life was the first game to really peg down many elements that are now considered to be must-haves for the genre. It's sort of like how Star Wars pioneered special effects back in 1977. Sure, they look sort of quaint these days, but it was doing stuff you Just Didn't See before then.
The game has also aged pretty well. I went back and replayed it and while it stumbles a bit near the end when the difficulty suddenly takes a huge spike and the mechanics get flipped around, this also accounts for one of the more interesting parts of the game. It's worth a play through not only to see where all this stuff originated, but how little it has changed since its inception. Half-Life still basically hits all the right notes a decade later. It's a little rough in spots but still acts as something of a development milestone. Here's where the genre really took a huge step forward.