The Game You Cannot Escape - Half Life & Black Mesa Retrospective & History

All the way back in 1908, a man called Ernest Rutherford transformed the way that we understand the building blocks of this planet. In a paper called The Law of Radioactive Change, for which he won a Nobel Prize, he debunked the idea that atoms were indestructible and eternal by proving that radioactive substances were actually in a constant state of decay, a process that could be reliably measured and which Rutherford called half-life.

This discovery would prove to be one of the most consequential in human history, as it allowed for incredible innovations in nuclear research, it birthed the practice of radiometric dating and in the world of medicine, this newfound knowledge resulted in all manner of scans and treatments which have gone on to save millions of lives. And yet, despite all this groundbreaking scientific brilliance, in 2025, the phrase Half-Life has come to mean something very different.

What Rutherford could have never foreseen was that in the 1990s humanity would become utterly obsessed with shooting digital monsters with animated guns, and that out of this an all new kind of Half-Life would grab hold of the term and never let go. Now that might sound ridiculous, as after all, how could a first person shooter ever come to overshadow a Nobel Prize winning discovery?

But here's the thing, Half-Life is not just any old video game. It was so innovative that it permanently changed how stories were told in the medium. So influential that it gave birth to entirely new genres. So ripe with potential that it sent modding into the mainstream. So ridiculously successful that its developer is now one of the most profitable companies in the world.

Even decades after its last release, the internet will implode at the faintest rumour of another instalment and we've got an entire generation of children growing up with memes that they don't even realise were born in Black Mesa. Half-Life isn't just a very popular shooter, it's a pillar of modern pop culture, and so today I want to take you back to before it was ever released, and tell you all the tale of how a little studio called Valve stumbled into a masterpiece.

This is the story of the game we cannot escape. Its unlikely creation, its towering legacy, its baffling expansions and its glorious remake. The eternal legend of Gordon Freeman and the Black Mesa Incident. But before we step onto the transit system and set off for work, I need to quickly talk about the future of this channel. So for all of you that haven't got self-promotion turned off in your ad blocker, this is for you.

To cut to the chase, YouTube in 2026 is a pretty hostile place for channels like mine. I don't make shorts, I don't use AI, I don't release videos every other week and I don't make things that will easily go viral, all of which means it's pretty tough to keep ahead of the game. So if you love proper video game history and want to see more projects like these, please consider backing the channel on Patreon, as it's through that incredible support that I Finished a Video Game is still going. It's currently half price to celebrate the release

of this video, and along with my eternal gratitude, you'll also get five Patreon exclusive videos, like a review of every game I played in 2025, or a heavy duty retrospective about the creation of Chrono Trigger. All stuff that any sane person would have probably published on the main channel. Anyway, with that emergency broadcast out of the way, let's step behind the eyes of a young MIT graduate on his way to work. A man who was about to change the world of video games forever. Much like so many other classic first person shooters, the story of Half-Life begins with

the grandfather of the genre, id Software's Doom, although our tale is concerned with a very specific version. In 1996 Microsoft published a port for Windows 95, largely thanks to the efforts of a certain senior employee who had noticed that the shooter was outselling their shiny new operating system. This was Gabe Newell, a very talented software designer who had spent his career making millions of dollars for Bill Gates, and who, after working

on Doom 95, became convinced that video games were about to explode in popularity. So, along with his friend and fellow developer, Mike Harrington, the two quit their comfortable jobs making business tools and set up a new company in Kirkland, Washington, which they called Valve. Now this might sound somewhat crazy considering they had zero video game experience, but Newell and Harrington had a secret weapon, a friend of theirs called Mike Abrash, who had left Microsoft earlier that year and gone to work at id. Abrash was certain

that he could convince John Carmack to sign over the rights to id Software's Quake engine, a favour which would put Valve on the cutting edge of video game technology before they'd even started. Amazingly, that is exactly what happened, as after a brief meeting at id's Texas headquarters, Newell and Harrington returned home with a copy of the most powerful 3D engine on the planet. A golden opportunity which most studios would have killed for. So with an engine in hand, they now needed staff. And this is where things start to get

weird. Because rather than hiring a bunch of cheap college graduates, Newell and Harrington went looking for developers in very odd places. Their first two hires were Steve Bond and John Guthrie, a pair of hobbyist modders that ran a popular Quake fansite, and who apparently thought they were being pranked when Newell called asking if they wanted to work on a standalone game for real money. Along with Bond and Guthrie, the desks at Valve's headquarters quickly filled up with an odd mixture of enthusiasm and experience.

Industry veterans like Chuck Jones and Doug Wood from 3D Realms, ex-colleagues from Microsoft like the software genius Ken Birdwell, and even friends with no technical background like TK and Ted Backman. As neither Newell or Harrington had finished college, they didn't really care about qualifications or resumes, as they were only interested in how well you knew the Quake engine and if you bought into their artistic vision. This was the truly important part, because the goal wasn't to make a quick clone of

Quake or Doom, but to try and push the medium forwards. In a series of interviews given to a young journalist called Jeff Keighley, Gabe Newell spoke about how he felt the PC games in the mid-90s were lacking in ambition, and that too many studios had become obsessed with the quality of their graphics at the cost of imagination. For his game, he wanted something fresh, something immersive, something with a proper narrative, an experience different to the abstract shooting galleries that had made Doom, Bloods and Heretic such big hits.

So while Valve began with a deal to get hold of an engine, Half-Life emerged from an idea for a story, as Newell turned up in the office armed with a book that he felt would be perfect for their game, Stephen King's The Mist. For those of you who aren't familiar, the story involves a small town in Maine that becomes enveloped by thick gray fog,

which brings with it all manner of grotesque monsters that tear apart any poor soul who gets caught outside. Now the book revolves around various townsfolk trying to survive while trapped inside of a grocery store. But it wasn't this that excited Newell, as instead he loved that the mists and monsters were never really explained, and that King dropped the reader right into the middle of

a terrifying crisis where they never got any answers. The team agreed that this should be the premise of their game, that you would play as a normal man, a scientist rather than some hulking super soldier, and that the player would guide them through a research facility that was being invaded by monsters after a mysterious botched experiment. A premise where you never really knew why this was happening or what was going on. It was a very unique concept, but the team didn't really know anything about writing narratives, so Harrington got in touch with a video game journalist he knew called Mark Laidlaw, as

he had published a few sci-fi novels and seemed very excited about Valve's work. Laidlaw agreed to join the team and would end up being responsible for a massive amount of what makes Half-Life tick, although we'll save that for when we dig into the game itself. Now along with wanting to push the narrative envelope, the team also had big technological ambitions, which involved rewriting almost 70% of the Quake engine code so they could do things that even id Software had never attempted. The first was a full skeletal animation system,

which meant that models could be twisted into all sorts of fluid and lifelike poses, and the second was a complete rewrite of the engine's AI, as the goal for their game was to have enemies and allies that could independently interact and come up with unique responses to the player's actions. They were very lofty goals, and actually they caused Valve quite a bit of trouble when trying to secure a publishing deal, as most of the companies they met didn't believe they could deliver on any of these promises and thus didn't

hand over any money. Luckily they eventually managed to get in front of Ken Williams, the CEO and owner of Sierra Online, a struggling American publisher who were very keen to release a cutting edge PC shooter, but who would only agree to a deal if Valve handed over the IP rights and a big chunk of their future profits. With nobody else willing to give them a chance, Harrington and Newell agreed. Although, as we'll find out later in the video, they

ended up getting their revenge in a pretty big way. Anyway, with an engine, staff, a concept and a publisher, all that remained was to settle on a name. And you might be surprised to hear that this is where Mr. Ernest Rutherford comes back into the story. You see, Newell wanted something that sounded evocative, avoided cliches and also had a corresponding symbol that they could use in marketing. So they eventually

settled on Half-Life, which not only sounds cool as f***, but is represented in chemistry by the Greek letter Lambda, which would go on to become the iconic logo for the franchise. So fast forward a few months and we arrive at E3 1997, where Valve unveiled Half-Life to the assorted video game media, and thanks to all the advanced animations and complex AI, it received an electric response. Magazines and websites were blown away by the work of this studio that they had never even heard of before, and amidst glowing previews and a host of

Best in Show awards, there were rumours online that Half-Life already had a quarter of a million pre-orders before the release date had even been announced. Considering all the hype, Sierra became very excited and announced that they were targeting a Christmas 1997 release window, where they would go head to head with id Software's Quake 2 and try to dethrone the king of first person shooting. It was fairy tale stuff for a studio that had barely been in existence for a year, but all of this

masked some pretty serious problems bubbling under the surface. You see, Valve's E3 demo was more of a showreel than a legitimate slice of finished game, and back in Washington, after the team sat down and played through all the content they had so far, Newell realised that Half-Life was a colossal mess. It was way too confusing, it wasn't fun to play, it was riddled with bugs and they didn't even have a proper ending. All pretty massive problems that meant Christmas 1997 was utterly out of the question. So Newell and Harrington went to Sierra and

asked for a pretty substantial delay, but the problem was that the publisher was only willing to push back the date, but not stump up any more cash, which left Valve in a pretty tricky situation. Their game needed a lot more work, but who exactly was going to pay for it? Well this is where we arrive at Newell and Harrington's second secret weapon. Their incredible personal wealth, which came from the stock options that they had been paid

in while working at Microsoft. When they had quit to form Valve, both were multi-millionaires, so rather than publish something sub-standard, they decided to put their money where their mouth was and start funding Half-Life themselves. Now what's impressive about this is that it wasn't just a couple of extra weeks of bug testing, but an entire additional year of development, with an expanded

team, which developer Ken Birdwell described as more like baking Half-Life 2 than fixing the original. Now, to make sure this didn't result in another mess, Newell came up with something called Design Cabals, where representatives from different parts of Half-Life's development team would spend time together every single week, making sure that each aspect of its design, from the sound to the textures and even details in the script were all pointing in the same direction.

If you can believe it, this was not typical of video game production in the 1990s, where level designers, artists and engineers often worked entirely separately, but Newell's collaborative approach worked very well and it led to a ton of ideas that would go on to define Half-Life. One of these was the game's unique approach to storytelling, as the team had originally intended to fill the game with cutscenes made to look like footage from security cameras,

but no matter how many times they reworked the idea, they always looked hokey and out of place. So during one of the cabals, Mark Laidlaw suggested that they just get rid of them, and tell every second of the story without breaking the player's perspective. A completely fresh approach to video game storytelling that would end up being one of Half-Life's most influential ideas. Similarly, Half-Life's main character was originally a weird design which the team called

Ivan the Space Biker, but during the additional year, designer Chuck Jones decided that this had to change, and re-wered the model to look more like his colleague, Kelly Bailey. This led to a new character with short brown hair, black glasses and a goatee. A totally unassuming and unexciting look, but one which is now considered utterly iconic. Now the funny thing about all this is that when Valve eventually returned to E3 in 1998,

armed with their all new version of Half-Life, the media was so excited to see more that nobody noticed that the game had been rebooted. And amidst a flurry of awards and desperate requests for interviews, it looked as if the gamble was going to pay off. That was until November 1st, a few weeks before the game's release, when Harrington sat down at his desk and realised that something terrible had happened.

You see, Valve had signed a few deals with different graphic card companies so that they could include a demo version of their game alongside the hardware, but as soon as this promotion started, the demo instantly leaked online. As it was downloaded millions of times within just a few days, both Valve and Sierra began to panic that it would ruin any chances of a big launch. But amazingly, the leak proved to be an extremely effective piece of accidental marketing. Rather than waiting for a launch copy, websites and magazines quickly threw together excited

previews, talking about how incredible the game's opening levels were, and on forums, rather than getting their fill and losing interest, fans developed a passionate lust for the full release. Initially Sierra had estimated that thanks to its good showings at E3, Half-Life might sell a quarter of a million lifetime copies. But when it finally hit shelves on November 19th, 1998, it absolutely blew past these numbers

and took on a life of its own. By February of 1999, after just two months on the market, Half-Life had shipped a whopping half a million units, a number which only continued to soar upwards thanks to some extremely clever decisions by Valve. Just like id Software had done with Quake, Half-Life shipped with a toolset for modding called Worldcraft, and this immediately created a huge online community of modders

and map designers, some of which became so popular that they effectively became games in their own right. Thanks to these fan creations like Team Fortress, Day of Defeat and Counter-Strike, hundreds of thousands of people ended up buying Half-Life and not even touching the base game. A strange phenomenon that Valve capitalised on as they ended up buying the rights to these mods and bringing the teams in house, all of which kept the sales pouring in. By 2004, just 5 years after its release, Half-Life had sold 8 million copies. An unthinkable

amount for a debut game from a studio founded by a team with no previous experience, who had barely been able to convince a publisher that their game was viable, and who had ended up spending millions of dollars of their own money to make it happen. The whole process was as impressive as it was unlikely, a true testament to what talented people can achieve when someone with deep pockets decides to choose long term art art over short-term

profits.

But, my friends, we are not here to simply dissect the story of Half-Life's creation, as I think it's high time that we step inside the gunmetal halls of Black Mesa and see the magic of dangerous experimental science with our own two eyes. So much of what makes Half-Life such an important game is found in its opening few levels. But in order to properly understand quite how groundbreaking they were, we need to take a quick detour and talk about storytelling in the 1990s.

You see, while video games had been getting increasingly complex throughout the decade, there were still plenty of genres that weren't all that concerned with anything beyond graphics and gameplay. Outside of point and clicks, RPGs and the odd 3D action adventure, most developers wanted you to get straight into the action. So taking the time to establish why you were fighting or racing or jumping didn't

really matter. This was particularly true in the world of the first-person shooter, where storytelling pretty much amounted to the art on the box, a few paragraphs in the manual, the aesthetics of the levels and maybe an introductory cutscene if you were particularly lucky. If you need an example, we need only look at a game we've already spoken about, id Software's Quake, which is supposedly about a character called the Ranger who has to stop a malevolent force called Quake from sending Lovecraftian monsters to destroy the Earth. Now,

in reality, this is never remotely relevant to the experience of playing Quake, where you load into the main menu, click on a new game, and within seconds you're shooting monsters and looking for the level exit. A process you repeat 30 times in 30 different configurations, without so much as a whiff of a narrative. Of course, it has to be said that there is nothing particularly wrong with this, and frankly I wouldn't want to sit through 20 minutes of expository dialogue before playing

a match in Tekken. But the entire vision behind Half-Life was to prove that first-person shooters could be so much more. The first thing we see when we start a new game is not an enemy to shoot, or a puzzle to solve, or even anything particularly exciting, as our journey begins in a quiet train car, travelling through the sprawl of the Black Mesa Research Facility. We play as Gordon Freeman, not a muscle-bound superhero or a

vicious prize fighter, but a 27-year-old research associate, and for the first 5 minutes of Half-Life, all we do is sit and watch the scenery pass us by. Now it might not seem like much, but this is the mission statement of this game. As while there are plenty of things to look at and listen to, like scientists milling around in offices, or announcements about health and safety, or recruitment initiatives, none of this is happening in a cutscene. You look at whatever catches your eye, move about as

you see fit, react to whatever noises you hear, or even just tune out entirely and wait for it all to end. But the point is that you are in complete control, and this immediately makes you feel as if you're a real person inside of a real place, rather than someone playing a video

game.

This was a million miles from the high intensity first levels that open virtually every other 90's shooter, but Half-Life breaks even further from tradition when we arrive at our location, the anomalous materials lab in Sector C. Inside, the lab is teeming with activity, colleagues who will greet you when you walk up to them, people cooking their lunch and banging on vending machines, friends standing in corridors having their own conversations and a receptionist who tells you to suit up and head into the test chamber. It is hard to emphasise just how mind-blowing it was

to see anything like this in 1998. Rooms full of little details and things to see and buttons to press, all presented without a gun in sight, and absolutely nothing to kill. Now obviously we do need to start killing things eventually, but what I love about Half-Life One is that it isn't just looking to be immersive. When we arrive at the experiment chamber ready to perform our duties, the game pivots into classic cinematic drama. Here

we don't know exactly what we are testing or what the team are trying to achieve, apparently something to do with an anti-mass spectrometer, but it quickly becomes clear that this involves pushing a large crystal into a giant spinning machine. Unfortunately this causes all hell to break loose. A resonance cascade which sends lasers shooting in every direction, all manner of explosions that rock the chamber and the comms to fill with the sound of scientists screaming in

panic. A hard tonal shift that is once again delivered while you are in total control. In fact, this even persists when we start teleporting between dimensions, first warping into an alien landscape where we can walk around bipedal monsters drinking from strange pools of water before we cut to pure darkness, with only the sounds of Gordon's heavy breathing to prove that we have not died. It's extremely enthralling stuff, but at the risk of repeating myself, the fact that we are not just a passenger, idly watching our screen while the game moves for us, and instead get to be an active participant, well it makes it

all hit so much harder. You are Gordon Freeman. You rode the train into work. You were responsible for the accident, and if you want to get out alive, you're going to have to do a lot more than just mindlessly run and gun. Now before we get onto Half-Life's gameplay, which is its own bundle of impressive ideas, we need to quickly acknowledge that this stroke of introductory storytelling genius almost never made it into the game. You see, originally, the plan had been to start players off after

the Resonance Cascade, where you would first take control of Gordon in the ruins of the Test Chamber, a much more traditional FPS opening that got straight to the point. The thing is, during one of the development cabals, writer Mark Laidlaw was looking over the game's first level and randomly asked its designer, Brett Johnson, if it would be possible to see exactly the same set of rooms cleaned up and populated with friendly NPCs. His thinking was that seeing the facility before its destruction would give the cascade much more impact,

and Johnson loved the idea so much that he went home and put it together overnight, having the entire sequence ready to go by the very next day. Considering just how iconic this whole section has become, and how big of a role it played in Half-Life's success thanks to the OEM demo, it's funny to think that it emerged from a throwaway comment and a single night's worth of work. Anyway, back in the world of Gordon Freeman's workplace crisis, this is where the game starts

in earnest. But what is fascinating about Half-Life is that even after the story kicks off, we still don't dive straight into traditional run and gun gameplay. You see, the Resonance Cascade didn't just damage the facility, as during our attempts to get to safety, we discover that it has somehow broken the barriers of reality, and caused a host of terrible monsters to begin slaughtering the survivors. We see fleshyhy parasitic headcrabs

that turn their hosts into scarecrow-like zombies. Faceless hounds that unleash bone-rending supersonic howls. Sickly-looking three-armed cyclops who hide around corners and ambush us with psychic blasts. Tentacle-mouthed bipeds that spit acid at their prey, and the one species that has always disturbed me the most – swollen barnacles that patiently wait until something becomes snared in their tongues, before greedily drawing it up into them more.

It is a pure horror show of a villain's gallery, but unlike in games like Doom or Quake – where we always feel equipped and ready to fight back, Half-Life doesn't even start you off with a weapon, and you have to run away from the first few enemies you encounter. Even when you do eventually find something, it's just a crowbar, which means you've got to get pretty close to danger in order to fight, and across the entire first level, the only extra firepower we discover is a small handgun and a measly amount of ammo

that will quickly run out if you aren't a good shot. Between headcrab jump scares that make you slow down every time you creep into a vent, or the endless disturbing scenes of scientists and security getting caught in the chaos, if anything, at this point, Half-Life feels closer to Resident Evil than Duke Nukem. That classic, first-person shooter power fantasy is entirely missing, and it's yet another example of Valve choosing cinematic atmosphere over the raw dopamine hits of fast-paced action.

To put it bluntly, this opening sequence changed the trajectory of first-person shooter design, and it's impossible to imagine that we would have ever seen games like Halo, Bioshock, Metro or Fallout if Half-Life hadn't proven that quieter moments could work in first-person, and that you didn't always need to be shooting to be sucked into the experience. Even if Half-Life had never been anything else, this calm before the storm would have been more than enough to write Gordon Freeman into the history books. But what makes this game so

special and so beloved is that it is also a rip-roaring shooter. Before we go any further, we need to stop for a brief message from today's sponsor, the Earbud Geniuses over at Raycon. If you hadn't noticed from my previous videos, the only other thing in my life that matches my love of video games is my love of music. Which means I've got to have a good pair of earbuds for when I'm locked in on a 6 hour session of writing. Now Raycons are particularly great as they're extremely light,

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At its core, the gameplay of Half-Life is still built on the foundations of Doom and Quake. You keep playing because it is very satisfying to point your gun at an enemy and blow them away, with this simple loop repeating itself in all manner of different configurations all the way to the credits. But the truth is that

that isn't really why this game is held in such high acclaim, as while it feels great to blast your way through a firefight, it's the smaller details and creative little flourishes that make Valve's take on the genre such a huge hit. Let's start with the HUD, which is pretty minimalistic, showing your health and armour in the bottom left, your ammo in the bottom right, your flashlight battery in the top right and your selected weapon in the top left, although this only appears as you scroll through them.

On its own, this isn't particularly notable, as FPS games had already started moving away from the clunky UIs of the mid 90s, but where Half-Life innovates is that all this information is given a proper reason to exist. You see, rather than our health number or ammo counter being some abstract video game system, we're instead told that they are the monitoring being done by your hazard suit, which is a really clever way to turn them into a piece of world building. They aren't

just there because the player needs them for the game to work, but because scientists need to monitor their vitals during experiments, and thus something immersion-breaking becomes immersive. But it doesn't stop there, as the suit also comes equipped with a friendly robotic voice that responds to a whole bunch of your actions, like losing health, becoming exposed to hazardous materials or running out of ammo, all of which health, becoming exposed to hazardous materials, or running out of ammo.

All of which adds a surprising amount to the experience. Not only are these voice lines legitimately helpful, as the feedback they provide means you don't have to constantly check your on-screen stats, but they also help explain away some of the more unavoidably gamey parts of Half-Life's design.

For example, if you take a big chunk of damage by falling down a ladder or getting caught in an explosion, the suit will let you know that it's administering a shot of morphine. Which doesn't actually do anything in gameplay terms, but it helps to explain how Gordon is able to carry on. Similarly, when we hear electrical damage detected or blood toxin levels rising, you can accept that this only causes a small amount of damage because the suit is mitigating the harm, rather than having

to chalk it up to video game logic that none of this stuff instantly kills you. It's actually very impressive for such a small idea, especially as this sort of constant commentary could easily get annoying if done wrong. but by the end of the game, hearing, Seek medical attention after a particularly brutal fight, almost becomes a source of comfort amidst all the insanity. Now what is cool is that this style of diegetic design is found all throughout Half-Life, and clearly the aim wasn't to just create a game that was fun to play, but one that

felt interactive and believable, at least by the standards of the late 1990s. Take your ammo and weapons, which rather than just randomly floating in place waiting to be picked up, tend to be positioned with more purpose, on the bodies of dead security officers or being introduced to us through little dioramas, like a tranquiliser crossbow sitting in a shark cage or an experimental laser that we find in a testing lab. Similarly, we don't restore our resources

exclusively through abstract pickups, as dotted around Black Mesa are wall-mounted chargers, one for health and one for armour, presumably intended to keep the staff topped up as they carry out their dangerous work. These are particularly interesting because on the surface they seem like a fun little aesthetic decision that doesn't add anything to the gameplay, but in practice they're a lot more useful as they function like a soft checkpoint. As they tend to be placed in between larger stretches of combat, they not only provide a

breather to break up the hectic pace, but they also stop less skilled players from always being on low health, which allows Valve to design all manner of ambushes and complex gunfights without the game becoming overly punishing. This design philosophy is really Half-Life's secret weapon, that everything in the game serves a dual purpose, contributing something concrete to the gameplay while also drawing you deeper into the narrative. And I think it's this mode of thinking that leads us to its most infamous and memorable idea.

Before Valve, non-playable characters simply weren't part of the first-person shooter equation, as the whole genre was still operating on the logic of Doom, where the only other figures the player interacted with were enemies that they had to kill. Unlike in RPGs or 3D platformers, where a big cast of colourful characters forms part of the appeal, shooters were intended to be a solitary experience. And even when the genre did put more emphasis on storytelling, like in Looking Glass' System Shock or Bungie's Marathon, they never became more interactive than reading text boxes or watching the odd cutscene.

Now, we've already spoken about how Valve had bucked this trend with Half-Life's opening sequence, but this actually continues all throughout the game, as we continually run into scientists and security officers trying to escape Black Mesa, both of which contribute a lot more than just voice lines. If you walk up to either type of NPC and hit the use key, they will agree to follow you, and you'll want to do this for a couple of different reasons.

The first is that throughout the facility there are various locked doors, some of which can only be opened by the research staff, and some of which can only be opened by the security staff, and generally speaking, when you come across one, you'll have to do a bit of exploring and find the security staff. And generally speaking, when you come across one, you'll have to do a bit of exploring and find the appropriate type. In my view, this is a smart remix of the traditional red key, red door concept which dominated old school FPS design. And just like with the HUD and the weapon placement and the health

stations, it takes a very gamey, abstract idea and turns it into something more believable. Now what's cool is that even outside of this door opening mechanic, the NPCs also act with their own agency. Let's say you're accompanying a scientist and find yourself ambushed by aliens. Well in that case, he'll turn tail and run for cover, a response that can often have unintended consequences as they sprint straight into trip mines or the hanging tongue of a barnacle. On the flip side, the security staff will stand their ground and try to defend themselves,

and can actually be surprisingly effective against low-level threats, which only makes you feel all the more guilty when your blue-uniformed buddy eventually gets cut down. Obviously, it does have to be pointed out that there isn't exactly a ton of model variety, as every single security officer looks and sounds exactly the same, and there are only a ton of model variety, as every single security officer looks and sounds exactly the same and there are only a handful of different scientists, but I feel like this has become a bit of an unfair criticism. If we jump forward in time and take a look at Halo 2,

which was released six years later and was considered to be one of the most cutting edge shooters of the generation, there really isn't that much more variety or complexity in the friendly NPCs. In many ways, Half-Life is a victim of its own success, because it was so ahead of its time that it's hard to not compare it to much more modern games, and forget that it was releasing into a world where a fully animated, fully voiced, reactive and purposeful NPC was like something from a sci-fi novel. In fact, that brings me onto another lovely little feature that you could easily miss

if you dive into Half-Life without an appreciation for the environment it released into. One of the game's crowning achievements is the way that its levels flow into one another without separation. A truly ingenious idea that makes it feel like you're moving through a singular realistic space, rather than a set of individual levels. Before Half-Life, this was virtually unheard of in a first-person shooter, as they were almost always split up into separate and distinct stages,

handcrafted chunks of gameplay that you loaded into from a menu and then exited with a completion screen. This was about a million miles from the artistic vision that Valve had for Half-Life. So while we do see a lot of rooms designed specifically for shootouts or platforming, or to house little puzzles, all of this has been carefully laid out to feel natural. Rather than fighting our way around inhuman geometric labyrinths, we battle monsters across the blood-stained linoleum

floors of the Black Mesa office complex, get caught in shootouts between massive storage units in the facility warehouse, ride an electrified rail system that moves resources between different sectors, and of course explore an endless system of snaking vents that keep air pumping around the building. Now this is obviously a very cool idea, and adds this enjoyable dynamic where seeing more of the strange, Kafka-esque layout of Black Mesa becomes its own reward, but what really makes

it work is that it's all woven together into one continuous experience. When we finish a level, rather than being ejected into a mission select screen or being teleported to the next starting point, we just walk into the next area, with every game space flowing seamlessly from one into the next. A process that you wouldn't even notice if it weren't for a short load. This was absolutely unprecedented for a video game of any kind in 1998, and it gives Half-Life

a real cinematic flood, where the uninterrupted structure feels closer to that of a movie than something you could find on an arcade or on a console. In many ways, even amidst all of the other clever ideas, this seamless approach to level design might be Half-Life's largest innovation, as even a decade later, when studios were working with far more powerful

engines and had a far better grasp of what worked and what didn't, Half-Life was still the benchmark for how realistic and immersive a video game world could feel. Essentially, if you put all of this together, the little details like the HEV voice lines, the way scientists react to seeing a monster, the thoughtful placement of every object and item and the way it all flows together without ever breaking a spell, well it feels almost disrespectful to call Half-Life just a first

person shooter. The truth is that it is so much more, and while shooting might be the main action you do while guiding Gordon Freeman to safety, it is not the sole reason that people keep coming back to Black Mesa. So if you haven't already gathered, Half-Life is an extremely well designed game, full of little details that elevate it far beyond any other shooter that had been released up to that point.

But here I want to throw you a little curveball. There is something that Half-Life does that is very often overlooked when assessing its legacy, and it's a characteristic that you wouldn't necessarily expect from an old school shooter, but is absolutely key to the whole package working. This is where we're going to talk about gameplay variety, and how Half-Life skillfully manages to avoid repetition, despite being part of a genre

where repetition is the whole point. Now to start off, we need to talk about something that happens in the game's third level. We've got hostiles, where Valve pull off one of my all-time favourite video game surprises. Up until this point, our time in Black Mesa has been exclusively spent trying to avoid the jaws of horrible monsters, and all throughout the labs and office complex, our only sliver of hope comes in the form of a rumour that the military are being sent in to save the

day. Well, when we arrive in the warehouses, we discover that this is only partially true, as we see a much relieved scientist racing over to a masked soldier, who promptly guns him down. Turns out that the military have indeed been sent in to clean up, it's just that this involves killing all of the witnesses along with the aliens, which unfortunately includes Dr Gordon Freeman.

This is a great little twist, as it adds a whole new dimension to the storytelling – the question of what secrets Black Mesa are hiding that would warrant such a cover-up. But I want to focus on what this revelation does to the gameplay. You see, when we're fighting the monsters, Half-Life is a rather chaotic experience, where you're trying to deal with headcrabs that leap out from the shadows, quickly take out alien slaves and bull squids

peppering you from range, all while avoiding getting swarmed by zombies and hound eyes. These encounters have a hectic pace, but when we start fighting the military, Half-Life transforms into a totally different kind of shooter. Thanks to the fact that they use guns, cover plays a much bigger role, as a squad of three or four soldiers can easily kill you if you're caught out in the open. But you can't ever stay in one place for too long as they'll eventually start throwing grenades or charging you down with shotguns. Along with these more advanced tactics, areas

that the military have taken over are full of all manner of gun positions, automated turrets and trip mines, all of which forces you into a much more careful playstyle, and later on we even come up against helicopters and tanks that will instantly kill you if you try to fight them head on. It's not quite Ghost Recon or SWAT, but you do have to think about each encounter, using explosives where you can get an advantage, sniping from distance before you're seen

or my personal favourite, using a little alien bug called a snark, which sends soldiers into a wild panic and allows you to capitalise. Now, if Half-Life was just one of these, horror-tinged brawls against aliens, or the more grounded military shootouts, I doubt we would have the legs to stay interesting for a full playthrough, but because we're constantly switching between

the two, Valve is able to stop the gameplay from stagnating and keep you on your toes. It's a very clever piece of game design, but it actually gets even better, as the further we push into Black Mesa, the less segregated these different styles become. In Half-Life's later levels, we constantly stumble into battles between the two factions that are already well underway, often where the military have been caught out by the invading alien forces, and they create these awesome moments of three-way pandemonium. There are

grenades exploding all around us, military comms going crazy, constant flashing lights from teleportation portals, tanks bursting through walls and organic bullets flying around every corner, all of which ups the intensity to a crazy high level and turns the last few hours into a climax of all out warfare. It's a deeply satisfying progression curve, and it's a huge part of what makes Half-Life such a great shooter, but if you can believe it, we've not even scratched the surface of how much variety Valve have squeezed out of this engine. Let's start with the level design, because there are lots of moments where Valve mixes

things up and gives us more to think about than just shooting enemies. Generally speaking, this relates to how we navigate around levels, where you need to do things like crawl through maze-like vent systems, or solve a little puzzle to open the path forwards, or jump across platforms to avoid environmental hazards. While these moments tend to be pretty brief, they often are welcome breather from all the action. The thing is, while the game's most popular levels – Office Complex, We've Got Hostiles, Questionable Ethics and Surface Tension – all revolve around a balance between these

navigation puzzles and fighting enemies, there are also a handful of sections that break from it entirely. Blast Pit is the game's most famous example, as this takes place in a large rocket testing chamber that's been occupied by a giant bladed tentacle monster, and surprise surprise, it's blocking our path forwards. Thanks to the advice of a helpful security guard, we quickly realise that our goal is to turn on the rocket engine, and blast the creature away, but this isn't done by simply walking from point A to point B. In order to activate the power, oxygen and fuel that the engine needs, you need to

sneak past the monster without making a sound, and then head into three separate branching wings, all of which connect to the central chamber and which can be tackled in whatever order you want. It is a sudden burst of non-linearity that works really well, slowing things down from the crazed action of the previous two levels and asking you to think about the space you're exploring by looking for clues in the environment.

Likewise, there's a moment around the halfway point that does the complete opposite, boiling Half-Life down to its most simple form. We have nothing to think about except the distance to your next platform. This comes after Gordon is captured while fighting the military's Black Ops unit, who get the jump on him and throw his unconscious body into a trash compactor. When we come to, all of our guns are gone and the walls are literally closing in,

which prompts this panicked little moment where you're desperately trying to climb your way out before being turned into jam. This leads into a level called Residue Processing, set inside Black Mesa's waste management plant, and which amazingly has hardly any combat

and is instead entirely focused on jumping. All of a sudden it feels like you're playing a first person version of Tomb Raider, as we're timing our leaps to avoid falling into radioactive runoff, jumping between conveyor belts while dodging dangerous machinery and basically doing everything that you'd expect to see in Banjo-Kazooie or Crash Bandicoot. It is a very strange left hand turn, but just like with Blast Bit, I think

it's really important to the overall flow of the game, as not every moment needs to be all-out intense action. Although it does have to be said that the platforming mechanics are a little wonky. Gordon's movement is actually pretty slippery, which doesn't feel out of place when you're running around in a gunfight, but which isn't exactly comfortable when you're trying to make precise jumps. And this can lead to quite a few annoying deaths, from overcorrecting landings or slipping off of edges. The thing is, as the level is only about 15 minutes long, it's quite easy to forgive its sins

and appreciate that it's just meant to be a little detour, so that all the grenades and shotguns and crossbows stay fresh. Now while that's all very well and adds a lot to the overall picture of Half-Life, there is a moment where Valve oversteps the mark with an experiment that doesn't really work. When we come out of the blast pit, we find ourselves at a power station for Black Mesa's underground rail system, which we need to ride over to the Lambda Complex on the far side of the building, where there is apparently a group of scientists who know how to close the resonance cascade.

This is our goal for pretty much the entire rest of the game, but it gets off to a very rough start, as we're thrust into a truly notorious level called On The Rails. The idea here is that we're riding an electrified tram around a labyrinth of railway lines. And to be blunt, it is a real slog. Not only is it extremely visually uninteresting, presented as a maze of repeating grey hallways that stand in stark contrast to the fancy labs and monolithic machinery of the rest of the game, but for some reason On The Rails is also one of the longest levels

in the entire game. It just feels like it goes on forever, and at no point are we doing anything particularly interesting. Just clearing obstacles from our paths, or shooting line selectors to change our track, or maybe jumping off to fight a small ambush, all of which happens multiple times over and can easily last an hour or more if you get lost or end up on the wrong track. Now if anything, On the Rails' relative dullness is a testament to quite how thrilling

the rest of Half-Life usually is, as it conditions us to think something unique will happen in every room we enter – an expectation that really was not reasonable to have of a first person shooter in 1998. You've got to remember that in games like Duke Nukem 3D or Turok, the variety exclusively came from the weapons you used and the enemies you fought, whereas Valve served up a circus of crazy ideas where you're just as likely to be running for

your life from a helicopter or solving a wild teleportation portal puzzle as you are to be gunning down a room full of monsters. In truth, I think this is often forgotten when talking about the influence of Half-Life, because really this was the first time that a first person shooter was able to match up to the sense of adventure that you could find in big budget console games like Metal Gear Solid or The Legend of Zelda. There is just so much game crammed

into the walls of Black Mesa, and while it's fairly common to hear praise for its immersive environments or its pulse-pounding shooting, I think it's this appreciation for variety

that glues the whole thing together.

You might have noticed that so far, we haven't really spoken about Half-Life's story, which is a little surprising considering its opening revolves around a pretty massive narrative hook. What exactly is happening in Black Mesa? Well, the answer to this question isn't particularly straightforward, and in trying to answer it, we come crashing into one of the most controversial finales in video game history. The Alien World of Xen.

Now before we get ahead of ourselves, let's look back and take stock. We know that Black Mesa was conducting weird experiments, and that when Gordon Freeman pushed the crystal sample into the mass spectrometer, some kind of reaction tore open reality and invited in an army of bloodthirsty monsters. Along with this, thanks to the testing labs we see in Questionable Ethics and the fact that the military are trying to eliminate everyone involved, it's pretty obvious that

the American government already knew about these otherworldly creatures. Although what they were trying to learn from them remains a mystery. Well when we finally arrive at the Lambda Core, you might imagine that the curtain is about to be lifted, but that is not the case, as instead, Half-Life's narrative takes a rather unexpected turn. We are told that the science team not only knew about the aliens, but had been conducting excursions into their world, and now they need Gordon to travel

there and take out a vast psychic power, which they theorise will shut down the resonance cascade. So armed with a new long jump module that gives us a sprint jump, we dive into a portal and begin this final battle, an assault of the alien border world, Xen. A truly strange place, and an even stranger conclusion. Now there is no other way to say this, but these four alien expeditionary levels are easily the worst part of the game, and it's developed such a notorious reputation that

during a Reddit AMA, Gabe Newell jokingly referred to it as his life's biggest regret. Unfortunately for Gabe, I don't think he's far from the truth, but before we get into everything that went wrong, let's take a moment to talk about the few things that actually work. Firstly, I do like the aesthetic of these levels, which do a great job of twisting low polygon geometry into something that feels inhuman and otherworldly. We see fleshy spider-like vegetation, huge spikes that pulse with electricity,

hanging tentacles that reach out from the walls, all presented on these strange floating islands, which don't make it clear if we're in outer space or somewhere else altogether. It has this eerie liminal vibe, almost as if it's half-formed, which in turn makes you question how the aliens could even live here when there doesn't appear to be any structure beyond a handful of teleporters and tunnel systems. Now that being said, there are a few concrete details you can uncover, one of which really

changes how we view the enemies we were fighting back in Black Mesa. Eventually we end up in what looks like a factory, where the aliens seem to be building armoured soldiers before they're transported to Earth, and while wandering around its halls we see the same brown cyclopean aliens that we have fought a hundred times already. The only difference is that here in the factory they are not hostile, and will leave you alone as long as you don't hurt them. Now it isn't confirmed anywhere in the game, but fans have long theorised

that this means that these aliens are slaves, forced to do the bidding of the more powerful races. Which implies that all these mindless monsters are actually a lot more complex than we would have initially thought, as their society must have defined roles and a hierarchy of power, all born from a history that reaches back further than the resonance cascade. And I think had Valve been able to explore this in more detail, Xen might be remembered a lot more fondly.

Unfortunately, though, that is not the case. While the art style and environmental storytelling might be cool, the actual experience of playing through these levels leaves a lot to be desired. Let's start with the first big problem, which is that the level design becomes hyper-simplified, and feels a million miles away from the immersive and interactable spaces we explored back on Earth. Take the first level, Xen, which is literally just a series of floating platforms and then a small underground puzzle, all of which can be completed in about 3 minutes

if you know where you're going. The same is true of the second level, Gonarch's Lair, which is just a short boss fight with no real mechanics beyond blasting the monster with your strongest weapons. Considering that some of the levels in Black Mesa can run upwards of an hour, and are often filled with distinct sections that are longer than both of these levels combined, it all feels very underbaked, like Valve threw together a few leftover ideas and called it a climax.

Even when we eventually get into a longer chunk of gameplay in Xen's third level, Interloper, that careful balance of first-person action, gameplay variety and environmental storytelling just isn't there, as all we do is teleport between a set of incoherent maps that have very little to do with one another. Without any NPCs to add colour or clever little set pieces to mix things up, Xen ends up feeling like a skeletal version of the rest of the game, where all those little

details that made Half-Life stand out are now conspicuously absent. On a personal note, my least favourite section is the game's final boss, a battle against a giant floating creature called the Nihilanth, who appears to be the psychic power responsible for keeping the cascade open. Other than the monster's voice lines, which are an ominous mixture of threats and warnings, that do give it a sense of life outside of this fight, the whole encounter is just so

strangely designed that I can't believe a game of this quality shipped with this as its ending. The idea is that the monster isn't vulnerable to direct damage, so you have to use a set of jump pads on the floor to soar up into the air and destroy three yellow crystals on the wall, which are responsible for regenerating its shields. Once that's done, you can blast away at its exposed brain, but actually managing to do this with anything other than a rocket launcher

is pure torture, and thanks to the weird bounce mechanics, you spend more time trying to line up your jumps than actually doing any fighting. Now this in of itself would make for a very janky boss fight, but what really ruins the moment is that the Nihilanth defends itself by teleporting you into a set of platforming challenge rooms. These are so fiddly and so particular about how you need to move through them that you can easily spend double or triple the amount of time on them that you do actually fighting the boss, and frankly,

I cannot believe that playtesting didn't expose this as the dreadful idea that it so obviously is. To be perfectly blunt, the four Xen levels are just not very fun. So that obviously begs the question, what happened? How did Valve mess up their conclusion so badly? Well, the closest we've gotten to an answer comes from an interview with Mark Laidlaw, where he admitted that Xen was thrown together at the last moment in a frantic rush to prevent another release date delay. The original idea had been for the alien homeworld to be this massive living organism, which Gordon would

move around inside of while fighting enemies, but this proved to be far too ambitious and had to be abandoned in favour of something more straightforward. The problem was that the team had basically no idea how the story was supposed to end, as all they had ever settled on was the vague notion that Gordon would go into outer space, and this left the level designers without any direction or purpose and resulted in a bunch of half-finished ideas that didn't really form into a proper whole.

Considering just how laser-focused Newell and Harrington were on their grand creative vision, it's extremely odd that they never settled on how their game should conclude, but what makes this even weirder is that when the Nihilanth is finally defeated, we're thrust into one of the most iconic final scenes in video game history. As the beast dies, everything fades to black, and when Gordon comes to, he's standing in front of a blue-suited man with a briefcase, who begins to speak

to us in the most disturbing Lizardman-style voice, and proceeds to blow the lore of Half-Life wide open. He tells us that thanks to our efforts, the border world of Xen is now under his employers' control, and that they are so impressed that they've decided to offer Gordon a job. Amidst rasping breaths and awkward sounding swallows, he gives us a choice. Step into the portal and accept their proposal, or be given a battle we have no hope of winning.

If we refuse, we are instantly killed, but if we walk out of the train car and accept, the mysterious bureaucrat gives a little chuckle of satisfaction, before the screen fades to black and we are told that Gordon is awaiting his next assignment. The whole sequence barely lasts two minutes, but it is easily one of the most discussed pieces of video game writing ever pressed to disc, and prompted an avalanche of fan theories and speculation. Who is this blue-suited man? Who are his employers? What

do they want with Zen? Are they responsible for the resonance cascade? What do they intend to do with Gordon? And most importantly, why does he speak so strangely? They are tantalising questions that have spawned almost three decades of debate, but that's not even the full picture. As if you've been paying attention during your playthrough, you'll notice that this is not the first time that you've seen this character. The G-Man, as named by fans, actually appears

quite frequently throughout the game, hidden away in distant locations that we can't reach, or popping up behind windows that we can't break. A mysterious, ever-present watcher that only adds to the mystery of this perplexing conclusion. It's another one of Valve's inspired little details, allowing us to go back and catch a peek at the magician behind the curtain – a move that somehow takes an ending that comes out of nowhere and has no connection with the rest of the game, and makes it feel

cohesive and intentional. There is so much in Half-Life that you can see in the shooters that come after it – the immersive level design, the reactive NPCs and environments, the pulse-pounding gameplay variety, but this ending is the one place where Valve's debut still stands alone. Video games simply don't end with cliffhangers, largely because there is no guarantee that a sequel will ever arrive to deliver closure, especially in a debut game from a debut studio,

but by taking that gamble, Valve created a legion of fans desperate to see what would happen next. What would become of Gordon Freeman? What would his next assignment be and what would the world look like when he returned? All questions for another time and another equally iconic video game. So for reasons we have now discussed in depth, Half-Life was a massive critical and financial hit, which meant that Valve were suddenly the hottest new studio on the market. But the next few years didn't play out quite as you'd imagine. You see, Valve didn't

just want to churn out another immersive shooter using the Quake engine. So before they began work on an already hotly anticipated sequel, they decided that they would create their own toolset. An engine that could produce next generation 3D graphics and handle realistic physics. A project that they called Source.

Now the trouble was that developing an engine took quite a bit of time, which along with their newfound interest in publishing multiplayer games like Team Fortress and Counter-Strike, meant that it would take Valve a while to get started on the next Half-Life, something that Sierra weren't all that happy about. This brings us onto the wild world of Half-Life ports and expansion packs. Three chunks of additional Half-Life content designed to keep the money flowing, and a chapter which

requires a little bit of myth-busting. You see there exists this misconception that Valve were the masterminds behind all of this spin-off content, when in reality they had almost nothing to do with any of it. Instead, it was driven entirely by Sierra and a small developer called Gearbox, who would go on to find big success with the Borderlands series, but who in 1998 were a fledgling team of 15 based out of Frisco, Texas.

Now according to their CEO, Randy Pitchford, his company got involved with Half-Life after he received an email from Gabe Newell, who was reaching out to let him know how sorry he was that Gearbox's first ever game had been cancelled by its publisher. With no work on the horizon, this gave Randy the bright idea to propose a Gearbox developed Half-Life expansion pack, as his team loved the game and felt they could do a good job working with the tools that Valve had created. Typically this is where modern coverage ends as people presume that Newell said yes and

the two studios worked together on a pair of expansions, 1999's Opposing Force and 2001's Blue Shift. But that is not really how it went down. Now Pitchford did propose a Gearbox developed expansion, where we'd see the events of Black Mesa from the perspective of the military, and while Newell liked the idea, he told Gearbox that they would need to speak to Sierra, as they owned the Half-Life IP. If you remember, this was one of the conditions of the game's publishing deal, so while Gearbox had the blessing of the original team, Valve weren't actually involved at any point

in the process. In fact, in an interview with Noclip to celebrate the game's 25th anniversary, Pitchford even recounts that once they got the go-ahead from the publisher, the only Valve employee that they ever spoke to was Mark Laidlaw, and that was in a single short meeting to discuss what aspects of the original story they could include in their game.

This means that while Half-Life Opposing Force is an expansion pack to a Valve-developed classic built in an engine that Valve put together, drawing from ideas that Valve came up with, it is a gearbox, top to bottom. So with its parentage out of the way, let's dive into this strange expansion, because

it is a real bundle of good ideas and slightly wonky execution. Let's start with the concept, which is that we are experiencing the Black Mesa incident from a totally different viewpoint, that of US Marine Adrian Shepard, who is part of the military force that is sent in to clear up the mess and silence the witnesses. It is a pretty novel idea, especially considering most 90s shooter expansion packs tended to be a loose collection of new maps with virtually zero narrative, but it's not quite a moral

inversion where we play as the bad guys. You see Shepard's helicopter is shot down before his squad can receive their orders, so rather than hunting down Freeman and slaughtering everyone in sight, Shepard's mission revolves around trying to escape Black Mesa, and realistically the narrative is pretty much identical to that of the base game. In fact, we even get a small retcon where we overhear the Black Ops unit being ordered to kill off the remaining grunts,

which gives Gearbox a very convenient reason to set up military shootouts despite us playing as one. Now, that doesn't mean Opposing Force lacks its own identity, as it actually has quite a different feel to Half-Life 1, putting way more focus on action and delivering with it a heavy dose of Hollywood-style military hoorah. Our flashlight is now a green-tinged set of night goggles. Instead of a Glock, we use

a laser-sighted Desert Eagle. In place of a crowbar, we have a Bowie knife. There are new military-grade weapons like a sniper rifle and an LMG. And to go along with the expected roster of terrified scientists and hapless security officers, we have an all new kind of NPC. These are your military buddies and they turn up quite frequently during Shepard's time in Black Mesa, offering to fight alongside us and providing some utility, like sappers who will open sealed doors or medics who work like a portable health station. All very useful stuff that compliments the additional firepower.

Now it does have to be said that their AI isn't incredible, and it's very clear that they were programmed by Gearbox rather than Valve, as the soldiers have a tendency to turn on you for absolutely no reason and will often get stuck in place, refusing to follow and thus depriving you of an extra body in a fight. That might sound like a minor problem, but it's actually quite a big deal, as opposing force is substantially harder than Half-Life 1, throwing way more enemies at you in

each fight and introducing a host of new aliens that pack a pretty mean punch. This is Race X, a group of aliens that Gearbox designed under Mark Laidlaw's supervision, with the idea being that they are different to the creatures we saw in Xen, and turned up in Black Mesa in an act of opportunism after noticing all the trans-dimensional portals. They are a lot bigger, a lot more aggressive, and bring with them a host of new weapons, like a rechargeable electric gun that will start attacking you of its own accord when you kill its host, or a living grenade launcher that eats its ammo and will be

stroked by Shepard if you have it out for long enough. While the whole idea of Race X is clearly another retcon, as it makes little sense that Gordon never saw any of them, it's hard to be that upset at having more enemies to fight and more ways to kill them, especially when so much of the game revolves around running and gunning. Now for as fun as all that is, it does bring me onto a point of criticism, which is that the levels Gearbox have put together

aren't particularly interesting. And outside of a few standouts, like an underwater testing lab and a sort of alien zoo, we tend to do most of our shooting in the same old series of boxy sewers and warehouses. I'd also add that the flow of the levels can sometimes be a little wonky,

and that careful balance between chunks of enthralling shooter action and more varied immersive moments hasn't really carried over from the base game. For example, there's a sequence set in the Black Mesa office complex,

where we fight through a series of conference rooms alongside a squad of gruff soldiers. But this is followed up with a series of really awkward box pushing puzzles, which bring the momentum crashing to a halt and feel like they've been placed there to extend the levels runtime. Similarly, there's a section in the late game where we're introduced to a new enemy, the Voltigore, which we first see in a pitch black sewer. And thanks to the reduced vision,

it's actually a pretty spooky introduction. And it's one of the few moments where opposing force dabbles with horror. The problem is that rather than this being the start of a cat and mouse section with a particularly dangerous foe it turns out that the sewers are just a featureless maze

full of enemies that can kill you in a single hit, which gets old extremely quickly. And again, feels like padding to bulk out the level. Now it might be a little harsh to expect Gearbox to design environments that match up to those produced by Valve but it's a noticeable step down in quality. And if we excuse those final moments in Xen, I don't think there's a single section of Opposing Force that matches up to the best of

Gordon Freeman's time in Black Mesa. Really, opposing force is at its best when you've got a weapon in your hand and lots of enemies to fight, and all of its best ideas come from Gearbox taking the shooter foundation that Valve laid down and cranking it up to 11. We fight enemies with a portal gun that transports them into another dimension, use a barnacle to grapple between distant points like in The Legend of Zelda, blow aliens to smithereens with all manner of heavy weapons and mortar cannons. Hell, the game even ends with an interesting boss fight, as during the game's final moments

we find ourselves locked in mortal combat with a monster called the Gene Worm, which has to be beaten back with gameplay mechanics that actually suit Half-Life's shoot-it gameplay. The truth is that Opposing Force is nowhere near as groundbreaking or creative as the game it is based on, and in many ways it shows that this was a small project from an inexperienced team. But if you compare it to everything else on the market, rather than one of the most influential games of all time, there's still a lot to like about Gearbox's hardcore

Black Mesa shooter. So all that remains is to discuss what happens to Adrian Shepard, as without jumping ahead, series veterans will know that this is his lone appearance in the Half-Life series. Well the in-world explanation is that after defeating the Gene Worm, Shepard appears before the G-Man, who tells him in his iconic affected manner that he cannot close his report

until every loose end has been attended to. For Black Mesa, this means a flash of brilliant white, implying that some sort of detonation has destroyed the facility. But for Adrian, his fate is much darker. Apparently the G-Man sees in Corporal Shepard something that reminds him of

himself, and thus has decided to spare him. Although in order to make sure that Adrian tells nobody about what he has seen, he leaves him trapped in a place where he can do no harm, and where no harm can befall him. The very same helicopter that he arrived in, spared from death, but cursed to spend an eternity alone. Now don't get me wrong, Shepard could well turn up in some mythical future Half-Life game, but I think it's unlikely, as just like its protagonist, Opposing Force has become

a video game frozen in time, totally disconnected from the wider series. It may well be an official Half-Life video game, and one that is arguably worthy of that name, but it is a game that belongs to Gearbox, and when Valve eventually returned to the series, they had their own ideas about where the series

should go next.

So while Opposing Force was pretty well received by critics and moved a respectable amount of units, Sierra wanted more, which meant taking Half-Life into the extremely profitable world of home consoles. Now back in the 1990s, console ports of PC games hadn't been a particularly successful space, largely because computers were substantially more powerful, and this meant that their games had to be heavily downgraded to make the jump, which tended to sap away a lot of what made them

good in the first place. Of course for a game like Half-Life, which was designed to be on the cutting edge of technology, this was a pretty big problem, and it made ports to popular consoles like the PS1 or Nintendo 64 practically impossible, as even with big downgrades, they simply couldn't support 3D environments on the scale of Black Mesa. This meant that Sierra had to wait for new hardware to arrive, which eventually happened

in September of 1999, when Sega released the Dreamcast in North America. So Sierra got in contact with a company called Captivation Studio, who had produced a handful of Dreamcast tech demos, and in partnership with Gearbox, who were contracted to build a set of console-exclusive levels, the two studios began work on a half-life Dreamcast port. Now sadly, this never actually made it to market, as it turned out that even the Dreamcast

wasn't quite powerful enough, as the game was plagued by extremely long load times, a very wobbly framerate and persistent control issues, caused by the console's lack of dual analogue sticks. Thanks to this, it never received much positive coverage in the media and eventually Sierra decided that it needed a pretty hefty delay in order to polish it up, but this had the unfortunate impact of knocking the release window back into early 2001, where Sega announced that they would be discontinuing their console due to poor sales. Obviously this

meant there was no reason for Sierra to release the port and thus it was cancelled. But Gearbox didn't want to let their work go to waste so it was agreed that their exclusive levels would be shifted over to the PC and sold as a standalone release called Half-Life Blue Shift. Now Blue Shift is a curious little game, because while it's been remembered as a full fat expansion pack on the same level as Opposing Force, it's really a much smaller and much

less ambitious project. It doesn't feature any new gameplay mechanics, doesn't pit you against any new enemies, doesn't give you any new weapons, it's formed entirely from pre-existing assets and to top it all off, it's runtime clocks in at a measly 2 hours. Really, it is a stretch to call this an expansion pack, and considering it was sold for $30 on release, there is definitely an argument to be made that Sierra were milking the franchise. But if we put that to one side, there is still quite a lot to

like about this miniature side story. Just like in Opposing Force, the idea is that we see the events of Black Mesa from another perspective, this time that of Barney Calhoun, one of the facility's hapless security guards. While that might not be as exciting as being part of the military, it's a premise that works quite well. Easily the strongest part of Blue Shift comes in its first 30 minutes, which mirrors the

opening of Half-Life, where Barney travels to work on the Black Mesa Transit System and interacts with a host of NPCs. We get to see tired security officers trying to keep prima donna scientists happy, grab our gear from a working shooting range where we can sharpen our skills, watch Dr Freeman pass by on his way to the labs, and before we even get a glimpse of a monster, we have to try and fix a lift that is broken in another sector. It's only a short sequence, but it does a pretty good job of making Barney feel like a regular person. Not some talented MIT graduate or a capable

US Marine, but a small cog in a massive machine who ends up getting caught in something far beyond his comprehension. This vibe also bleeds into the gameplay, but Barney doesn't have a HEV suit keeping track of his vitals and doesn't get his hands on any particularly crazy weaponry. All of which gives Blue Shift a more grounded atmosphere, where it's you, your pistol and your wits against an army of murderous aliens. It's actually quite a clever way to use worldbuilding to explain away the Dreamcast

induced restrictions that Blue Shift was developed under. but if I'm honest I do think it results in a much less interesting video game. Without the creative weapons, weird enemies and military perspective of opposing force, or the carefully crafted gameplay variety and immersive drama of the original, Blue Shift can often be a little dull. I think this is really on show in the environments that Barney explores. Outside of the security station in the introduction, it's a parade of bland tunnels, grey sewers and

non-descript office rooms, with the only fresh idea coming in the form of a train depot, which is so featureless and so lacking in character that it could have been lifted out of any other 3D first person shooter. The reality is that Blue Shift's levels don't do anything with Black Mesa that we haven't already seen before, and without enough time to come up with something new, Gearbox obviously settled for repeating what works and playing it safe. Now while that is a little underwhelming, especially as this was sold as an expansion

pack, Blue Shift still has some pretty good moments and actually includes one of the best takes on Xen in the entire series. Near the end of the game, Barney meets up with Dr. Rosenberg, a scientist who wants to head down into a disused teleportation lab and use the old machinery to escape from Black Mesa, but in order to do so he and his team need Calhoun to go into the alien border world and set up a relay.

What follows is a chunk of game that does a much better job of marrying Half-Life's ideas with the feeling of being in another world, giving us a much larger level to explore and posing challenges that actually suit the engine. The whole thing is just so much more varied and interesting than any of the Xen levels that Valve served up, and I particularly love that we get to see a black mesa outpost, as even though the scientists are all long dead, it helps zen feel connected with the events that are happening back on earth. Anyway, once you return home, you have to help Dr Rosenberg operate his teleporter,

protect his team while they escape, and then jump in yourself, all of which ends with Barney Calhoun making it out alive. Considering both other games end with the G-Man stepping in to whisk us away, it's surprisingly satisfying to actually escape Black Mesa. And, while most of what Gearbox produced would never appear in another Half-Life game, our wily security guard managed to avoid the chop and turn up in the next

game.

Ultimately, Blue Shift's value relies on a pretty simple question. Did you enjoy Half-Life enough to play through a few extra hours of remixed content? If the answer is yes, be thankful that you live in a time when this game costs $3 instead of $30. So while that completes the tale of Half-Life's twin PC expansion packs, we're not quite finished with its spin-offs, as in 2001, Half-Life did eventually make it onto consoles in the form of a PlayStation 2 port. This was also put together by Gearbox, and while we don't have much information about its development, they must have been making it alongside Blue Shift as it was released just 4 months later.

Now obviously we don't need to go over what makes this game so great, so instead we'll stick to what makes this port worth checking out. For starters, it is an extremely impressive technical achievement, as all of the framerate issues, control problems and lengthy load times found in the Dreamcast version have all been ironed out, and in their place stands a pretty faithful adaptation of the entire PC experience.

To have managed to cram all of this onto a PS2 disc warrants praise in of itself, but Gearbox have also made a few changes that actually improve the experience ever so slightly. The main one is that platforming has been tweaked, with crouch jumping, a strange mechanic required to reach certain ledges now triggering automatically, and the long jump module being activated by a double jump rather than a sprint jump. These might seem barely worth mentioning, but they make the platforming sections run

so much smoother, and when you're neck deep in residue processing, or trying to beat the Nihilanth's ridiculous teleporting puzzles, you'll be more than thankful that these were done. The other big shift is that Half-Life on PS2 uses a lock-on system, which might sound odd to our modern, dual-analogue addicted brains, but was actually quite an inspired move. You see, back in 2001, console shooter control schemes were not yet standardised, and between inverted look, tank movement and face buttons to shoot, they were often a pale imitation

of their PC cousins. This conundrum was eventually solved with the release of Bungie's Halo, but Half-Life offers us a glimpse into another way. As while we use the right stick to look around, the circle button allows us to log on, which means that the game is less about making precise shots, and more about decision making, like which weapon to use or where you should be standing to avoid damage. It might sound weird considering we've had two decades of Battlefield and Call of Duty

to condition our brains, but it actually works quite well, and in contemporary reviews, the system was praised as a real innovation that made Half-Life one of the best shooters on the platform. Now while that's all very impressive, what makes this port truly worth the money is that Gearbox included another chunk of console-exclusive content, Half-Life Decay, although this is quite different to the other expansion pack efforts. Decay is a two-player mode where you and a friend

assume the roles of Gina Cross and Colette Green, a pair of scientists who don the missing HEV suits from Half-Life's opening chapter. As expected, the game is a series of missions that show the events of Black Mesa from their perspective, delivering the sample to Gordon in the test chamber, alerting the military of the alien outbreak and eventually prepping a satellite that helps close the cascade. Admittedly, on the third go round, this premise does wear a little thin,

especially as there is not much to decay that we haven't already seen in Half-Life and Blue Shift, but what makes it worthwhile is that you're here for the gameplay rather than the narrative. You see, Decay's levels were designed entirely around the idea of co-op. Which means, rather than just blasting through aliens with a buddy, you have to think about what each other are doing, and are constantly thrown into situations that ask each player to act independently. It's things like one

player turning a valve while another stands on a moving platform, or the level branching into different sections that have to be tackled at the same time. Nothing hyper complex or ambitious but still quite impressive considering that console co-op in the early 2000s was typically nothing more than jamming another player into the campaign. Unfortunately there are some costs associated with this, as the split screen presentation means that we can't see our gun, which is a pretty big issue in a first person shooter, and the levels

have had to be separated out, which means no sprawling interconnected environments. They are slightly annoying compromises, but the biggest issue is that Decay has no save system and no checkpoints, which means if either you or your partner die, you're sent right back to the start of the level. And let me tell you, this is a bitter pill to swallow during some of the longer, late game sequences. Still, it's hard to be too upset considering Decay is a bonus mode included in an otherwise excellent port. And thanks to this spread of content

and clever design changes, Half-Life on the PS2 reviewed extremely well, and ended up selling a rather respectable half a million units. Considering the series had no footprint in Japan, and the shooters weren't yet the imperious console sellers that they'd become a few years later, this was all very good news, especially as neither Gearbox or Sierra had ever put out a game on the platform. Sadly for them, this all proved to be a pretty brutal false dawn, as while they had done

a pretty good job of shepherding the series, this is also where their time in charge came to a crashing halt. In 2002, Valve returned to claim what was rightfully theirs, and while this would eventually lead to an unbelievably acclaimed sequel, we are concerned with the strange future of their original masterpiece. In order to understand this next phase of Half-Life's history, we need to talk about Monica Harrington, the wife of Valve founder Mike Harrington, whose contribution to the

success of not only Valve, but the entire PC gaming market is one of the most criminally underappreciated stories in the industry's history. Just like her husband, she had a very successful career at Microsoft, where she specialised in software marketing. But as Valve and Half-Life picked up Steam, she found herself spending less and less time on her day job. During those first few years, she played a crucial role in organising Half-Life's E3 campaigns, arranging interviews with newspapers and even

handling the creation of Valve's website, all of which led to her joining the company full time in 1999, just in time for the game's release. Now you might think that that would mean there wasn't much work left for a marketing expert, but actually she was critical to the future direction of the company thanks to two meetings with Sierra where she completely outmanoeuvred Valve's publisher. The first happened in 2000, when Sierra informed them that they would be pulling funding from

Half-Life's marketing in order to pursue other ventures, something which the team couldn't believe as they had just won a slew of industry awards. So, Monica replied with an ultimatum. Sierra would continue to fund Half-Life's advertising and release an all-new Game of the Year edition, or she would go to the video game press and tell everyone about how their new favourite studio were being held back by their publisher, who apparently cared more about PGA Golf and NASCAR.

This showed that Harrington was not someone to mess with, and incredibly, Sierra caved, and within 6 months, Half-Life Game of the Year Edition was being sold in every major retailer, which continued to drive sales and began the trend of very successful games getting re-releases that came packaged with additional content. The thing is, Monica Harrington didn't stop there, as in 2002 she moved on to Valve and Sierra's publishing agreement, which had been signed before she joined the company and was not

at all to her liking. If you remember, not only did the deal give Sierra full control of the Half-Life IP, which had led to the various Gearbox developed spin-offs, but it also gave the publisher 80% of the profits of the next three Valve produced games, a contract signed in absolute desperation and clearly at odds with where the studio wanted to go next. So with the blessing of the owners, Harrington concocted a master plan to get back the Half-Life

IP, and in the process, she changed the face of the PC gaming industry. The first step was to arrange a meeting with a fast-growing Seattle-based company called Amazon, to whom she proposed a Valve-developed online entertainment platform, where customers could buy games digitally. A prospect that was very appealing thanks to the team's background in software development and their clear eye for a good video game.

Considering something like this had never been done before, it was a huge gamble. But a few weeks later, a case of champagne arrived at Valve's headquarters, along with an offer to buy a minority stake in the company and make Harrington's idea work. Armed with this, she marched back into the Sierra offices and told a room full of stunned faces that they could either hand over the Half-Life IP and renegotiate their contract, or Valve would sign the deal with Amazon and never produce another game. It was a masterclass in business manipulation, and terrified of the prospect of losing their

most successful partnership, Sierra had no other option but to accept, which led to Valve not only taking control of the entire Half-Life franchise, but retaining the concept of an online gaming platform, which Amazon abandoned without their involvement. This would lead to the creation of not only Half-Life 2, one of the most influential and successful games of all time, but the launch of Steam. A digital front for PC games that would eventually become the entire marketplace. A platform

that would catapult Valve from a highly regarded developer to one of the wealthiest tech companies on the planet. The simple fact is that without Monica Harrington's cutthroat brilliance, none of this would have ever happened. And while she never designed a single polygon and never wrote a word of dialogue, her contributions to the story of both Half-Life and Valve cannot be underestimated. It was thanks to her that Valve were back in the driving seat, and it is in this newfound

position of authority that we find the next incarnation of Half-Life 1. If you remember, rather than jumping straight into a sequel, the studio had set about creating their own engine, Source, which would be the basis for everything they made for the next 15 years, and importantly, would be what their legion of mod-obsessed fans would use moving forwards. This meant that it was extremely important that Source was compatible with everything made in their old customised Quake engine. So in order to test that this was possible, the team decided to port both Counter-Strike and Half-Life

into the finished version. Luckily for them, the two were completely compatible. But this little experiment soon took on a life of its own, as in 2004 someone had the bright idea to offer these ported versions with any purchase of Half-Life 2. The problem with this was that Half-Life's source, as this version became known, wasn't ever intended to be a proper commercial product, and when it emerged into the wild, it was clear that the port

wasn't really up to Valve's normal high standards. On paper it sounds like an interesting proposition, as the new engine allowed for much more realistic water, proper lighting with reactive shadows, and most impressively, a full physics system where enemies and allies would react believably to explosions, and you could pick up and move items in the environment. As Half-Life Source was either included with Half-Life 2 or available separately for just $10, it should have been a no-brainer.

But the game was blighted by a lack of polish and a ton of very noticeable bugs. There were moments where the skyboxes would clip through the level geometry. NPC AI was largely broken and would result in all sorts of weird non-interactions. Models would sometimes float in the air for no discernible reason. The sound effects were completely messed up and worst of all, the much touted lighting system caused a ton of textures to end up with this ridiculous looking shiny effect.

As Valve had cynically advertised Half-Life Source as a full remake, a lot of fans were left feeling very let down, and to this day you'd be hard pushed to find anyone who recommends playing Source over the original. Now it is in this disappointment that we find the next stage of Half-Life 1's story, as while some fans set about creating fixes and patches for Half-Life Source, others felt that they could go one better, and deliver what Valve had failed

to produce. Within just a few months, two different Half-Life 1 remake projects emerged out of the game's modding scene, Leakfree and Half-Life Source Overhaul. But after realising that they were both working towards the same goal, the teams decided to merge and became the Crowbar Collective. Their aim was to faithfully reproduce the entirety of Half-Life 1 in the Source engine. But rather than just porting the game as Valve had done, they would give the 1998 classic the true facelift that they

felt it deserved. A top to bottom remake called Black Mesa. Now at first, progress was slow. Lar, largely because the team was based all over the world, were working on the mod in their spare time and had to deal with people constantly dropping in and out of the team. All of which meant that things didn't really start moving until 2008, when Crowbar were able to release their first trailer. This helped drum up quite a bit of excitement, but it still took another 4 years before the mod was ready to go public.

And even then, it wasn't the full game, as Black Mesa initially launched with just the levels set on Earth, ending as Gordon arrived at the Lambda Core and jumped into the portal to Xen. According to Project Lead Adam Engels, this was done because the team felt, if they were going to do a proper Half-Life remake, the Xen levels needed to be totally redesigned. Not just because the original version was so half-baked, but because Crobat felt it had the potential to be so much better. It was a very ambitious move for a mod that had already taken 8 years to produce something

playable, but in November of 2013, something incredible happened. Rather than the typical IP holder response to these sorts of projects, it turned out that Valve loved what Crowbar were doing, and got in contact with a team about turning the mod into a proper commercial product. Now, Valve had a long history of doing things like this, as we've already discussed with Team Fortress and Counter-Strike, but they'd ramped it up since becoming the masters of their own destiny, publishing both Left

4 Dead and Portal in 2008, two highly acclaimed games that had begun life as Half-Life mods. Essentially if a mod got official backing from Valve, it was virtually guaranteed to be a success. So overnight, Crowbar transformed from a group of hobbyists working on a passion project, to a proper studio full of paid employees. This resulted in the second release of Black Mesa in 2015, this time as a standalone game, although it was initially only in early access, as the zen levels were still nowhere near

finished and would end up transforming into something that requires a chapter all to itself. So for now, let's dive into this modern reinterpretation of the Black Mesa incident, and see what happens when a team of people who absolutely love a video game are given the keys to the kingdom. When talking about Black Mesa, you have to start with the way it looks, as this is the most notable difference between Crowbar's shiny modern remake and the blocky artistry

of Valve's 1998 original. Thanks to the Source engine, every single second of the game has been meticulously rebuilt, and is now presented in glorious high definition, with all the graphical bells and whistles you'd expect from a triple A game released in the 2020s. Between the hyper-realistic lighting and shadows, complex particle effects, the 3D skyboxes and a huge amount of ambient detail, Black Mesa's environments have undergone a serious transformation. While the geometry is virtually identical, even down to the placement of insignificant

details like empty boxes and inactive doors, this facelift has a big impact on how everything feels, adding a sense of scale and depth that was unimaginable in the 90s. To add to the wider scope of the visuals, there's also been a real focus on adding to what was already there, like in the game's introduction, where crowbars serve up much more variety in the NPC models and voice lines, or in Questionable Ethics, where the previously spartan labs are now full of half-dissected

aliens, bloody surgical equipment and alien pens. It's nothing that wasn't already there, but it's been dressed up and pushed into the foreground, all of which helps drive home the theme of the levels without requiring quite as much imagination. Now while the game is clearly nicer to look at, I've got to say that I find the Source Engine very enjoyable for first person gameplay, especially compared to the original's more frantic, Quake-influenced vibe. Weapons and movement now have much more weight, which

adds a lot of intensity to firefights even though they are slower paced, and paired with the engine's ragdoll physics, things like headshots or close-range shotgun blasts or grenade explosions all pack a much harder punch. Obviously, it is a matter of personal taste when comparing the two, but what is inarguable is that the Source Engine's weightiness leads to much improved platforming, and Crowbar have clearly done a lot of work getting rid of the awkward slideyness that plagued the

original. It means that even though levels like residue processing and land decor are largely unchanged, they are substantially less frustrating because you feel more in control of where you're going to land. It means you don't have to be quite as obsessive about quicksaving. While these changes are largely as a result of the shift to a modern engine, Black Mesa is also full of a lot more thoughtful design changes, as Valve gave Crowbar full

creative license to straighten out some of Half-Life's less successful ideas. For example, in the original version of Surface Tension, there's a short sequence where you have to pick your way across a handful of minefields, but the only way to know where they are is to throw out a grenade or a snark and hope to trigger them so you can cross safely. If you run out of either of these, you're pretty much stuck, and it can be a bit of a progress trap if you don't know this sequence is coming. In Black Mesa, the minefields are still in

exactly the same places, but now the mines have little visible plugs, and you can use any of your guns to clear them out, which preserves Valve's original idea without locking the player into a single solution. In other ways, the changes are more about convenience, like in Power Up, where the original required you to go back and forth between an electric tram and a control room in order to move it into place, a pointless piece of

busy work that added nothing to the level, but which in Black Mesa has been removed thanks to a helpful guard. To be honest, there are so many of these subtle improvements that it would be impossible to list them all, but it's clear that Crowbar knew the original inside out, and were able to smooth out these moments of friction while never stepping too far away from being familiar. Now that being said, in certain places there has been some heavy duty surgery, especially

when it comes to the creatures from Xen, which I think have been dramatically improved. Headcrab zombies can now be set on fire, and can use objects in the world as missiles. Two ideas ripped straight out of Half-Life 2, but which fit seamlessly into Black Mesa, and add a much needed dose of variety to an enemy that otherwise didn't really do much. Along with this, Houndeyes now attack in much bigger packs, triggering this disorientating effect with their scream, and the Bull Squids, which previously looked very threatening but which were pretty easy to kill, now attack with this big spread of acid that makes them

much tougher to deal with. Personally I think these are all great changes that keep the early game aliens feeling dangerous, and it means that Crowbar are able to incorporate them into the later levels without them feeling like cannon fodder, a move that adds even more variety to Half-Life's box of tricks. Now along with this, there is another section that Crowbar felt needed special attention, and that is On a Rail, the notorious boring mid-game slump, which only the most fanatical of Half-Life purists would have wanted to

see unchanged. In its new form, the level is much more linear, removing all the branching pathways, endless way stations and obstacle courses, and instead forcing you through a series of battles with the military that end with a massive shootout as you launch the Lambda Team's satellite. From start to finish, the whole thing is now just 30 minutes long, and even though it's a huge departure from what Valve put together, I think it's a wise move to cut this much, and it does wonders for the overall flow of the game.

So by this point, it probably sounds like Black Mesa is the definitive Half-Life 1 experience, but the truth is that it is not a perfect remake, and there are some strange design decisions that I think are big steps backwards. The first is the game's new soundtrack, which is markedly different to the one found in the original and is used in a very different way. Half-Life 1's soundtrack was very restrained, opting against dedicated level themes in favour of a more ambient approach, where the gameplay was framed

against the sound of fans, machinery and the Black Mesa PA system. There were songs in a few places, like when we first reached the surface, but the tunes had a grungy electronic vibe, where they were sitting low in the mix and were just meant to add a touch of drama to a particularly notable moment. Black Mesa attempts to take this idea and incorporate it into more places, but thanks to the decision to go with a much more varied and prominent score, the music tends to overpower

the scenes whenever it's used. When it works, the new music does add a lot to the experience like the Doom style thrashing guitars when we battle the military for the first time but when it is bad it is really bad and if you can believe it I actually had to turn it off during one particularly ear-piercing drum and bass loop that plays during the damn sequence. It's an odd decision considering Crowbar didn't need to change anything but the biggest misstep by far, one which is impossible to overlook, are the changes

made to the military enemy's AI. You see, in Half-Life, the soldiers you fought had a set of predictable behaviours, where they would attack you when you stepped into their line of sight, throw grenades if you hid behind cover, would see cover themselves if they were injured, and importantly, would stand still or crouch while shooting. This created a certain rhythm to the gunfights, but for some reason, Crowbar have elected to entirely change this dynamic. Presumably in an attempt to make the soldiers less predictable, they now charge

around the battlefield in a state of constant motion, endlessly zipping between cover and seemingly choosing actions at random. A situation made all the worse by their newfound pinpoint accuracy, even from absurdly long range. Instead of feeling like Half-Life with an additional dose of chaos, Black Mesa feels more like a multiplayer match in Unreal Tournament, where you need to have split-second reflexes to emerge victorious, and long-range combat is almost entirely pointless. It is a huge blemish on an otherwise imperious remake,

and it's a real shame that Crowbar's honest desire to produce the best possible adaptation has resulted in them accidentally spoiling one of the original game's cleverest features. Now that isn't to say Black Mesa isn't worth playing, and in fact most of my complaints are pretty subjective, and could easily be overlooked if you're of a different disposition. Which means that even from the most critical possible perspective, Valve's faith in

Crowbar was very well placed. It might have taken them almost 10 years, but they genuinely did realise their dream of a modern, high definition remake of Half-Life 1, and for that they deserve real credit, especially considering they began life as a group of amateurs working in their spare time. But here's the thing, when you sit down to play Black Mesa, you're not just getting a faithful recreation of Half-Life 1. And so it is here that we need

to step through the final portal and into the wild world of Crowbar Collective's Xen. Now before we discuss anything else, we need to remind ourselves of just what exactly went wrong with Half-Life's original Alien conclusion, because the desire to fix these mistakes was central to Crowbar's decision to develop Black Mesa's Earthbound and Xen levels separately. If you remember, the original was extremely barebones, with levels 1, 2 and 4 clocking in at a combined run time of just 15 minutes, and the third level, a mess of confusing maps and awkward platforming running much longer for all the wrong reasons.

There was also a real lack of satisfying gameplay variety, as outside of the long jump, Xen doesn't introduce any fresh mechanics and without the military to mix up the shooting, it simply repeats ideas that we'd already seen back on Earth. Also, without any of the human NPCs to interact with, there was virtually no story content and it's only through theory crafting tiny details that fans were able to draw any conclusions

at all.

Obviously, these are not small problems with quick fixes, and without the blueprint of Valve's original to build upon, Crowbar were flying blind, and this is why it took a further five years for these final four levels to see the light of day. Now what's incredible is that this new interpretation of Xen solves every single one of the original's issues, but in the process it ends up stumbling

in its own unique ways. A curious example of a remake that is both better and worse than its inspiration. So let's start with something that is inarguably an improvement, the visuals, as these hit you from the moment Gordon wakes up on the other side of the Lambda portal. Gone are the blocky polygons, the muddy textures, the flat skyboxes and abstract geometry, and in their place stands

an utterly sumptuous alien world full of character and colour, where it feels as if we're moving through a Mobius comic come to life. Unlike the stark platforms of the original, the zen of Black Mesa is a living, breathing place, and I love it as a counterpoint to the cold metal hallways and industrial machinery of the levels set on Earth, where it is not science that reigns supreme, but unfettered organic growth. Now what's particularly cool about this is that rather than just jamming in every possible fancy

graphical effect, Crowbar have used the original version of Xen as a basis for all this new visual wonder, and you can see how little details have been blown out into much larger environments that feel like a natural next step. A small underground cavern filled with dirty water and a few plants is now an expansive overgrown swamp. A single room with a few buttons to press becomes a lengthy sequence of puzzles

in a crystalline alien installation. And best of all, those dead scientists dotted around the maps have been expanded out into the ruins of a black Mesa forward base. This in particular is a fantastic addition to the narrative as it lets us see firsthand

what the human expeditions were trying to achieve. The capture of alien samples and the exploitation of Zen's resources. The first shots fired in a war that clearly began well before the resonance cascade. Now in a weird way,

all this alien glamour was somewhat to be expected, as Crowbar had already proven that they could produce beautiful looking environments. So the real test was in the gameplay, where Zen needed invention and creativity, rather than a fresh paint of coat. We'll start with the enemies, as rather than coming up with an all new alien species that might trample on Valve's established world building, the combat has been jazzed

up thanks to variations of creatures that we have seen before. For example, houndeyes are now usually led by an alpha, whose thick hide deflects bullets and can only be killed by shooting its frontal weak point. Something that is extra tricky, as the packs on Xen will also include irradiated runts that will explode when shot. Much like these, there is also a new underwater variant of the Barnacle, whose mandibles add an extra threat to platforming across water,

and my personal favourite, a horrifying new kind of headcrab zombie that wears a broken HEV suit which spits out broken versions of familiar voice lines. In terms of raw gameplay variety, it's admittedly not quite enough to make up for the loss of the military, but considering how awkward I found those to be, Black Mesa's remixed aliens are a pretty good replacement, but feel suitably chaotic, especially during the new boss fights.

If you remember, neither Gonarch nor Nihilanth were all that impressive in the original Half-Life, with the former being a boring bullet sponge and the latter a strange mess of jump shots and enforced platforming. Thankfully, Crowbar have redesigned both, and they now revolve around much more traditional boss mechanics, like high damage moves that need to be avoided, weak spots that you can destroy, and phases that meaningfully change how the fights work. At the centre of this is the long jump module, which is still largely intended

for platforming but can now be used to long jump backwards or sideways, effectively becoming a dodge. A peculiar thing for a Half-Life game but something that really does work in these more complex one-on-one fights. Now before I spoil this wonderful alien picture and start talking about the things that Crowbar got wrong, I want to dedicate a moment to my favourite new idea, and that is the increased role of the alien slaves. If you remember, one of the faint good ideas in the original

Xen was that we could discover that these creatures were being forced into combat down on Earth, with the presumption being that they were enslaved by the Nihilanth and his psychic followers. Well thanks to story developments in Half-Life 2, this was all confirmed to be true, so Crowbar went into the Xen levels with the aim of making this connection far clearer, and helping to set up Gordon Freeman's messianic relationship with the Vortigaunts. The result is an awesome little section set in a Vortigaunt village, full of NPCs talking to one another and carrying out small tasks, although it is hardly a pleasant place as

they are abused by larger alien grunts and live in abject poverty. Now while the Vortigaunts are happy to leave us be, eventually Gordon's presence is discovered by the Flying Alien Controllers, who have been redesigned so that now they take over the minds of nearby slaves. And this drives home that horrible idea that all of this warfare has been against their will. As we eventually defeat the Nihilanth, who in turn controls the Flying Aliens, it's

now crystal clear that our actions free the Vortigaunts from bondage. And it means that when they eventually turn up in the sequel, praising the holy name of the free man, it all makes a lot more sense. Now ironically, the end of the Alien Village is the perfect place to transition into Black Mesa's zen related issues, because it also marks the point where the remake becomes bogged down in some well-intentioned but ultimately misguided ideas. The most obvious place to start is that the

Xen levels are substantially longer than anything found in the base game, with the two boss fights easily lasting a combined 45 minutes and the opening sequence and the alien factory now taking nearly two hours apiece. This is a monstrous increase from what Valve served up in 1998, and unfortunately, I'm not sure that any of the levels really justify this run time, as while they are built on good ideas and beautiful visuals, Black Mesa's Xen has a serious problem with repetition. Part of this comes from the way the levels were

developed, as in interviews with the team you often hear them talk about the Valvian philosophy, which is a term they came up with to describe the way Valve were able to create complex levels that never broke your immersion. Essentially it works like this. You arrive in a location and see a machine with two sets of wires laying nearby, so you plug them in and a door opens to the next room. In here you see the same machine, but the wires are nowhere to be found, so you go looking for them and after a short hunt

you're able to find what you need and repeat the process from the first room. It's effectively a way of tutorialising gameplay ideas while building towards more complex obstacles, And by layering in combat, puzzles and platforming, you can end up with very mechanically compelling levels that don't require any explanation. The trouble is that Crowbar have replicated this process a little too literally, and every

single mechanic, from using the long jump, to webs that need to be burnt away with fire, to deactivating shields that protect alien controllers, to machines that need to be rewired, and even riding on top of boxes in the factory, all religiously follow this method of level design. To be blunt, it results in a huge amount of repetition, where we're introduced to a mechanic and then do nothing but that for a good 20 minutes, which creates this really strange pacing, where you feel like a level should be coming to an end because it's central gameplay idea has become exhausted, only for another to be introduced and for it to all keep going. Now obviously if you

enjoy what you're doing, this doesn't have to be an issue, but the zen levels aren't uniform in their quality, and when you get stuck with something less fun, you tend to be stuck there for quite a while. When plastered on top of all of the original ideas that Crowbar wanted to include, which often suffer from their own pacing issues, like the game's climactic lift ride which takes 20 minutes to go from the bottom to the top, the whole experience of playing through

Black Mesa's zen can be a little exhausting. Like you're eating a delicious meal, but are forcing yourself to have a portion that's just far too big. It's a real shame because it looks and sounds incredible. It plays extremely well. Its underlying ideas are all very neatly designed and it's clearly been made with real passion. But it's also painfully obvious that it was the first truly original thing that Crowbar had made, and just like Valve 22 years earlier, those growing pains are there for all to see.

Video game remakes can often be a pretty contentious subject. Do you stick close to the original or do you build on its ideas? Should it be made for existing fans or to introduce the game to a whole new audience? Do you replicate or do you innovate? Black Mesa somehow manages to do all of these things at once. But what I think stands out most to me is that it wasn't dreamt up by some publisher trying to capitalise on ancient

popularity and instead was born out of a community's deep and unwavering love for Half-Life. It might be endlessly frustrating that Modern Valve don't produce more games, but when it comes to working with their fans and supporting them when they start to make something special, it's hard to have any complaints about the way they do their business. Sure, Black Mesa might not be for everyone, but the fact that it exists at all is an incredible

testament to this strange company that never played by the rules, and the wonderfully flawed and endlessly captivating game that started their whole story. If you hadn't already noticed, this video is called The Game You Cannot Escape, and I want to round things off by exploring what this means. We'll start with the most straightforward interpretation, as the title is clearly a nod to Half-Life's legendary cliffhanger ending, where the G-Man whisks

Gordon away and denies us the reward we have been fighting for since we arrived in Black Mesa. There is no happy ending, no riding off into the sunset to the cheers of the people you saved, just a black screen that tells you Gordon is awaiting his next assignment – a horrifying liminal prison which you are forced into accepting. In fact, it's very striking on subsequent replays that everything we do during the Black Mesa incident, from defending scientists and security officers, to fighting

off the military and even defeating the Nihilanth, well it all has a rather hopeless overtone when you know what is coming. You might be in full control of Gordon Freeman, taking part in a story that gives you freedom on a level that had never been seen before, but ultimately you cannot deviate from the path and cannot escape your fate. Now I don't know if this was widespread, but within my group of friends there existed

this wonderful naive belief that there must be some hidden ending where Gordon is able to outsmart his abductor, maybe triggered by saving all the scientists or beating the game within a certain time limit. I look back on those heated debates with a lot of nostalgia because it shows how groundbreaking Half-Life really was, that a group of teenagers who loved clever video games and challenging stories simply couldn't accept that the game didn't let them win. This brings me onto the second interpretation, because Half-Life is not a game that you simply

finish and move on from, as it demands to be analysed and assessed in a way that only legendary art is able to do. In many ways, it reminds me of movies like The Godfather and 2001 A Space Odyssey, or novels like 1984 and Blood Meridian. Great examples of film and literature that made such an impact on their medium that they are still being dissected decades later. I say this with a heavy heart, but there are not that many video game equivalents,

releases that were able to push the industry forward while never becoming a relic of the past, and I think it's testament to how radically ahead of the curve Half-Life was that it feels almost generationless. This is a 28 year old video game that is still being played by thousands of people every day, that still sells tens of thousands of copies every year, that is still debated in hundreds of videos and live streams and podcasts all across the internet.

The fact is that if you love video games that try to be more than just basic dopamine simulators, Half-Life is impossible to escape from as it will keep popping up wherever you look until you eventually give in and board the train to Sector C. So with that in mind, we arrive at the final interpretation of this video's title, which is that even if you do not like Half-Life, and have somehow reached this point convinced that you will never give it a second's worth of your time,

you still cannot escape. This isn't just a game that birthed a popular franchise or innovated in its genre, no this is a game whose footprint is so much bigger than Black Mesa or Gordon Freeman or even the people who dreamt them up in 1997. The next time you're wandering through a game world and are taken aback by its realism – not in terms of its graphics, but in the little details that sell the illusion – you owe that to Half-Life. Next time you're playing a game that isn't just aping the language of cinema and instead

tries to actually use the medium's interactivity – that door was opened thanks to Half-Life. The next time you open up a mod that reinvigorates an old classic, or play some crazy community creation that the developers never intended, that creative freedom was championed by Half-Life. The next time you're trawling a store and spot a re-release that bundles a game with all of its DLC and expansions, your wallet owes that deal to Half-Life.

Hell, if we want to take this idea all the way, the next time you sit down and buy a game digitally, that convenience only exists because of Half-Life and the battle for its creative control. The truth is that some games are just so massive that you can see their influence everywhere you look, and while Valve would go on to release experiences that are arguably even better, I don't think they will ever produce another game that changes the industry quite like Half-Life 1.

So just like Dr. Freeman floating through the aether, trapped by a decision not of his own making, acceptance is all we are left with. Half-Life is a video game that you simply cannot escape from, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

Thanks for watching.

So with that we arrive at the end of the video and our customary Patreon thanks and channel roundup. Obviously we've got to start with the Patrons, who deserve an extra dose of gratitude for keeping the channel ticking while I've been busy on this video, especially as it took a little longer than expected. My aim this year was to try and release something every 6-8 weeks, but between Christmas holidays, some ill health in my family and a chunky Patreon exclusive, the schedule has managed to go out of whack before the end of February, which isn't exactly a great start. I'm going to try and get things back on track with the

next video, so hopefully you shouldn't have to wait too long for your next dose of pointlessly detailed video game history, especially as we're going to be covering a game that I know like the back of my hand. Outside of the videos, my newfound post-Half-Life freedom means I'm going to once again revive the Twitch stream, and actually try to finish a game on stream for once. So if you want to hang out while I inevitably fail to live up to that promise, the link is down in the

description. Otherwise, thanks for watching, thanks for supporting, thanks for supporting, and I'll see you all very soon.