The sequel lived up to its predecessor’s reputation, and it received 39 Game of the Year awards, and in 2012 Half-Life 2 won ‘Game of the Decade’ at the Spike Video Game Awards, eight years after its release.
Nothing came close to taking Half-Life’s throne… until the 16th of November 2004, when Valve released Half-Life 2.
Gearbox also developed an excellent PlayStation 2 port of Half-Life that included a 2-player co-op experience called Decay.įor years to come, PC Gamer would call Half-Life ‘The Best PC Game Ever’ and ‘Best Game of All Time’, and PC Zone would call it ‘Game of the Millennium’. Half-Life also had two official expansion packs, developed by Gearbox Software, Opposing Force and Blue Shift. Some amateur projects became so popular that they were published as retail games, such as Counter-Strike and Day of Defeat. Half-Life also came with map-making and modding tools, which led to Half-Life dominating the PC gaming scene, as buying Half-Life also gave access to hundreds of fan-made adventures and multiplayer mods. This led to Half-Life becoming the first game to be re-released in a special ‘Game of the Year Edition’, an updated version that came with additional multiplayer content, including Team Fortress Classic, a remake of a popular Quake mod. On the 19th of November 1998, Valve released Half-Life, to unprecedented critical acclaim, and over 50 Game of the Year awards from publications worldwide. Despite the emphasis on storytelling, Valve committed to keeping the game entirely in a first-person perspective, with no cinematics or third-person cutscenes, to avoid breaking immersion. Valve populated the world with characters that had groundbreaking skeletal animations, and performed complex scripted sequences.
Levels resembled real-world laboratories and offices, rather than shooting arenas. They took inspiration from Stephen King’s The Mist, episodes of The Outer Limits, and the conspiracies of The X-Files. Valve took the basic plot of Doom - an experiment causes monsters to materialise out of thin air - but rather than just using the story as an excuse for shooting things, they created a believable world, with a story and setting that players could immerse themselves in. What could a couple of guys used to developing computer operating systems know about making games? But they managed to find a publisher, Sierra, who were best known for adventure games and simulations.
No-one expected ‘Valve Software’ to amount to much. They recruited amateurs who had made impressive Quake maps and mods, as well as one or two professionals who had worked on the PlayStation version of Doom.
They met with id Software and licensed their Quake engine. For their first project, they decided to develop a sci-fi first-person shooter. In 1996, two Microsoft millionaires started their own games company. The government has sent in a ruthless and efficient clean-up crew, and their orders seem to be that when it comes to Black Mesa, nothing gets out alive… and especially not you. What’s more, the inhuman monsters aren’t your only enemies. You must enlist the help of traumatised scientists and trigger-happy security guards to get through high-security zones, sneaking and fighting your way through ruined missile silos and Cold War cafeterias, through dark air ducts and subterranean railways. You head for the surface, but the usual routes are impassable.
Hordes of creatures are pouring through rifts in the local fabric of reality. The next thing you know, the entire Black Mesa Facility is a nightmare zone, with sirens wailing and scientists fleeing in terror from the things their co-workers have become. Is it sabotage? An accident? Or is it something you did? All you hear is screaming all you see is space-time shattering. Until something goes wrong, and you’re staring into an alien world. One morning you are sent alone into the Test Chamber to analyze a strange crystalline specimen. Each morning you ride the train to work from the employee dorms, put on your environmental protection suit, and run tests on whatever odd objects have been delivered from some other nameless part of the Black Mesa compound. You are Gordon Freeman, a research associate in the Anomalous Materials Laboratory. Deep in the bowels of the Black Mesa Research Facility, a decommissioned missile base, a top-secret project is underway.