Half-Life 2 is the kind of game that’s impossible to overhype: Even played now, when its technological advancements seem routine, it remains better than almost any contemporary first-person game. Half-Life 2 could be a first-person shooter at one minute, a racing game the next, then a grim work of horror, then a goofy alien adventure that saw the player commanding hordes of giant bugs against the enemy. The world of Half-Life 2 wasn’t an underground lab but a dystopic Earth conquered by a mysterious extra-terrestrial militia, and the game navigated through diverse environments (vast cities, abandoned sewers, a haunted village, an alien prison) and drew from every genre imaginable.
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Finally, they gave fans a full sequel in 2004 with Half-Life 2, which is still generally regarded as the greatest PC game ever released.
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Valve tinkered with Half-Life over the years, offering add-on games that shifted the viewer’s perspective (in Blue Shift, you played as a security guard watching the crisis unfold in Opposing Force, you jumped into the skin of one of the original game’s villains). The game was in every way a revolution, and remains a wonderfully scary, inventive work almost 20 years after its release. Valve embraced the limitation of the first-person perspective (players can only see through Gordon’s eyes) by having a huge story unfold around him in tiny bits and pieces: Players could put together what was happening if they paid attention to overheard bits of dialogue, or watched other characters interact from afar. Half-Life began with the player’s avatar, the scientist Gordon Freeman, ambling through a massive underground lab on a normal workday before a terrible accident flooded it with aliens. Previous first-person shooters like Doom and Quake embodied simplicity: Walk into room, kill monsters with weapons, rinse, and repeat. Why do people still care so much? The original Half-Life, released for the PC in 1998, remains a definitive work in “first-person” gaming, a sci-fi thriller that set new standards for storytelling techniques and immersive world-building in a genre that had always boiled down to guns and blood. “I don’t know this man at all,” he joked in March 2013, when the British host Jonathan Ross begged him for further news of a sequel. “I got nothing to say about Half-Life,” he said in August 2011. but yes, of course we’re doing Episode Three,” was the line in September 2009. “We know how the trilogy ends and there’s a bunch of loose ends and narrative arcs that need to come to a conclusion in Episode Three,” he said in August 2007. The longer things go on, the more impossible everyone’s expectations become-if a new Half-Life were ever released, the hype would be unimaginably hard to match, and yet Valve’s initial promise has only added to the franchise’s mystique.įans online “celebrated” the 10-year anniversary by cutting together a video of Valve’s co-founder and managing director Gabe Newell talking about his company’s plans for a Half-Life sequel over the years. But Half-Life 2 sequels ended with Episode Two, and over the years, Valve’s party line on a new installment went from a firm commitment to vague promises to tight-lipped refusals to say anything at all. Since that announcement, Valve has released a dozen games, including the acclaimed Portal and Portal 2 and multiplayer smash hits like Left 4 Dead and Team Fortress 2. The Loss at the Heart of Guy Fieri’s Entertainment Empire Megan Garber
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