Half-Life
-
Half-Life: Blue Shift
(2001) - Half-Life: Further Data V.1 (1999)
- Half-Life: Further Data V.2 (1999)
-
Half-Life: Opposing Force
(1999)
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Half-Time: Die Level-CD für Half-Life
(1999) -
Life/2
(2001)
-
Half-Life
(2001) -
Half-Life: Deathmatch - Source
(2005) -
Half-Life: Source
(2005)
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Black Mesa
(2012) -
Black Mesa
(2015)
-
Half-Life: Complete
(2008) -
Half-Life: Game of the Year Edition
(1999) -
Valve Complete Pack
(2008)
-
Half-Life
(2001 on
PlayStation 2)
Description official descriptions
The Black Mesa Research Facility is an ultra-secret laboratory under a government contract to conduct top-secret and extremely volatile experiments. The scientist Gordon Freeman is a Black Mesa employee. One morning, as usual, he pits his way to the research facility for a run-of-the-mill experiment. However, Gordon comes to realize that it might not be as ordinary as he thought. Odd things happen as he makes his way to one of the Black Mesa test chambers. Even stranger things happen when he begins to move the test sample towards the anti-mass spectrometer.
At that moment, everything goes horribly wrong. Aliens from the dimension Xen suddenly invade the facility, injuring or killing many of the employees. Soon afterwards, marines arrive to contain the situation by killing the aliens as well as the surviving human witnesses. Gordon understands what that means: he will have to fight his way through both aliens and marines to get to the top of the Black Mesa complex and to freedom.
The story of Half-Life is told entirely in-game: everything is seen through the eyes of the protagonist. Most story elements unfold via scripted sequences, triggered by the player reaching a certain area. If other characters have information to reveal, they address Gordon directly. The Black Mesa complex in the game is made up of both distinct levels which progress in a linear fashion as well as hubs where backtracking may be required to unlock further areas.
The game's weapon arsenal mostly consists of realistic weapons like pistols, machine guns and explosives, but there are also futuristic energy weapons developed at Black Mesa as well as organic weapons acquired from the invading aliens. Most weapons feature an alternate firing mode.
Enemies fall into two categories: aliens and human soldiers. While most of the aliens are not very bright, the humans display some relatively advanced artificial intelligence: they seek cover, retreat when hit and try to drive the player from his cover by throwing grenades. Some of the alien enemies cannot be killed by normal means. The environment must be used against them instead, going with a general tendency of the game to alternate the combat with environmental puzzles.
As of the 25th Anniversary Update from 17 November 2023, the Steam version of Half-Life includes content from Half-Life: Uplink as well as sprays and maps from Half-Life: Further Data V.1.
Spellings
- 半条命 - Simplified Chinese spelling
- 戰慄時空 - Traditional Chinese spelling
Groups +
- 3D Engine: GoldSrc
- BestSeller Series (Cendant / Havas / Vivendi Universal) releases
- BPjS / BPjM indexed games
- Gameplay feature: Drowning
- Gameplay feature: Minefield traversal
- Gameplay feature: Radiation / radioactive poisoning
- Games referenced in movies
- Games with official modding tools
- Games with officially released source code
- Half-Life universe
- Middleware: SDL
- Setting: 2000s
- Setting: Future now past
- Weapon: SPAS-12
Screenshots
Promos
Videos
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Credits (Windows version)
80 People (58 developers, 22 thanks) · View all
| Engine Programmer | |
| Engine Tools Programmer | |
| The Half-Life Team | |
| [ full credits ] | |
Reviews
Critics
Average score: 94% (based on 60 ratings)
Players
Average score: 4.3 out of 5 (based on 576 ratings with 30 reviews)
It's not a game...It's like your living it..
The Good
This is one of the most amazing games that can get you so engrossed into it, that you forget its a game. The engine and gameplay was so unique for 1998. The way you could interact with other characters and witness cool events in realtime made it feel like a movie. The graphics were really good to back up the gameplay, you could hardly tell it was made from the Quake 2 engine. Valve really modified the engine and made it good. The movements and characteristics of the enemies were really cool. The sound and lightning of the game made it downright scary. Even more incredible was the online multi player and the ease of custom and mods which lead to another classic..Counter-Strike!
The Bad
It's a pretty hard game, especially in the latter levels when the army comes after you. Apart from that, the AI for the NPC characters is a little weak sometimes but still pretty good considering when the game was made.
The Bottom Line
If you love FPS games or Horror or just PC games in general, you must play this once and see what made it so special. Once you see the intro, which is one of the best of all time, you will get hooked.
Windows · by The Ring Hawk (826) · 2003
The Good
A modern classic, this is an finely-honed first person shooter with a compelling story, some excellent action set-pieces, great presentation, and a ground-breakingly perfect musical score. It reeks of quality, and stinks of class - the creators obviously cared about making a good game, and that simple fact sets 'Half-Life' apart from everything else. Now almost two years old, 'Half-Life' is still just as good as it was, and it could be released tomorrow and still make the same impact. It's an embarrassment of riches, with too many good things to count - in amongst the seemingly-intelligent soldiers, giant tentacles, amusingly jingoistic security guards and radioactive water the game almost off-handedly solves the problem of how to tell a story with a computer game - and it's extremely immersive. You really need to play it with headphones, or an expensive stereo. Everything from the plausible, gloomy environments, to the metallic chatter of your machine-pistol, fits the atmosphere perfectly, and there's a sparse, scary set of musical cues which mix ambient techno with noisemusic. It's even excellent fun as a multiplayer game, or even in related 'Team Fortress' form.
It's rock-hard, too, but in a way that makes you want certain bits again and again. All told, it's a classic, and you should own it already (plus the mission pack).
The Bad
It's not perfect, though, although familiarity has no bred contempt. The narrative flow breaks down in the final, alien-bound levels, which are a disappointment after the recognisably real-world environments in the rest of the game. On the alien world there are a couple of places where you can be inextricably stuck, too, which seems unfair. Some of the creature designs don't seem to fit, either - whilst the mutated scientists and head-crabs are fantastically hateable, the hulking, wasp-firing alien 'sergeants' seem to belong to another game entirely.
Play it in the dark, for the first time, and you'll be scared to death, too.
The Bottom Line
It makes 'Blood 2' look amazingly, implausibly bad.
Windows · by Ashley Pomeroy (225) · 2000
The Good
Half-Life is the kind of game that a lot of gamers have been waiting for. You take your average run-of-the-mill FPS, give it a well thought out storyline, ooze on some frightening atmosphere, add realistic weapons and an Intelligent AI, and you get this game.
The wonderful part of the story is that you aren't necesarily at the center of it. Things go on around you that you may or may not see, but have some relevance to what you may experience. The atmosphere also adds something to the story. There you are, a lone scientist trying to survive an out of this world (pardon the pun) experience, walking through a deserted office area, when the ceiling comes down on your head. And with the debris comes a handful of headcrabs! If you really enjoy being scared, play Half-Life in the dark.
As if being surprised by aliens and military grunts in abandoned hallways weren't enough, you have to reload your weapons. Yes, you heard me right! There is no such thing as a 99 round clip for your weapon anymore. You actually have to stop shooting and reload. And with the more realistic (for the most part) weapons, this can add a little bit of difficulty to those that charge into a room guns blazing.
The Bad
When I mentioned that the AI was one of the good things about this game, I wasn't lying. Just that upon closer inspection, the AI isn't as wonderful as I originally thought. The humans were indeed the smartest and most dangerous baddies that had to be dealt with. The grunts especially worked well together to get you to come out and die. The aliens however still seemed to be on the charge until he's (I'm) dead kind of AI. This doesn't detract too much from the enjoyment of the game.
The Bottom Line
All in all, Half-Life is a must play game. Not only is the single-player unbelievable, but the multi-player is really good too. There are tons of mods for multi-player Half-Life, among them the VERY popular Counter-Strike. Fans of the FPS rejoice!
Windows · by Narf! (132) · 2001
Discussion
| Subject | By | Date |
|---|---|---|
| Narrative, wait what? | Donatello (466) | Jul 15, 2012 |
| Sorry, Valve | xroox (3895) | Feb 12, 2009 |
Trivia
1001 Video Games
Half-Life appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.
Advertisement
Very early beta footage of the game, as well as interviews with some of the programmers, is available on the Diablo expansion pack Hellfire, released by Sierra a full year before the game ever shipped. Sierra already had advertisements for Half-Life in many of their products back then.
Cancelled ports
- Half-Life, at one point, was completely finished for the Dreamcast console. Prima (the Official Strategy Guide folks) even had a Dreamcast-exclusive guide published. Unfortunately, the game wasn't published - probably due to the fact that SEGA announced that they would no longer produce new Dreamcasts. In certain circles of the Internet, a leaked copy can still be found and ran on a Dreamcast.
- A Macintosh port was in the works from Westlake interactive and reached beta before being cancelled because of concerns about responsibility for tech support.
Development
In its first finalized form, as it would have been published if the original release date was kept, Half-Life was largely a total conversion of Quake with new enemies and levels. In the one additional year spent on development, the game transformed into the form that led it to critical and commercial success.
Engine
Half-Life was released a full year after Quake II and it was commonly believed that it was based on the Quake II engine. This is not true. It is based on a heavily modified version of the original Quake engine. Amongst the additions were built-in 3D accelerator support, skeletal systems and shadow casting (the latter didn't make it into the game). Valve named the engine "GoldSrc". This is probably how the "Source" engine from Half-Life 2 got its name.
German version
There is a special German version which features robots as enemies, green blood instead of red and innocent people cannot be killed any longer. The robot design was outlined by Sierra's Germany division, then sent to Valve in Seattle, where the artists created and implemented the tin soldiers. The changes in the game's code and art, together with the text and speech localization, served to delay the German version by full four months. By then, even casual gamers had already purchased the original version, which was freely for sale up to its ban. However, Half-Life proved to be so immensely popular that the German robo-version still sold over 50,000 copies, so the venture was ultimately successful for Sierra.
On 16 December 1998, the US version of Half-Life was put on the infamous German index by the BPjS. For more information about what this means and to see a list of games sharing the same fate, take a look here: BPjS/BPjM indexed games.
Gina Freeman
Apparently, Valve had written a part for Gordon's wife, Gina, to appear in the game, this idea got scrapped but she still made it to the game, her model was the one used for the holographic trainer. Her character was reworked as Gina Cross in the PlayStation 2 port's Decay missions.
id Software
When id Software saw what Valve was doing with their engine, they were reminded of their original idea for a seamless, story-based Doom and thought it would fail. It didn't.
Innovations
Half-Life was influential in many little ways, popularising several gameplay devices which have subsequently become standards, such as:
- The between-episode text which appears, overlaid on the screen, before slowly fading out (adopted not just in other computer games, but in several different Linux windowing systems too)
- A training segment which is presented as an integral part of the storyline
- The practice of rendering cut-scenes with the in-game engine
- Blood-splatters and other persistent stains
- Semi-random NPC speech and 'interaction' in an otherwise straightforward action game
- Weaponry which needs to be manually reloaded between magazine changes
- Constant playflow: the levels directly connect to each other
Inspiration
According to Valve's Gabe Newell, originally Half-Life was inspired by Stephen King's novella The Mist. However the game evolved so much from the preliminary concepts that the only things that remained were the horror/technology combination and the designs for the Bull Squid and the blind tentacle.
Lambda
Half-Life's lambda symbol is not the scientific symbol for half-life, but is instead the decay constant in the differential equation for exponential decay. The actual scientific symbol used for half-life is t1/2.
Mods
Valve and Sierra had a mod support program, making Team Fortress Classic as an example of a finished mod in the officially released tools. They also sponsored "Mod Expos", events where modders could present their work to other gamers and the press.
Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat, Ricochet, and Gunman Chronicles would get official commercial releases, with Counter-Strike becoming a series of its own.
Plot
According to planethalflife.com: "the material that makes up the three green triangles protecting Nihilanth is the same as the crystal sample which you pushed into the beams to start this whole mess in the first place. Valve Software originally intended to make this connection more obvious but never did."
References
- The security office is in sector 7G. Homer Simpson works in a sector with the same name.
- The Gluon Gun was nicknamed "The Egon" after the Ghostbusters Character Egon Spengler. The Gluon gun projects a plasma stream similar to the ones used by the Ghostbusters.
- The surnames on the lockers where Gordon goes to collect his HEV suit are of people from the development team. Gordon also has a book by Half-Life writer Marc Laidlaw in his locker.
References to the game
The game makes an appearance in season 1, episode 22 of Lost, a popular TV series. Some in-game action is shown, and the characters shortly discuss the use and the effectiveness of the crowbar as a weapon.
Remakes
- In 2004, Valve released a re-mastered version using Half Life 2's Source engine, called Half-Life: Source.
- In 2012, a group of fans released a remake of their own, called Black Mesa. The team's goal was to provide a completely new and more modern version of the original experience, since according to them, Valve's remake "didn't fully live up to the potential of a Source engine port of Half-Life". In fact, most of the game's content remained unchanged: Half-Life: Source mainly added new water and physics effects, but didn't upgrade the game's textures or character models.
Sales
As of 2007, the game sold of over eight million since its release. (source)
Shotgun
There's a minor technical error with the shotgun. It's presented in the game as a double-barreled weapon, and the alternative fire mode shoots two shells at half the speed. However, the shotgun is modeled on a single-barreled weapon, the popular Franchi SPAS-12, which appears in several computer games. What looks like a second barrel is actually the under-barrel tubular magazine, which holds the shells.
Sound engine
Half-Life was one of the first games to utilize a software-driven environmental sound engine. Effects are applied in context of room size and surfaces of reflection. Reverb effects are calculated in realtime and applied on the fly as sounds are triggered.
University of Innsbruck
In the game manual, the first two pages contain a fictional letter from the administrative offices of the Black Mesa Research Facility to Dr. Gordon Freeman, concerning his upcoming employment. The address on the letter indicates that Freeman was a visiting fellow at the Institute for Experimental Physics, University of Innsbruck, before moving to Black Mesa. In contrast to the common practice of using fictitious addresses for storytelling purposes, the listed address is actually real. As confirmed by the official university website, "Technikerstraße 25, A-6020 Innsbruck" is the real-world location of Innsbruck University's Institute for Experimental Physics.
Awards
- Computer Gaming World
- April 1999 (Issue #177) – Game of the Year
- January 2001 (Issue #199) – Introduced into the Hall of Fame
- March 2001 (Issue #200) - #1 Game of All Time (Readers' Choice)
- March 2001 (Issue #200) - #2 Game of All Time (Editors' Choice)
- GameSpy
- 2001 – #2 Top Game of All Time
- 2012 – #1 Top PC Gaming Intro
- GameStar (Germany)
- Issue 12/1999 - #17 in the "100 Most Important PC Games of the Nineties" ranking
- PC Gamer
- April 2000 - #1 in the "All-Time Top 50 Games" poll
- October 2001 - #1 in the "Top 50 Best Games of All Time" list
- April 2005 - #1 in the "Top 50 Best Games of All Time" list
- PC Player (Germany)
- Issue 01/1999 - Best Game in 1998
- Issue 01/1999 - Best Shooter in 1998
- Power Play
- Issue 02/1999 – Best Action Shooter in 1998
- Retro Gamer
- October 2004 (Issue #9) – #38 Best Game Of All Time (Readers' Vote)
Information also contributed by -Chris, Ace of Sevens, Adam Baratz, Ashley Pomeroy, Chris Martin, CrankyStorming, Emepol, Entorphane, Foxhack, Gargaj, Maw, MegaMegaMan, PCGamer77, phlux, Ronald Diemicke, Spartan_234, rstevenson, Sciere, Scott Monster, Silverblade, shifter, Xoleras, Zack Green and Zovni.
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Related Sites +
-
Hints for Half Life
Question and answer type hints give you the solutions at your own pace. -
Planet Halflife
The usual 'planet' site for the Half-Life game. Lots of new maps, skins, addons etc. Together with the daily news ticker this makes a 'must-stop' for every Half-Life fan. -
The Final Hours of Half-Life
GameSpot writes about the last part of Half-Life's development. -
The Half-Life Saga Story Guide
A site devoted to detail the various events and lore in the Half-Life universe so far. -
The Official Half-Life Web Site
Wayback Machine snapshot from 2000
Identifiers +
Contribute
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Contributors to this Entry
Game added by doj.
Macintosh added by Sciere. Linux added by Kabushi.
Additional contributors: Tomer Gabel, Adam Baratz, Unicorn Lynx, Jeanne, Zack Green, Apogee IV, Daniel Saner, Paulus18950, Cantillon, Patrick Bregger, Plok, lethal_guitar, MrFlibble, FatherJack.
Game added June 6, 1999. Last modified November 17, 2024.