Half-Life (series)

• 1. Introduction

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  Half-Life is a series of first-person shooter games from the studio Valve, and its hero never says a word. Gordon Freeman is a scientist at the Black Mesa Research Facility, and the player sees everything through his eyes. The first game appeared on the 19th of November 1998 and was Valve's first product. The games blend shooting combat, puzzles and storytelling, always from that single viewpoint. What made a first product from a new studio so influential? Who else got to tell stories in this world? And why did the main story stall for years before it returned?

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• 2. Black Mesa Origins

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  Valve was founded in 1996 in Kirkland, Washington, by two former Microsoft employees, Mike Harrington and Gabe Newell. The company began work on Half-Life soon after. It settled on a horror-themed 3D action game and licensed the Quake engine from id Software. At the 1997 E3 convention the game became a hit, thanks to a demonstration of its animation system and artificial intelligence.

  Sierra On-Line published the finished game for Windows. The player is a theoretical physicist at Black Mesa, where an experiment accidentally tears open a dimensional rift and triggers an alien invasion. Most shooters of the era kept taking control away from the player. Half-Life mostly did not. Control of Freeman stayed almost constant, and scripted sequences told the story in place of cutscenes.

  Reviewers praised the graphics, the gameplay and the seamless narrative, and the game collected over 50 Game of the Year awards. Players also took it apart and rebuilt it. Community-made mods grew out of the game, and two of them became the multiplayer titles Counter-Strike and Day of Defeat.

  A demo released on the 12th of February 1999 carried a chapter missing from the full game. It was called Half-Life Uplink, and it sits in an alternate timeline. Freeman reconfigures a transmitter to enter the Lambda Reactor Complex. Inside, he is trapped in a room with a large Gargantua and cannot escape.

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• 3. Gearbox Expansions

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  Opposing Force was announced on the 15th of April 1999. It was built by Gearbox Software, a new company based in Plano, Texas. Gearbox founder Randy Pitchford said Valve gave them the project so that Valve could focus on future games. The expansion was shown at the 1999 E3 convention, where new locations, characters and story details were revealed.

  Gearbox then made Blue Shift, which Sierra Entertainment announced on the 30th of August 2000. It began as a bonus campaign for a Dreamcast port of Half-Life, with models and textures at double the polygon count of the originals. After several months of delays, the Dreamcast version was cancelled. Blue Shift arrived on Windows on the 12th of June 2001.

  In Blue Shift the player is Barney Calhoun, a Black Mesa security guard. He tries to escape the facility with a small group of scientists, during the early part of the original story. A High Definition pack upgraded the models and textures in Blue Shift, Half-Life, Opposing Force and Team Fortress. Critics liked the atmosphere and the new graphics, but they noticed the short length and the lack of new material.

  Decay, the third expansion, came out on the 14th of November 2001, exclusively with the PlayStation 2 version of Half-Life. It is the only cooperative game in the series, and two players must work together to progress. They play Gina Cross and Colette Green, two of Freeman's colleagues, who help other scientists counter the dimensional rift and try to close it. Reviewers found it fun with a friend, though its puzzle focus held it back. Gearbox had first shown Decay at E3 2001, with model sets around twice as detailed as those in Blue Shift. An unofficial Windows port followed in September 2008.

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• 4. Source and Steam

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  Half-Life 2 reached players on the 16th of November 2004, after a development cycle of six years. The road was rough. Delays piled up, and the game's source code leaked in October 2003. Valve had worked on it in secret, building a new engine called Source. It shipped with a heavily modified version of the Havok physics engine, which let objects in the world react in new ways, in both single-player and online play.

  The story jumps twenty years past the first game. Earth is occupied by the Combine, a transdimensional race that exploited the events at Black Mesa to invade. The G-Man places Freeman in City 17 in Eastern Europe to fight the occupation. Reviewers praised the animation, sound, narration, graphics, artificial intelligence and physics, and the game won more than 35 Game of the Year awards. It was also the first game to use Steam, Valve's digital delivery system. That system eventually led to a falling out with publisher Sierra Entertainment.

  On the 27th of October 2005, Valve released Lost Coast, a single map built to show off high-dynamic-range rendering. It drew on a segment cut from Half-Life 2. Freeman climbs a cliff to destroy a Combine artillery launcher in a monastery.

  In May 2006, Valve announced a trilogy of episodes to continue the Half-Life 2 story. Newell said the format would get products out faster after the six-year wait, and he considered the trilogy the equivalent of Half-Life 3. He described an arc across the games. In Half-Life the G-Man turned Freeman into his tool, in Half-Life 2 he used him, and in the episodes he would lose control.

  Episode One came out on the 1st of June 2006. Freeman and Alyx escape City 17 before a dark energy reactor core destroys it. The episode added new lighting features and more advanced facial animation, and Valve modified Alyx's AI so she could react to what the player did. The story centers on Alyx. Reviews were generally positive, though many complained about the short length.

  Episode Two followed on the 10th of October 2007, for Windows, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, as part of the compilation The Orange Box. It was sold digitally on Steam and at retail by Electronic Arts. Freeman and Alyx travel into the surrounding countryside, pursued by Combine forces, across larger environments and less linear play. Reviewers praised its new technology and features, and length was again the complaint, even though it ran significantly longer than Episode One. The planned third episode, which Valve had scheduled by Christmas 2007, would one day land on the list of cancelled games.

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• 5. Creatures and Lambda

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  Headcrabs are parasitic aliens that latch onto a person's head and turn the victim into a mindless zombie. Some are used as biological weapons. They are only one of many species in the series, and many come from Xen, a border world. Vortigaunts are highly intelligent aliens who often help Freeman after he saves them from oppression. Antlions are human-sized burrowing insectoids. Bullsquids are tentacled predators that shoot acid. Barnacles are amorphous creatures that cling to ceilings and snare victims with sticky tongues.

  The human cast is just as distinctive. The G-Man is an enigmatic businessman with powers beyond any ordinary human, and he hired Freeman and placed him in stasis. The expansions added their own heroes, such as Shephard and Calhoun, and Calhoun returns in the Half-Life 2 games. Half-Life 2 then introduced a smaller, more focused group fighting the oppressive Combine Empire. Among them is Alyx Vance, a prominent member of the resistance and the daughter of Eli Vance, a former Black Mesa scientist.

  The series has one recurring symbol, the Greek letter lambda. It first appears on Freeman's HEV suit, and it names the Lambda Complex, which teleports him to Xen to shut the portal. In Half-Life 2 it returns as the emblem of the resistance against the Combine. Critics have praised the depth of this fictional universe. Some of its creatures would later wander far outside Valve's own games.

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• 6. Beyond the Main Line

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  In April 2000, Valve acquired the rights to the fan-made modification Counter-Strike. After working with the original team, Valve sold it at retail as Half-Life: Counter-Strike. Players join teams of counter-terrorist forces or of terrorist militants, in locations around the world with little tie to the main story. Because it began as a Half-Life mod, it shared assets with the 1998 game, including Black Mesa containers, vehicles and scientists. Black Mesa logos on several maps place it implicitly in the same universe. It was bundled with Half-Life in later packages, including Half-Life: Platinum Pack and Half-Life: Platinum.

  When the game was remade as Counter-Strike: Source, it came bundled with every retail version of Half-Life 2 and with all the initial digital versions. Some journalists called it the multiplayer version of Half-Life 2. The Collector's Edition and the digital Gold edition also included Day of Defeat: Source and Half-Life: Source. Counter-Strike grew into its own series and gradually drifted from the main games. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive still carries an Easter egg that references Portal.

  Portal, a first-person puzzle game built around a gun that creates wormholes, shares the Half-Life universe. It was released on the 10th of October 2007, and Portal 2 followed on the 19th of April 2011. Half-Life writer Marc Laidlaw opposed the crossover, feeling it made both universes smaller. He later said, "I just had to react as gracefully as I could to the fact that it was going there without me. It didn't make any sense except from a resource-restricted point of view."

  Fans and outside studios kept building. Codename Gordon, a two-dimensional Flash sidescroller from NuclearVision, appeared on Steam on the 18th of May 2004 to promote the upcoming Half-Life 2. Garry's Mod began as a sandbox mode using Half-Life 2 assets and became a commercial product. Minerva is a fan campaign designed to extend the Half-Life 2 story. Crowbar Collective's Black Mesa, a remake of the original game in the Source engine, began as a free mod in September 2012. Valve approved it for commercial release, and it was fully released for Windows and Linux on the 6th of March 2020. Reviewers likened it to an official Valve game. On OpenCritic it holds an average score of 87 out of 100, with 100 percent approval across 14 reviews.

  Half-Life characters have also made cameos elsewhere. Peggle Extreme, bundled with the PC version of The Orange Box, has levels based on Half-Life 2, Team Fortress 2 and Portal. The headcrab is an unlockable character in Super Meat Boy and a pet in Torchlight 2. It also turned up as an April Fools event item in the MMO Vindictus, alongside the Crowbar. Magicka offers a playable character after a DLC that resembles the original zombie, crowbar in hand. Gordon also appears in Renegade Ops.

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• 7. Silence and Alyx

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  Designer Robin Walker said Valve used Half-Life games to "solve some interesting collision of technology and art that had reared itself". For the original, that meant expanding the role of narrative in shooters. For Half-Life 2, it meant exploring characters and physics, and the episodes refined those ideas. After that, Valve tried repeatedly to make more Half-Life games but could not settle on a direction. Its flat management structure made it hard for projects to gain momentum. Walker said the company never found a unifying idea that gave a sense of "wonderment, or opening, or expansion".

  The cancellations piled up. They included Episode Three, a version of Half-Life 3, Borealis, a Source 2 virtual reality spin-off, and games developed by Junction Point Studios and Arkane Studios. In January 2016, Laidlaw left Valve. He said he had tired of the shooter genre, and that he had "always hoped that we'd stumble into a more expansive vocabulary or grammar for storytelling within the FPS medium, one that would let you do more than shoot or push buttons, or push crates".

  In the mid-2010s, Valve began experimenting with virtual reality. The team built prototypes with several of its properties, including Portal, and found that Half-Life suited the medium best. Half-Life: Alyx entered production in 2016 on the new Source 2 engine. It had the largest team in Valve's history, including people from Campo Santo, a studio Valve acquired in 2018.

  Half-Life: Alyx was released for Windows on the 23rd of March 2020, and Valve called it its flagship virtual reality game. It is a prequel set five years before Half-Life 2. Players control Alyx as she and her father Eli establish the resistance against the Combine in City 17, and she works to uncover their mysterious "super-weapon". Gravity gloves let the player manipulate objects, much like the gravity gun in Half-Life 2, and the game supports all PC-compatible headsets. Reviewers at VG247, Tom's Hardware and Video Games Chronicle described it as the "killer app" for virtual reality. Years earlier, Valve's president had floated another route for these stories, which was film.

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• 8. Screens and Sales

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  On the 6th of February 2013, at the DICE conference, director J. J. Abrams and Gabe Newell announced a possible collaboration. Abrams said, "There's an idea we have for a game that we'd like to work with Valve on." Newell added, "We're going to figure out if we can make a Portal movie or Half-Life movie together." In an interview in March 2016, Abrams said he still planned to direct both films, and both were in the writing stage.

  Other filmmakers got there first. On the 15th of March 1999, the British marketing agency Cruise Control released a short film called Half-Life: Uplink, unrelated to the demo of the same name. It follows a journalist trying to infiltrate Black Mesa. Reception was very poor, and Sierra withdrew it after Sierra and Valve failed to resolve licensing issues with the agency.

  In early 2009, the Toronto film company the Purchase Brothers released Half-Life: Escape from City 17, a five-minute film based on Episode One. It mixes live-action footage with 3D animation made in the Source SDK, and Valve received it well. A sequel of nearly 15 minutes followed on the 25th of August 2010. Late in 2010, a trailer appeared for Beyond Black Mesa, an independent short directed by Brian Curtin that follows Adrian Shephard. The full film went online on the 21st of January 2011.

  In late 2008, Valve shared lifetime retail sales in a company profile in Game Informer magazine. The two main games had sold 15.8 million units at retail, 9.3 million for the first and 6.5 million for the second. The expansions had sold 1.9 million, with 1.1 million for Opposing Force and 800,000 for Blue Shift. Half-Life 2 expansions added 1.4 million units, all of them Episode One, by the end of November 2008. The Orange Box had sold 3 million units at retail by then. That put the franchise at around 18.8 million full games and approximately 6.3 million expansions.

  Those numbers left out digital sales. Half-Life: Counter-Strike had sold 4.2 million units standalone by the same time, and Counter-Strike: Source came bundled with every retail copy of Half-Life 2. Forbes reported that, with digital sales included, Half-Life 2 had sold over 12 million copies by February 2011.

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