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Half-Life bravely attempts to bridge the gap between video games and films.
Half-Life (1998) has been so thoroughly dissected over the 2+ decades since its launch that it feels difficult to have an opinion on it. As someone who’s tracked the FPS genre since 1992, in an attempt to review every game in my Steam library, here are some observations about what I think made Half-life different from what came before.
For 1998, Half-Life has an incredible amount of assets matched only (yet admirably) by Unreal. If we take previous FPS games of the era, Quake had gothic cathedrals, castles and tech bases that all existed so independently of each other that there wasn’t much indication of a broader environmental narrative. The journey was considered from the start to the end of a level, with some regard for a grander narrative of an entire episode, but very little for the entire game. Duke Nukem 3D’s nighttime streets, sci-fi space ships and mountainous deserts felt semi-connected in the first episode, but by episode 2 you really had to rely on flavour text within the game manual to understand why you were in a certain area.
Half-Life has coolant facilities, dormitories, staff rooms, test labs, hydro plants, desert, research labs, transit areas, and car parks all chained together believably with custom-made assets for each. Unlike DOOM and Quake where most levels draw from the same universal box of textures and materials, Half-Life feels like every level has its own distinct set of assets. Just as importantly, they also feature their own unique audio. The computerised hums of the research labs contrast distinctively from the mechanical pistons of the transit areas, giving a completely different ambience from level to level.
Half-Life also dared to treat its story with the seriousness of a movie. It felt like the best FPS games pre-Half-Life relied too heavily on parodying popular action movies for fear that they couldn’t be taken seriously in their own right. Like a high school class who can’t stop laughing at themselves during drama class, humour disguises a lack of confidence, and it feels like developers thought it easier to make the player laugh than it was to genuinely invest them in a story.
Half-Life, on the other hand, emulated film tropes with a belief that games could be on the same narrative level as big-budget cinema. The game opens with a *lengthy* period of normality; Gordon goes to work, talks to his colleagues, and heats up food in a staff room. Every FPS game before 1998 starts you immediately after the inciting event, whereas Half-Life brings you in a step before the catalyst, closely mimicking the structure of a film. It’s also the little touches too, such as the game featuring opening credits for the first 10 minutes, intentionally placed to associate Half-Life with a movie or TV show rather than a video game.
Previous FPS games were generally rather lonely affairs too, with the player walking through isolated corridors entirely by themselves and their enemies. In Half-Life, Gordon is joined by characters throughout such as the security guard Barney, and the various scientists (who are often quickly eviscerated). While their AI isn’t particularly advanced, and they will often walk directly into bullets, they do hint at a world beyond just the player and advance the plot meaningfully.
All these advances in bridging the gap between video games and films aren’t just done for the sake of it; they’re actually done well . It’s also part of the reason I’m not hugely into Half-Life mods, as the game is so fundamentally tied to its context that anything less than a total campaign (of which there are many fantastic ones) don’t play into the strengths of the game. There’s also the infamous final Xen chapter, which loses all the game’s grounding, environmental storytelling and cohesive progression between levels in exchange for an abstract, wacky final few levels that really miss the mark. But with all the risk-taking of Half-Life, this 30 minute chapter can be forgiven.
Besides this, Half-Life’s legacy remains as a confident, unapologetic step forward for the genre.