Half-Life is a science fiction first-person shooter computer game developed by Valve Software and published by Sierra Studios. It was released on November 20, 1998 based on a heavily-modified Quake game engine. It was first published for PCs running Microsoft Windows, and was later ported to Sony's PlayStation 2 and Sega's Dreamcast video game console, although it was never officially released in the latter's case.
Half-Life, often shortened to HL, has been heralded by computer game critics for its gripping and atmospheric presentation of the plotline, and one which would influence the development of other first-person shooters in the years to come. It was among the first first-person shooters to feature a story that was told entirely in-game and in real time, without the use of cutscenes. Half-Life is also known for its (at the time) sophisticated enemy AI. Its own success continued for years with expansions such as Opposing Force (OP4) and Blue Shift (BS), mods such as Counter-Strike (CS), Team Fortress Classic (TFC), "Firearms", Deathmatch Classic (DMC), Ricochet and Day of Defeat (DoD), and its sequel Half-Life 2 (HL2). Half-Life won over 50 "Game of the Year" awards from numerous publications and was named "Best PC Game Ever" by PC Gamer in its November 1999, October 2001, and April 2005 issues.Company information from official Valve website. Retrieved on June 11, 2006.. It is one of the best selling PC first-person shooters to date.
Overall, the Half-Life franchise, including Counter-Strike and Day of Defeat, has seen over 15 million sales.
The game is set in a remote area of New Mexico at the Black Mesa Research Facility, a fictional complex that bears many similarities to both the Los Alamos National Laboratory and Area 51 during December of 200X (according to calendars in game and the Playstation 2 version's manual). The game's protagonist is the theoretical physicist Gordon Freeman, a survivor of an experiment that goes horribly awry when an unexpected resonance cascade (an apparently completely fictitious occurrence; see also 1, 2) rips dimensional seams that devastate the facility. Aliens from another world - known as Xen - subsequently enter the facility through these dimensional seams.
As Freeman tries to make his way out of the ruined facility to find help for the injured, he soon discovers he is caught between two sides: the hostile aliens, and the Hazardous Environment Combat Unit, a military force dispatched to cover up the incident — including eliminating Freeman and the rest of the scientists. Throughout the game, a mysterious figure known as (but not actually referred to in-game as) the G-Man regularly appears, apparently monitoring Freeman's progress. Ultimately, Freeman uses the co-operation of surviving scientists and security officers to work his way to the mysterious "Lambda Complex" of Black Mesa, where a team of survivors teleport him to the alien world Xen, where he must kill the Nihilanth, the creature keeping Xen's side of the dimensional rift open.
The game's plot was originally inspired by the computer games Doom and Quake, both produced by id Software, Stephen King's short story/novella The Mist, and an episode of The Outer Limits called "The Borderland." It was later developed by Valve's in-house writer and author, Marc Laidlaw, who wrote the books Dad's Nuke and The 37th Mandala. However, the more influential aspect of the single player mode is not the plot itself, but rather how it is presented to the player.
The game tells the story by flowing into scripted sequences that are integrated as part of the game rather than as cut scene intermissions. These sequences range from the introduction of major plot points such as the resonance cascade to bringing the player into a particularly difficult part of a level. Two of the intended results of this style of presentation were to increase immersion and to maintain a contiguous narrative that keeps the player's interest.
Valve implemented other factors to heighten the feeling of immersion, including that the player never sees or hears their own character, who remains a 'silent protagonist' in the plot, and that the player rarely loses the ability to control Gordon, even during monologs. The scripted sequences help flow by keeping the player in the game, whereas cutscenes in other contemporary games had often been a diversion from previous segments of their gameplay. The levels for HL were also divided into small sections to minimize long interruptions from loading.
Gordon starts his day riding a tram into the Black Mesa Facility to begin work. On his way he witnesses many interesting things, such as a military helicopter preparing to leave and a strange man in a blue suit watching him from another tram. He is running late for an important experiment, and after donning his HEV suit (HEV Mark IV), he proceeds to the test chamber to assist with the experiment (Sample GG-3883), but something goes terribly wrong. A "resonance cascade" has been triggered, causing massive structural damage to Black Mesa. Worse yet, hostile aliens begin teleporting in across the facility, attacking the confused and terrified staff, who are left to fend for themselves.
After the incident, Gordon works his way to the surface through an office facility filled with panicked scientists and trigger-happy security guards. He finds out that a military force is en route, and hopes to get help from the soldiers. The Marines of the Hazardous Environment Combat Unit take control of Black Mesa and begin a cleanup operation, killing aliens and all facility personnel. Gordon learns that the surviving members of Lambda Team will be in the Lambda Complex at the other end of the facility and they may be able to close the dimensional rift; Gordon begins the journey across Black Mesa to reach them. With his normal route blocked, Gordon finds himself deep underground in a rocket testing area inhabited by three tentacles. After sneaking around the tentacles' lair and fuelling the engine, he fires the rocket, killing the tentacles, and is able to follow the tunnel it leaves behind. Freeman then arrives at the terminus of a deactivated underground rail system and is forced to fight off hostile Marines and a Gargantua. He restores power and begins a journey deep underground.
A guard informs Gordon that a communications satellite needs to be launched to allow the scientists at the Lambda Complex to seal the dimensional breach. Gordon fights his way through the rail system, finding entrenched Marines lying in wait for him, and launches the satellite's rocket. Working his way through old, abandoned underground areas, Gordon runs into a team of mysterious assassins and is captured by the Marines, who dump him in a garbage compactor. He escapes from the compactor and carefully moves through "residue processing," an old and sparsely populated industrial area of the complex filled with hazardous materials and automated materials processing equipment. Then, with the help of hiding scientists, Gordon makes his way through a deserted laboratory complex where experiments were performed on Xen creatures, clearly indicating that human scientists had been visiting Xen prior to the resonance cascade. He eventually makes it outside and continues his journey to the Lambda Complex. The surface is swarming with aliens and Marines, who have brought in vast amounts of military hardware to try and even the odds against the Xen forces. Gordon destroys several tanks and aircraft while making his way across the bombed-out remains of the Cold War-era buildings on the surface and even navigating a sheer cliffside. Escaping a Gargantua in a parking garage, Gordon tricks the military into bombing a sealed entrance into the fortified Lambda Complex.
Half-Life chapter sequence
The Marines begin to evacuate Black Mesa and airstrikes begin. Gordon navigates underground water channels and fights against squads of hardened alien grunts on the way to Lambda Core. Finally arriving in the Lambda Core, Freeman sees that the place is swarming with aliens. He brings the nuclear reactor online and discovers the secret teleportation labs which have allowed expeditions to travel to the alien borderworld of Xen. The handful of surviving personnel inform him that an immensely powerful being in that borderworld is keeping the portal between the worlds open, and that he must kill it to prevent the Xen aliens from taking over completely. They activate the teleporter and Gordon is relocated to Xen.
On the strange borderworld, Gordon encounters many of the aliens that had been brought into Black Mesa, as well as the remains of HEV-wearing researchers that came before him. He activates an alien teleporter and is whisked away. Gordon faces a powerful spider-like creature which continually gives birth to headcrabs. After killing it, he finds a portal and enters it. He then arrives at what seems to be an alien factory and discovers that it is a genetic flesh factory manufacturing an army of engineered soldiers (presumably for the invasion of Earth). In addition, the Vortigaunts working there do not attempt to harm him (unless coerced by the Alien Controllers), which suggests that they are forced to fight by rulers of Xen. After making his way through, he finds yet another portal and enters it. In a vast cave, he finally confronts the powerful and mysterious being that is holding the portal open: the Nihilanth. Gordon destroys the being's shield and so then is able to destroy its vulnerable brain. Having just obliterated the Nihilanth, he is once again met by the mysterious G-Man who shows him what he has accomplished (pacifying Xen for an invasion by the HECU, which even G-Man calls "a nasty piece of work") and offers him an ultimatum: either work for his "employers" or be faced with an impossible battle unarmed against hundreds of Xen creatures.
Additionally, the long jump module can increase the horizontal distance and speed of jumps. This increased mobility can be used to dodge attacks quickly and jump from one platform to another. The long jump is done by moving forward, crouching, then jumping.
The original code name for Half-Life was Quiver, after the Arrowhead military base from Stephen King's novella The Mist, which served as early inspiration for the game. Gabe Newell explained in an interview that the name Half-Life was chosen because it was evocative of the theme, not clichéd, and had a corresponding visual symbol: the Greek letter λ (lower-case lambda), which represents the decay constant in the half-life equation.
The first public appearances of Half-Life came in early 1997; it was a hit at Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) that year, where they primarily demonstrated the animation system and game AI. Valve hired science fiction author Marc Laidlaw in August 1997 to work on the game's characters and level design. Half-Life was originally planned to be shipped in late 1997, to compete with Quake II, but was postponed when Valve decided the game needed significant revision.
In a 2003 Making Of... feature in Edge, Newell discusses the team's early difficulties with level design. In desperation, a single level was assembled including every weapon, enemy, scripted event and level design quirk that the designers had come up with so far. This single level inspired the studio to press on with the game. As a result, the studio completely reworked the game's AI and levels in the year leading up to its release. At E3 1998 it was given Game Critics Awards for being the "Best PC Game" and "Best Action Game" at the expo. The release date was delayed several times in 1998 before the game was finally released in November of that year.
Versions for the Sega Dreamcast and Apple Macintosh [http://www.applelinks.com/articles/1999/10/19991019163339.shtml were essentially completed, but never commercially released.
Despite never officially being released, the Dreamcast version was leaked onto the Internet, fully-playable; it contains the full versions of Half-Life and Blue Shift, both with an early version of the High Definition Pack (it was from this port that the pack was spawned), but has a somewhat inconsistent framerate (though never to the point of unplayability) and lengthier load times when the player moves from area to area (around ten seconds, while today's average PC can load an area in around one and a half). Also, there are some saving problems; the number of blocks on a VMU increases rapidly as the player reaches the end of a level. While the game allows you to remove files to increase space, sometimes it still isn't enough.
The console's mouse and keyboard peripherals are supported, if preferred to the standard controller. If the controller is used, the game adds an auto-aim feature, so that when an enemy nears the center of the player's vision, the aiming crosshair will shift over toward the enemy to make shooting them easier. The game's controls are customizable. The game has no multiplayer mode, and lacks the parental feature of the PC version (players cannot turn the gibs off). It does have an interesting password feature, however; with three dials, the user makes various phrases, such as "Otis Loves Dreamcast" (god mode), "Fear and Gravity" (jump to Xen in HL), or "Barney Goes To Work" (skip the intro in Blue Shift and jump right into the main game, pre-resonance cascade).
Main article: Source
To experience first-hand the processes mod-makers would have to go through with the new engine, Valve ported Half-Life (dubbed Half-Life: Source) and Counter-Strike to their new Source engine. Half-Life: Source is a straight port, lacking any new content or the Blue Shift High Definition pack. However, it does take advantage of vertex and pixel shaders for more realistic water effects, as well as Half-Life 2's realistic physics engine. They also added several other features from Half-Life 2, including an improved dynamic lightmap, vertex map, and shadowmap system with cleaner, higher resolution and specular texture and normal maps, as well as utilization of the render-to-texture soft shadows found in Half-Life 2's Source engine, along with 3D skybox replacements in place of the old 16-bit color bitmap skies. Also redesigned was the crossbow that will pin its targets to a nearby wall (if they're close enough). The Source engine itself, however, is not entirely perfect. Certain control issues are generally regarded as being a problem, such as ladder bounce (where disconnecting from a ladder gives a sideways vector boost, which can be highly undesirable when trying to move near a ladder on a platform over a fall), fall push (where moving off of a platform into a fall gives a sideways vector boost), and jumping from platforms (where the graphics engine tends to lead the player to think a jump can be made later than it really can). Naturally, the Half-Life port possesses the Source engine's control weaknesses as well as its many graphical strengths. Half-Life: Source is available with special editions of Half-Life 2. Source was released on September 26 2005. This port has been criticised however, for not utilizing many of the features of the Source engine found in Half-Life 2, as it still used textures and models from the original game. Due to this, a third-party remake called Black Mesa is also under development.
On June 10, 2005, Valve announced through their Steam update news service an upcoming port of Half-Life Deathmatch, the multiplayer portion of the original game, much in the same fashion as the earlier released Half-Life: Source. No exact release date was given, simply the words "In the coming weeks..." On July 2, 2006, Source#Multiplayer was released.
Recently, Episode One was released. It is part of a three episode trilogy, of which the second episode is scheduled to be released in winter 2006.
Blue Shift returns the player to HL's Black Mesa timeline once more, this time as one of the facility's security guards. (This expansion was originally developed as a bonus mission for the canceled Dreamcast version.) Blue Shift came with an optional High Definition Pack that could update the look of Half-Life, Opposing Force, and the new Blue Shift content. In particular, the models' polygon count and texture resolutions were increased, and some changes were made to the in-game sounds, most notably the shotgun. Blue Shift had relatively little new content compared to Opposing Force: aside from a few models (jacket-less scientists and security guards, Otis, and Dr. Rosenberg) all content was already present in the original Half-Life.
Decay was another expansion by Gearbox, released only as an extra with the PlayStation 2 version of Half-Life. The add-on featured cooperative gameplay in which two players could solve puzzles or fight against the many foes in the Half-Life universe.
The Half-Life Platinum Collection was released in 2000. The games included are:
Later in 2002, the pack was rereleased with Blue Shift added.
Half-Life's code has been released and is being used as a base for many multiplayer mods such as the immensely popular and free Counter-Strike. Other popular multiplayer mods include Team Fortress Classic (TFC), The Specialists, Day of Defeat, Deathmatch Classic (DMC), Action Half-Life, Firearms, and Natural Selection. TFC and DMC were developed in-house at Valve Software. Counter-Strike, The Specialists, Day of Defeat, and others that began life as the work of independent developers (self-termed "modders"), later on received aid from Valve.
Numerous single player mods have also been created, like USS Darkstar (1999, a futuristic action-adventure onboard of a zoological research spaceship), The Xeno Project 1 and 2 *" target="_blank" >(1999-2005, a great two part mod starting in Xen and again including space ships), Edge of Darkness Absolute Redemption (2000, which brings back Gordon Freeman for four additional episodes and another encounter with the G-Man), They Hunger (2000-2001, a survival horror total conversion trilogy involving zombies), Poke 646 *" target="_blank" >(2002, a follow-up to the original Half-Life story with improved graphics) and Xen-Warrior [http://www.fileplanet.com/116559/download/Half-Life:-Xen-Warrior-1.4 (2002-2004, based on Half-Life: Chronicles you play as an Alien Grunt, similar but more consistent than Point of View in which you play as an Vortigaunt).
Some Half-Life modifications eventually landed on retail shelves. Counter-Strike was the most successful, unexpectedly becoming the biggest selling online game to date and having been released in five different editions: as a standalone product (2000), as part of the Platinum Collection (2000), as an Xbox version (2003) as the single player spin-off, Condition Zero (2004), and the newest addition, Source, which runs on Half-Life 2's Source engine. Team Fortress Classic, Day of Defeat and Gunman Chronicles (2000, a futuristic Western movie-style total conversion with emphasis on its single player mode) were also released as stand-alone products.
(Note: Most of the tracks were retitled and carried over to the Half-Life 2 original soundtrack; the names in parentheses are the revised titles used in the Half-Life 2 OST. Tracks 2, 12, 13, and 24 were remixed for the sequel.)
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