Half-Life (video game): Difference between revisions

Half-Life is a

Unlike other games of its time, the player has almost uninterrupted control of the player character, and the story is told mostly in scripted sequences rather than cutscenes. Valve co-founder Gabe Newell said that the team was disappointed with the lack of innovation in the FPS genre, and aimed to create an immersive world rather than a "shooting gallery". Valve developed using GoldSrc, a heavily modified version of the Quake engine, licensed from id Software. Science fiction novelist Marc Laidlaw was hired to shape the story and assist design.

Half-Life received acclaim for its graphics, realistic gameplay and seamless narrative, and won over 50

Half-Life is a

Half-Life includes online multiplayer support for both individual and team-based deathmatch modes.^[2]

Plot

Theoretical physicist

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 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 an immensely powerful 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 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

Development

Valve, based in Kirkland, Washington, was founded in 1996 by 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), Stephen King's 1980 novella The Mist, and a 1963 episode of The Outer Limits titled "The Borderland".^[9] According to 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.^[10] 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.^[11]

Valve struggled to find a publisher, as many believed the game was too ambitious for a first-time developer.

Valve aimed for a November 1997 release to compete with Quake II.^[15][16] 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.^[15] 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.^[15] When the rest of the team played the level, which designer Ken Birdwell described as "Die Hard meets Evil Dead", they agreed to use it as a baseline.^[15] 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.^[15]

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.^[15] 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.^[15]

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 science fiction novelist Marc Laidlaw to help manage the script.^[10][15] 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."^[17] 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.^[17] For example, he conceived the opening train ride after an engineer implemented train code for another concept.^[17]

Within a month of the cabal's formation, the other team members started detailed game development, and within another month began

Much of the detail of Half-Life's development has been lost; according to 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.^[18]

Release

Half-Life was released in November 1998.^[19] The revised version of Half-Life shown at E3 1998 was given Game Critics Awards for "Best PC Game" and "Best Action Game".^[16] 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.^[20] 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.^[21] The film's protagonist is a journalist who infiltrates the Black Mesa Research Facility, trying to discover what has happened there.^[22]

Half-Life was heavily censored for its German release as to comply with the Federal Department for Media Harmful to Young Persons (BPjM by its German abbreviation). Newell had stated at the time of Half-Life's release that to comply with the BPjM's regulations on violence against humans, they had to replace all the humans in the game with robots, replacing any blood with oil and body parts with gears, among other changes. This allowed for the game to be released but was placed on a list maintained by BPjM that prevent sales of the game to anyone under 18 years old. In 2017, BPjM removed Half-Life from its list, and to acknowledge this, Valve released Half-Life Uncensored, free downloadable content for those in Germany to patch Half-Life and revert these changes.^[23]

Reception

Sales

According to Newell, Half-Life was budgeted with the expectation of lifetime sales around 180,000 units.^[24] However, following its November 19 release,^[25] the game became a surprise hit.^[24] In the United States, Half-Life debuted at #8 on PC Data's weekly computer game sales chart for the November 15–21 period, with an average retail price (ARP) of $49.^[26] It rose to sixth place the following week,^[27] before dropping to position 10 for the week ending December 5.^[28] During the December 6–12 period, the game climbed back to sixth place; by this time, its ARP had dropped to $36.^[29] It placed between sixth and eighth on PC Data's weekly charts through the end of December,^[30][31][32] and its ARP rose back to $45 by the week ending January 2.^[32] PC Data declared Half-Life November's sixth-best-selling computer game in the United States,^[33] a position it held for the month of December.^[34] While its US sales were below 100,000 copies by November 30,^[25] by 1999 it had sold 212,173 copies and earned revenues of $8.6 million in the United States by the end of 1998.^[35]

In January 1999, Half-Life debuted at #3 on

After maintaining the 16th place for May in the US,[54] Half-Life exited PC Data's monthly top 20 in June.^[55] Half-Life became the fifth-bestselling computer game of the first half of 1999 in the US.^[56] Its domestic sales during 1999 reached 290,000 copies by the end of September.^[57] During 1999, it was the fifth best-selling computer game in the US, with sales of 445,123 copies. These sales brought in revenues of $16.6 million, the sixth-highest gross that year for a computer game in the US.^[58] The following year, it was the 16th best-selling computer game in the US, selling another 286,593 copies and earning $8.98 million.^[59]

The PlayStation 2 version received a "Silver" sales award from the

Half-Life has a score of 96 out of 100 on aggregate review website Metacritic. Computer Gaming World's Jeff Green said that the game "is not just one of the best games of the year. It's one of the best games of any year, an instant classic that is miles better than any of its immediate competition, and – in its single-player form – is the best shooter since the original Doom".^[69] IGN described it as "a tour de force in game design, the definitive single player game in a first-person shooter".^[2] GameSpot said it was the "closest thing to a revolutionary step the genre has ever taken".^[71]

Next Generation reviewed the PC version of the game, rating it five stars out of five, and stated that "It is fast paced, it is dramatic, and it brings the very idea of adventure on a PC out of the dark ages and into a 3D world. All that and not a single Orc in sight."^[72]

Several reviewers cited the level of immersion and interactivity as revolutionary.

The final portion of the game, taking place in the alien world of Xen, was generally considered the weakest. Besides introducing a wholly new and alien setting, it also featured a number of low-gravity jumping puzzles. The GoldSrc engine did not provide as much precise control for the player during jumping, making these jumps difficult and often with Freeman falling into a void and the player restarting the game.[77]^[78] Wired's Julie Muncy called the Xen sequence "an abbreviated, unpleasant stop on an alien world with bad platforming and a boss fight against what appeared, by all accounts, to be a giant floating infant".^[79]

During the 2nd Annual

Jeff Lundrigan reviewed the PlayStation 2 version of the game for Next Generation, rating it three stars out of five, and stated that "It may be getting old, but there's still a surprising amount of life in Half-Life".^[73] the PlayStation 2 version of Half-Life was a nominee for The Electric Playground's 2001 Blister Awards for "Best Console Shooter Game", but lost to Halo: Combat Evolved for Xbox.^[81]

In the November 1999, October 2001, and April 2005 issues of

Captivation Digital Laboratories and Gearbox Software developed a port of Half-Life for the Dreamcast, with new character models and textures and an exclusive expansion, Blue Shift.^[93] Following the cancellations of several third-party Dreamcast games in the wake of Sega's decision to discontinue the console in March 2001, Sierra cancelled the port weeks before its scheduled release in June, citing "changing marketing conditions".^[94][95] Blue Shift was ported to Windows.^[96] The Dreamcast port became the basis of the Half-Life port for PlayStation 2, released in late 2001. This version added competitive play and a co-op expansion, Half-Life: Decay.^[97] A late build of the Dreamcast version was eventually leaked onto the internet.^[94]

A version of Half-Life for

In 2004, Valve released Half-Life: Source, a version of Half-Life created in their new game engine, Source. It includes no new graphical elements, but adds new physics and water effects, and 5.1 surround sound.^[101] Black Mesa, a third-party remake of Half-Life developed by Crowbar Collective in the Source engine, was published as a free mod in September 2012. It was then approved by Valve for a commercial release.^[102][103] The full version was released on March 6, 2020, for Windows and Linux.^{[citation needed]}

Expansions

Half-Life was followed by an