Half-Life 1

Half-Life is a 1998 first-person shooter (FPS) developed by VALVe and published by Sierra Studios for Windows. It was Valve's first game and the start of the Half-Life series. Players control Gordon Freeman, a physicist trying to escape the Black Mesa Research Facility after a science experiment goes badly wrong and lets in a flood of aliens. The game mixes combat, exploration, and puzzle-solving throughout.

Valve wanted to make something more interesting than the shooters that were already out there less of a "shooting gallery" and more of a real world to explore. The game runs on GoldSrc, a modified version of the Quake Engine. Science fiction writer Marc Laidlaw was brought in to write the story. One of the things that made Half-Life stand out was that the player rarely loses control of Gordon the story plays out around you rather than through cutscenes.

Half-Life was widely praised for its graphics, gameplay, and storytelling, winning over 50 "Game of the Year" awards. It sold more than nine million copies by 2008 and is still considered one of the most important shooters ever made. The game was later ported to the PlayStation 2 in 2001, and to macOS and Linux in 2013.

Gameplay

The player fighting soldiers, a helicopter, and a gun turret in the chapter "Surface Tension"

Half-Life is a first-person shooter where you fight enemies and solve puzzles to move forward. Unlike most shooters of the time, it tells its story almost entirely through scripted events that happen around you rather than stopping the game for cutscenes. You play as Gordon Freeman from start to finish, and he never speaks or appears on screen you see everything through his eyes.

The game has no traditional levels. Instead, it's split into chapters whose names pop up briefly on screen as you progress. Each area flows directly into the next, keeping things feeling continuous.

Along the way you'll run into puzzles things like finding a path through conveyor belts, stacking boxes to climb somewhere, or turning a valve to blast an enemy with steam. Boss encounters aren't really about direct fights; they usually ask you to use the environment cleverly to bring something big down. Towards the end, you get a long-jump module for your suit, which is needed for the jumping sections in the alien world of Xen.

Security guards and scientists sometimes help you out, either by fighting alongside you, opening locked doors, or passing on information about the story. The alien enemies include headcrabs, vortigaunts, bullsquids, and zombie-like creatures, while you also go up against soldiers and black ops assassins.

Plot

Gordon Freeman works at the underground Black Mesa Research Facility as a theoretical physicist. During a routine experiment on a strange crystal, something goes horribly wrong a "resonance cascade" tears the facility apart and starts pulling in hostile aliens from another dimension.

When Gordon makes it to the surface, he discovers things are even worse: the US military has been sent in, not to rescue anyone, but to cover up the whole incident by killing everyone left alive. A surviving scientist tells Gordon he needs to reach the Lambda Complex to stop the alien invasion.

Gordon fights through rocket test chambers, waste facilities, alien-specimen labs, and the facility's surface, eventually making it to the Lambda Complex. Scientists there tell him a powerful alien creature is keeping the portal open. They send him through to the alien world, Xen, to deal with it.

In Xen, Gordon battles through strange landscapes, kills a massive creature called the Gonarch, and eventually finds and kills the Nihilanth the alien keeping the invasion going. Immediately after, a mysterious suited figure known only as the GMan appears. He claims his "employers" want to offer Gordon a job. If you accept, Freeman is put into stasis. If you refuse, you're sent to your death.

Development

Valve co-founder Gabe Newell in 2002

VALVe was founded in 1996 in Kirkland, Washington by former Microsoft employees Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington. Their plan for their first game was a horror-themed first-person shooter. Rather than building a new engine from scratch which would've been too much work for a small team they licensed the Quake Engine from id Software and built heavily on top of it. Newell later estimated that around 75% of the final engine code was written by Valve themselves.

Half-Life drew inspiration from Doom (1993) and Quake (1996), Stephen King's novella The Mist, and a 1963 episode of The Outer Limits (1963 TV series). The working title was Quiver, taken from the military base in The Mist. The final name, Half-Life, was chosen because it fit the scientific theme, wasn't a cliché, and had a natural visual symbol: the Greek letter λ (lambda), which represents the decay constant in the half-life equation.

Finding a publisher was tough; many thought Valve was too new and too ambitious. Eventually, Sierra On-Line signed them for a single-game deal, giving Valve around $1 million upfront in exchange for 30% of revenue. The rest of the development was funded personally by Newell and Harrington. The game was first shown in early 1997 and made a good impression at E3 that year.

By September 1997, though, things weren't going well. The game had interesting pieces, but felt scattered and wasn't fun to play. Playtesting got mixed responses. Sierra wouldn't give more money, so Newell took out a personal loan to fund more development time and push the release date back.

Valve's solution was to have a small team build a single prototype level containing every type of thing the game needed sort of a 'Die Hard meets Evil Dead experience. When the rest of the team played it, everyone agreed it worked. They figured out three things that made it click: the player controlled the pacing, the world reacted to everything the player did, and dangers were always telegraphed rather than sprung without warning.

To lock in a unified design, Valve formed a group called the "cabal" six people from across different departments who met for six hours a day, four days a week, for six months. They were responsible for designing levels, events, enemies, narrative, and how gameplay elements were introduced. Mini-cabals would then form within specific departments to carry out whatever the main group decided. Membership rotated to manage burnout.

The cabal produced a 200-page design document and a 30-page story document. Sci-fi novelist Marc Laidlaw was hired to help with the script. He described his job as bringing "old storytelling tricks" to the team's bold ideas, working alongside them rather than handing down a finished story from above. The opening train ride, for example, came about because an engineer had already coded a working train for something else.

Valve originally planned to use cutscenes, but switched to a continuous first-person perspective because they ran out of time. They ended up preferring it it created a stronger sense of immersion and made the loneliness and danger feel more real.

Playtesting was built into the process from an early stage. The cabal would watch players silently, note down anything confusing or broken, and fix it in the next version. Eventually they added tools to track player behavior statistically and fine-tune levels based on the data.

One awkward footnote: about two to three months before release, Valve's source control system crashed and destroyed much of the development history. Code had to be recovered from individual machines. Despite this, the revised version shown at E3 1998 picked up awards for "Best PC Game" and "Best Action Game."

Release

Half-Life launched on November 19, 1998. Valve's marketing chief Monica Harrington pushed Valve's profile in the industry with conference talks and press coverage, including a piece in the Wall Street Journal. When Sierra made clear it wasn't planning to do much promotional work after launch, Harrington threatened to go public about it. Sierra responded by reissuing the game in a "Game of the Year" edition, which helped sales. By 2001, Valve had renegotiated with Sierra and gained full control of the Half-Life intellectual property and online distribution rights.

Two playable demos were released. Half-Life: Day One covered the first fifth of the game and was bundled with certain graphics cards. Half-Life: Uplink came out on February 12, 1999, with original content not in the main game. A short film of the same name was also made by a British marketing agency, following a journalist who sneaks into Black Mesa.

In Germany, Half-Life was censored to comply with local media regulations around violence human characters were replaced with robots that spilled oil and gears instead of blood. In 2017, the game was removed from the German censorship list, and Valve released a free patch called Half-Life Uncensored to restore the original content.

Reception

Critical reception

Half-Life landed with near-universal praise. On Metacritic, it holds a score of 96 out of 100 for the PC version.

Computer Gaming World called it "not just one of the best games of the year" but "one of the best games of any year" and "the best shooter since the original Doom." IGN described it as "a tour de force in game design, the definitive single player game in a first-person shooter." GameSpot said it was the "closest thing to a revolutionary step the genre has ever taken." Next Generation wrote that it "brings the very idea of adventure on a PC out of the dark ages and into a 3D world."

Reviewers repeatedly pointed to the level of immersion as the game's biggest achievement. AllGame said it had "totally revolutionized an entire genre."

The one part of the game that consistently drew criticism was Xen, the alien world near the end. The jumping puzzles there were difficult because the GoldSrc engine didn't give players very precise control in the air, leading to a lot of frustrating falls. Wired later described Xen as "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."

At the AIAS' 2nd Annual Interactive Achievement Awards, Half-Life won "Computer Entertainment Title of the Year" and "PC Action Game of the Year."

PC Gamer named it the best PC game of all time in 1999, 2001, and 2005. In 2004, GameSpy readers voted it the best game of all time. Gamasutra gave it their Quantum Leap Award for the FPS category in 2006. GameSpot added it to their Greatest Games of All Time list in 2007. IGN wrote in 2013 that the history of the FPS genre "breaks down pretty cleanly into pre-Half-Life and post-Half-Life eras." The Guardian ranked it the third-greatest game of the 1990s in 2021.

Sales

Valve originally expected Half-Life to sell around 180,000 copies total a modest target. It blew past that quickly. By the end of 1998, it had sold over 212,000 copies in the US alone and brought in $8.6 million in revenue. Global sales passed 500,000 units by January 19, 1999 just two months after launch.

By April 1999, global sales were approaching 1 million. By July 2001, they had reached 2.5 million. By late 2004, eight million copies had been sold, and by 2008 the number was 9.3 million. Guinness World Records recognized it as the best-selling first-person shooter of all time on PC in their 2008 Gamer's Edition.

The PlayStation 2 version earned a "Silver" sales award from the Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association, indicating at least 100,000 copies sold in the UK.

Expansions and sequels

Half-Life was followed by two expansion packs developed by Gearbox Software. Opposing Force came out in November 1999, putting players in the boots of a marine sent into Black Mesa who ends up fighting alongside Freeman's former enemies. Blue Shift followed in June 2001, telling the story through the eyes of a security guard named Barney Calhoun. A third expansion, Decay, was made exclusively for the PlayStation 2 port a co-op campaign following two Black Mesa scientists.

Half-Life 2 was announced at E3 2003 and released in 2004. Set 20 years later, it follows Freeman in a city under alien occupation. Two episodic follow-ups came out: Half-Life 2: Episode One in 2006 and Half-Life 2: Episode Two in 2007. After a long gap and several cancelled projects, Valve returned to the series with Half-Life: Alyx in 2020, a VR-exclusive prequel set between the events of the first two games.