THE IMPACT OF: HALF-LIFE
We all knew Half-Life was something special as soon as we stepped into the shoes of Gordon Freeman riding the train into the heart of the Black Mesa Research Facility back in 1998. At that time, we were still accustomed to thinking about the spaces that games – and first-person shooters in particular – took place in as levels, an artifice providing the backdrop for gameplay to happen. Black Mesa was different. This was an environment. You weren’t dropped straight into a corridor with a gun in your hand and an enemy to use it on standing in front of you. You were playing as a person arriving at work. Valve took the time to show you a workplace in operation, with people going about their daily business, and gave you some time to inhabit its protagonist as a normal person doing their job before everything went to hell.
“Gordon, and by extension the player, is there for the whole incident,” says Adam Engels, project lead on Black Mesa, the recently completed remake of the original Half-Life. “You kick it off, you fight through the facility, you kill the big bad at the end. You are not dropped into someone else’s problem, and you have context for the whole adventure. I think, even to this day, it makes Half-Life stand out.
“The facility itself seems not only huge but active,” continues Adam, reflecting on the worldbuilding that made Half-Life feel so revelatory when he first encountered it. “Like the whole facility is operating just out of view. It helps what might be a cheesy sci-fi fantasy feel grounded and real.”
As Adam suggests, Half-Life’s opening was indicative of the approach Valve took to designing the game at large. There was a concerted effort not to create a string of videogame levels that you would take on one after the other, but instead create a consistent place that felt believable and try and situate the player in it as a real space as much as possible. Valve built a world that responded to you, where the scientists going about their business in the labs,
