An alien invasion spurred on by the actions of an evil corporation helped set the stage for one of the most revolutionary first-person shooters of all time: Half-Life. The game, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, was the result of the developers wanting to create an immersive world and interesting story rather than just a “shooting gallery” for players to interact with.
On August 24, 1996, former Microsoft employees Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington founded Valve, LLC in Kirkland, Washington. The pair secured the rights to use the Quake engine from their friend Mike Abrash, another former Microsoft employee who was then working for id Software. After significantly modifying the engine and renaming it GoldSrc, they quickly went to work on the company’s first game, Half-Life. However, they initially had trouble finding a publisher willing to take a chance on a new developer. Finally Sierra On-Line stepped in and agreed to a publishing deal with Valve, releasing the game on November 19, 1998.
Half-Life, a first-person shooter which also incorporates puzzles, tells its immersive story completely without cutscenes, instead using scripted sequences which are integrated into the gameplay. The game takes place in the fictional Black Mesa Research Facility in New Mexico. There, Dr. Gordon Freeman (the player character) participates in a lab experiment which goes horribly wrong and opens a portal to another dimension called Xen, releasing hostile alien creatures into the facility. Freeman must battle both the Xenian creatures and a special government unit sent to cover up the incident by eliminating the aliens as well as all of the surviving lab employees.
After escaping from the lab, Freeman must face off against the likes of aggressive Xen creatures such as the Vortigaunts and the infamous parasitic headcrabs. He eventually discovers that other scientists have potentially found a way to close the portal, but that they are unable to do so, as an incredibly powerful being on the other side is forcing it to stay open. Eventually, Freeman travels to Xen itself in order to destroy the Nihilanth, the creature maintaining the rift. However, after doing so, Freeman encounters the mysterious G-Man, who has apparently been watching and monitoring all of Freeman’s actions throughout the game; the G-Man puts him in stasis at the end of the story.
The game was an overwhelming success credited with revolutionizing the FPS genre, and it was named the all-time best-selling FPS for PC by Guinness World Records in 2008 – at which point it had sold 9.3 million copies. It was followed with two expansion packs developed by Gearbox Software as well as three sequels: Half Life 2, Half-Life 2: Episode One, and Half-Life 2: Episode Two. Another sequel, Half Life 2: Episode Three has been announced, but a large number of delays combined with company silence on the game’s development have made confirmation of the game’s release into a bitter running joke in the gaming community. In August 2017, one of the key writers from the series posted a story on his website called “Epistle 3,” which seemed to be a summary of what Episode Three would have consisted of, had the game ever been made.
