The Impact Of: Half-life
We follow the journey that began with Gordon Freeman taking the train to work to explain how Valve’s revered series revolutionised game design and set the standards for the titles we are playing to this day
Valve’s David Speyrer, John Romero and many others explain the influence of Gordon Freeman’s adventures
We all knew Half-life was something special as soon as we stepped into the shoes of Gordon Freeman riding the train into the heart of the Black Mesa Research Facility back in 1998.
At that time, we were still accustomed to thinking about the spaces that games – and first-person shooters in particular – took place in as levels, an artifice providing the backdrop for gameplay to happen. Black Mesa was different. This was an environment. You weren’t dropped straight into a corridor with a gun in your hand and an enemy to use it on standing in front of you.
You were playing as a person arriving at work. Valve took the time to show you a workplace in operation, with people going about their daily business, and gave you some time to inhabit its protagonist as a normal person doing their job before everything went to hell.
“Gordon, and by extension the player, is there for the whole incident,” says Adam Engels, project lead on Black Mesa, the recently completed remake of the original Half-life. “You kick it off, you fight through the facility, you kill the big bad at the end. You are not dropped into someone else’s problem, and you have context for the whole adventure. I think, even to this day, it makes Half-life stand out.
“The facility itself seems not only huge but active,” continues Adam, reflecting on the worldbuilding that made Half-life feel so revelatory when he first encountered it. “Like the whole facility is operating just out of view. It helps what might be a cheesy sci-fi fantasy feel grounded and real.”
As Adam suggests, Half-life’s opening was indicative of the approach Valve took to designing the game at large. There was a concerted effort not to create a string of videogame levels that you would take on one after the other, but instead create a consistent place that felt believable and try and situate the player in it as a real space as much as possible.
Valve built a world that responded to you, where the scientists going about their business in the labs, break rooms and corridors of Black
Mesa would acknowledge your existence and react to the things you do (even to the point of pissing them off by exploding their casserole in the microwave). It’s a place where exposition isn’t presented to you on a platter, as if you are the centre of the universe, but where overheard conversations provide small details, the environment is used to help tell the story, and those with a keen eye are rewarded with unsettling appearances of the nefarious G-man lurking in the periphery. This kind of approach is now relatively commonplace, but at the time it represented a huge shift in the way we thought about games.
For David Speyrer, who is now a developer at Valve and worked on Half-life 2, the first Half-life had a profound impact. “My first exposure to Half-life was playing the ‘day one’
leaked build – but don’t judge me, those were different times!” David recalls. “My immediate reaction was, ‘This is amazing and important! I would love to make games like this.’ I found the seamless integration of storytelling and gameplay so compelling and transporting; I had never inhabited a videogame protagonist so completely. Jay Stelly and I had made games together all through high school and college, and he’d gone on to do loads of wonderful work on Half-life. He’d been encouraging me to apply to Valve, but I was busy and happy living in Boulder,” David continues. “Once I played ‘day one’ and realised what they had accomplished with Half-life, I didn’t need any more prodding. I came up for an interview on the day that Half-life went gold and happened to take the team photo during the shipping party. It was a memorable day. Back then, I considered Half-life important enough to change the course of my life.”
The sense that Half-life represented a fundamental shift in the way games would be designed was felt across the industry. Jonathan Chey, who was working on System Shock 2 at Looking Glass Studios at the time, remembers the terror he felt when he came to realise what Valve had achieved.
“I had a terrible sinking feeling when I first played Half-life,” Jonathan remembers. “How the hell were we going to compete with this? It redefined what was possible with a first-person shooter – the frenetic gameplay and wafer-thin worldbuilding of the past was gone in one stroke. Black Mesa felt like a real place populated with something other than just mindless enemies to be gunned down. It evolved the firstperson shooter genre into something entirely new, it demonstrated the power of in-engine storytelling and it pushed forward the state of the art in terms of weapon design and enemy behaviours. It’s hard to believe what an incredible statement it was.”
The in-engine cutscenes Jonathan references were integral to the ethos of what Valve was trying to achieve with Half-life. Situating you in the world meant making a commitment to never taking you out of it. “Gordon resonated because he became the player,” Adam argues. “Because he does not talk and because you never have control taken away from you, it is easy to see yourself as Gordon, not as a person controlling someone else.” By keeping you in control at all times and having narrative events happen to you as a player who is moving through the space where those events are happening, rather than a character in a cutscene, or a piece of text between stages, Half-life avoided the disjuncture that the games that came before it subjected you to. After Half-life, others began following Valve’s lead.
“I think the most enduring legacy of the Half-life franchise is the continuity of experience, weaving through action, narrative, puzzles, downtime and vistas while never breaking the first-person perspective,” David reflects. “Every time I experience what I think of as a ‘train ride’ in a first-person game, in which the player is taken on a linear journey through a bunch of environmental spectacle, I feel like I’m seeing the legacy of Half-life.”
Another area where Half-life delineated itself from what came before was in the behaviour of its enemies. More often than not, enemies in the games that preceded Half-life would do one of two things: run straight at you without any regard for their own safety, or stand fixed in one spot, robotically shooting at you until you took them down. In Half-life, things were very different. The marines that show up to lock down and wipe out any evidence of what happened at Black Mesa after you’ve spent some time battling the iconic Alien-esque Headcrabs, Vortigaunts and other assorted alien creatures, were a particular revelation to players accustomed to the dead-eyed dumbness of videogame enemies, showcasing an ability to work together and respond to what you were doing. They would retreat and take cover, force you out from hiding with grenades and flank you. That the idea of marines as an elite force of trained soldiers was
being realised (albeit in a rudimentary way) in the way they behaved in-game was mind-blowing, and forced the games that came after to place far more focus on enemy AI that would act in more interesting ways and present more engaging challenges to the player.
Jonathan reveals that, though the team was late in development, the innovations that Half-life made were significant enough that Looking Glass Studios felt compelled to try and incorporate some of its lessons into System Shock 2. “Although System Shock had already established itself as something distinct from the Doom-style run-and-gun shooters in terms of its commitment to worldbuilding and simulation, Half-life showed us how to blend some of those ideas with more accessible gameplay mechanics,” he explains. “The controls were simple, but the world and challenges in it were not. System Shock 2 was not a Half-life-style game – it was slower, more free-form, contained RPG mechanics and differed in many other ways – but it drew (late) lessons from what we saw in Half-life. Although we didn’t have the development resources or the time to reproduce the kinds of things we saw in Half-life on System Shock 2, we, along with every other developer, knew that we’d have to reach that bar in the future.
“I think every FPS made since Half-life has been extensively influenced by it,” Jonathan continues, speaking of the broader influence of the game. “It made developers pay attention to level-building as something more than just constructing combat arenas. It showed how to use in-engine animated sequences to tell a story without breaking out into prerendered cutscenes, and it demonstrated how more complex enemy behaviours, animation and audio could result in deeper combat experiences.”
Not many games have had the kind of far-reaching impact that Half-life did, but what makes Half-life so special is that this series didn’t settle for changing the shape of gaming once. It did it twice.
Half-life’s story had left the potential for a sequel open, with plenty of questions
“I THINK EVERY FPS MADE SINCE HALF-LIFE HAS BEEN EXTENSIVELY INFLUENCED BY IT” JONATHAN CHEY
unanswered, particularly through the fascinating character that is the G-man, who could frequently be spotted following your progress throughout the game. “G-man works because people love a good mystery,” Adam suggests. “The way he keeps ominously and casually showing up throughout your adventures really helps build him up within the player’s mind. To paraphrase someone else, the theatre of your mind is way more interesting than anything you could put on-screen. G-man feels like a threat without him ever really talking much or showing much emotion.”
This tantalising narrative justification for a sequel was bolstered by the huge critical and commercial success of Half-life, the game selling one million copies by April of 1999, a mere five months after its release. A follow-up seemed inevitable and indeed, in 2004, the hotly anticipated sequel, Half-life 2, was released.
Half-life 2 began in the same way as its predecessor: with Gordon Freeman arriving on a train. As well as being a deliberate echo of the first game, this felt like a statement of principle, a recommitment to the ideas that made Half-life such a success. You were arriving in a world that wanted to convince that you could be in a real place. That world was the incredible City 17, a dystopic Eastern-european-inspired city overseen by the oppressive alien Combine. In introducing us to and building a vivid picture of this place, the game did much of what the original Half-life did, but better. It gave you a taste of what people’s day-to-day life was like as you moved through it, showed you what this city was like to live in through gameplay rather than exposition – having a bullying guard force you to pick up a can he knocks on the floor – and told you stories via its environment, the dilapidated ships that lay abandoned in barren landscapes where water once flowed gesturing with characteristic subtlety to the impact the Combine has had on this world, to give just one example. It fleshed out the idea of picking out information from stolen moments of conversation, using PA announcements to give you a flavour of how the Combine rules here, and created more rounded and believable characters for you to interact with. Even the game’s architecture was effectively employed as a way to give the player information without relying on exposition, functioning as a visual representation of what kind of force the Combine was and what it was doing to the city via the steel of its brutally angular buildings jutting into the city’s traditional architecture.
Half-life played a huge role in establishing the idea of videogame levels as real places rather than shooting galleries. Half-life 2 added a depth and richness that the games that came after would try to emulate once again. But it was not just an aesthetic success. “The level design of both games was excellent, especially Half-life 2,” says another great influencer of the FPS genre, Doom and Quake designer John Romero, who cites Half-life 2 as a game that “raised the bar in design”.
The game was designed in such a way that the world felt incredibly open and free, whilst subtly guiding the player on the path they were supposed to take and arming them with the knowledge they would need to do it without them even knowing it. “Half-life 2 and its Episodes set a new standard for teaching the player and layering design mechanics to make the player not only feel powerful, but in control,” Adam says. Half-life 2 was great at showing you how things work, rather than telling you. When it introduced new ideas, it would typically take a gradual approach, showing you a mechanic with zero pressure, in its simplest form, then ramping up the danger or complexity associated with it as you encounter it again and again. For example, there’s a moment where the game forces you through a narrow gap with barrels that you have to push past, inevitably sending one rolling down the hill in front of you, where it gets hooked and reeled in by the hanging tongue of a Barnacle. You now know that you can effectively feed Barnacles objects to get those pesky tongues out the way and get past them. Then, immediately after that, you find some explosive barrels (which you already know are explosive by this point). You can’t help but put two and two together and realise that you can feed this to the Barnacles, set it alight with a gunshot and blow them all away to clear the area. Plenty of games have failed to learn this lesson, continuing to bore us with clunky tutorials, but those that have been wise enough to learn from this approach have emulated it again and again in the years since the game’s release.
Six years having passed since the release of the first Half-life, Half-life 2 naturally took leaps forward from a technical perspective. Even more so than its predecessor, those technical innovations would have a huge influence going forward. “The timing of those games at a moment in gaming that was rich with technical opportunities came into play,” says David on the series’ impact. “On Half-life, skeletal animation and AI were opportunities for innovation. On Half-life 2, rigid body physics, facial animation, materials and shaders were all becoming possible in real time. Going after those technical innovations and exploring the implications of them created the pillars of the product.”
The game was heavily praised for its stunning visual effects and incredible facial animation – the latter a big part of what made the character of Alyx work, small movements of her face able to communicate emotion without her having to say anything. Again, Valve had set a new bar for what was to come.
While those facial animations and the games stunning visuals were influential, it was unquestionably the game’s pioneering use of physics that would have the greatest impact from a technical perspective.
We’re now so used to knocking over and throwing objects around in games that it can be easy to forgot how novel this once was. Half-life 2 was the game that made these kinds of physics-based interactions into something that would become commonplace. Going back
“GOING AFTER THOSE TECHNICAL INNOVATIONS AND EXPLORING THE IMPLICATIONS OF THEM CREATED THE PILLARS OF THE PRODUCT” DAVID SPEYRER