The 1990s was an astonishing period for video games – an entire decade where it felt like a revolutionary vision of the future arrived every six months. Super Mario 64 made the third dimension an essential addition to platformers, Baldur’s Gate brought astonishing scope to RPGs, and Resident Evil turned a simple house into a terrifying interactive nightmare. These examples remain immortal classics, but also paved the way to a better future for their respectives series and genres.
But there’s one ’90s classic that has an unusual relationship with the future. Half-Life, the revolutionary first-person shooter created by just 30 people at the then newly-formed Valve Software, still feels like it's a generation ahead. Its surface may have aged with blocky textures, primitive lighting, and stilted animation, but Half-Life is a masterclass of level design, atmosphere, and immersive storytelling. And despite being so influential on the entire video game industry, on its 25th anniversary it remains a singular triumph.
It’s apt that Half-Life’s exhilarating campaign, which oscillates through energetic shootouts and tense discovery, starts on a rollercoaster. Sort of. The train that carries your protagonist, Dr. Gordon Freeman, to their day job as a scientist at the underground Black Mesa Research Facility is an automated tour of the locations that await you; the many stages upon which a continual supply of innovative encounters and clever level design will guide you to a literally extraterrestrial conclusion.
21st century FPS classics, like the original Modern Warfare and Titanfall 2, follow in these footsteps. Half-Life’s variety is the root of missions like 'Into The Abyss' and 'All Ghillied Up'. But even those brilliantly varied campaigns struggle to keep up with the speedy evolution of Black Mesa’s corridors. Every single chapter has a defined, unique concept, from the hide-and-seek attack on the Tentacles in 'Blast Pit', through firing laser-guided rockets from a cliff ledge in 'Surface Tension', to solving portal puzzles in 'Lambda Core'.
This variety helps control Half-Life’s perfect tempo. After an opening that sits purposefully on the knife edge between astonishing and mundane, a science disaster tears open the fabric of space and aggressive aliens pour into Black Mesa. With just one goal – to reach the surface and find help – you ascend the facility’s floors in a desperate fight to the finish. But just as it seems like safety is within reach thanks to the arrival of the US Marines, you and all your colleagues are suddenly in the firing line as the army works to fatally silence any witnesses. This brilliant, shocking twist triggers Half-Life’s ever-escalating sense of jeopardy. It forces you back below ground and into a series of chapters that will bring you agonisingly close to the surface, only to push you ever deeper down to contend with deadly snipers, agile assassins, and even more brutal forms of aliens from beyond the stars.
Adding soldiers into the foes gallery also radically rethinks the encounter design. Half-Life’s primary language is that of the gun but its vocabulary is constantly expanding. This begins with its aliens, who in the tradition of Doom each have unique attacks and work together as an ugly collage – to fend off leaping headcrabs while houndeyes charge their shockwaves and vortigaunts blast you with long range forks of lightning is quite the combat challenge. The way these extraterrestrial enemies are arranged, each demanding specific tactics to defeat, is a far cry away from the legions of identikit humans that make up so many of today’s biggest shooters. But even when Half-Life opts for foes of this Earth, they’re just as exciting as their more esoteric counterparts; an army of aggressive flankers and risk-takers who love to flush you out with grenades. Get into a fight with both groups at the same time and it’s an exhilarating survival shootout very few games have replicated since.
The Marines’ arrival in ‘We’ve Got Hostiles’ shifts Half-Life’s initial tone of surviving a disaster to something closer to being hunted by predators. This atmospheric pressure makes Half-Life one of the most effective horror games ever made. It’s enhanced by astonishing attention to detail, lighting, and timing – scares generated by headcrabs lurking in dark vents and zombies hidden by tight corners. All of this feeds on isolation; friendly NPCs are a rarity, and so you’re asked to survive long onslaughts of acid-spitting bullsquids and flesh-hungry barnacles on your lonesome. It's frequently a desperate, terrifying battle for survival against all odds.
That oppression is balanced by laugh-out-loud, pitch-black comedy. Hapless lab staff are gobbled up by unseen horrors hiding in air vents, their chunky entrails fired out just a few seconds later as the punchline of the world’s goriest burp joke. A desperate scientist cries "Take me with you! I'm the one man who knows everything" before promptly exploding all over the walls. Half-Life is a genuine hoot in a way very few of today’s oft self-serious games are.
Those chuckle-worthy scientist deaths aren’t just gags, though. They contribute to Half-Life’s story, which is ingeniously told via the environment itself. Valve had originally planned to use traditional cutscenes but ran out of time, and so Half-Life plays out entirely in first-person with the player in full control from start to finish. It creates an extraordinary sense of immersion – you’re living every moment, and aside from the game’s only fade-to-black moment after being knocked unconscious, your journey is completely continuous with no cuts. It makes Black Mesa’s sprawling, interconnected labs and offices feel truly authentic rather than a series of levels. And it’s that authenticity that means the locations aren’t just the stage for the story, they are the story.
“The narrative had to be baked into the corridors,” explained Half-Life writer Marc Laidlaw in an interview with Rock, Paper, Shotgun. “Lots of traps and detours and obstacles and occasional moments of breakthrough. Really good level design tells its own story. You don’t need NPCs popping up to tell you what to do if your visual grammar is clear enough. Then when characters do pop up, they can say lines of dialogue that make them feel like characters instead of signposts.”
Almost all of Half-Life’s victories have been replicated over the last quarter-century. Halo features that same astonishing approach to combat encounters, powered by brilliantly reactive AI. The Metro games adopted that thick atmosphere that made every corridor its own story. Call of Duty has built its legacy on concept missions that rotate in wild adventures with each new chapter. But despite its influence, it’s hard to think of many shooters that managed to holistically elevate the FPS in the way Half-Life did. In fact, at least as far as I’m concerned, only one game has ever managed it: Half-Life 2.
In many ways, Half-Life can be seen as an indictment of the video game industry: how can a 25 year-old game be better than almost every shooter that has followed it? Why has its ambition only ever been exceeded only by its own sequel? It paints a picture of a stagnated industry still playing with toys from the 1990s.
But for as long as that’s the case, Half-Life will continue to feel like it's from the future. Its copy-paste security guards, scruffy audio quality, and slippy ’90s movement can’t age it, such is the strength of its design. And so today is as good as any day to revisit the game that completely redefined the narrative shooter.
They’re waiting for you, Gordon. In the test chamber.
Matt Purslow is IGN's UK News and Features Editor.
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November 19, 2023 at 10:02PM
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