Edward's Videogame Obsession #6: Half-Life

This was the first PC game I ever really got into. It fortunately came out during a period where expensive graphics cards weren't mandatory to play computer games. Somehow, my PC at the time was able to run this. This and The Ocarina of Time were the two greatest single-player experiences I've ever had. My first runthrough of this game was like a dream, because whenever I remember any specific moments from it, it brings back such a strong feeling of nostalgia and joy and also a bittersweetness that I probably won't ever have an experience like this again.

In terms of first-person shooters, this was one of the most revolutionary of all time, along with games like Doom, Goldeneye, and the first Halo. It introduced a cinematic quality to gaming that I see used in games like Far Cry, Uncharted, Killzone, and many, many others. This was one of the earliest games that really achieved this effect, and if others had attempted it before, none perfected it before the first Half-Life. This quality really drew me into the game in a way I had never been before. Something about Gordon Freeman's quest from the bowels of a top-secret science facility located far beneath the desert in the American Southwest was so intense, so cool, and so mindblowing. I loved the gradual progression from area to area in the facility, since as has often been noted before, there were no clear breaks between levels (again, this game strove for a kind of realism and immersion that was not seen earlier than this). Some of the areas will stay with me forever: the train tracks level, the giant tentacle level, the office level. Fuck, pretty much all of them, honestly. My favorite was, of course, Surface Tension (see my #7 favorite videogame moment ever here). I felt exhilaration along with Gordon Freeman at seeing the sun finally, and the vast expanses of desert, dam, and cliff spread out before me. Much has been made of the fact that Gordon Freeman remains forever silent (like Link in my other favorite game), allowing the player to insert themselves behind the mask of his special protection suit and see the world vicariously through his eyes. I'm not sure of the truth of this, but I know the way the game is created--its vast, lived-in environments; the sense that you are barely eeking your way through increasingly deadly situations in a massive world, instead of destroying swathes of armies and feeling like you are Superman in a typical shooter; the fact that the game doesn't dumb down to its audience like previous shooters had--sure made me feel like I lived insisde of this game, moreso than any game I had ever played before.

I had so much fun with this. I never wanted it to end, and was sad when it had to. The one flaw with the game is the final levels spent in the alien world, but no game is perfect. This also had a very influential multiplayer mode with the later expansions and mods Team Fortress Classic and the exceedingly popular Counter-Strike (neither of which I have much experience with, because of my lack of high-speed Internet growing up). What I think Half-Life brought to the table was an incredibly involving and exciting single-player mode, and I can see its influence in so many modern games. Even a movie like Children of Men I felt was very influenced by the visuals of Half-Life's phenomenal sequel.

--Edward