Half-Life: Ten Years Later

Today marks the 10th anniversary of the release of Half-Life. Not just this news site's hallmark title, Half-Life is a classic standard for the PC gaming industry, almost universally considered the best game ever made for six long years, only to be upset by its own sequel. It wasn't just a game, it was the launch of a phenomenon that has lasted to this day. To commemorate this day in history, the PHL staff has gotten together to share some of our earliest and fondest memories regarding the masterpiece.

Kevin "Fragmaster" Bowen, Founder of Planet Half-Life
Like most 1997-era FPS nerds, I first became aware of Half-Life when that Gameslice(?) article announced it. It sounded mildly interesting and I loosely followed development of the game, but I think at the time I was a lot more excited about SiN. I don't believe very many people expected Half-Life to be anything special, but once Half-Life: Day One (the first 1/5th of the game, included as a sort of demo with video cards) leaked everyone basically completely freaked out. Personally, it blew my mind. It was soooo good. I'm sure the original Half-Life seems quaint now, but at the time it was way, way more advanced than the competition in almost every respect. And it almost seemed like it came out of nowhere; Half-Lifee just wasn't hyped the way SiN or Daikatana was.

So ten years ago around this time I was probably sitting in my college dorm room, trying to convert a sort of abandoned site called Contaminated.net into Planet Half-Life. My memory of those days is now a little fuzzy, but I remember playing through and enjoying the hell out of the single-player game, having a lot of fun playing DM on my fast college connection (Stalkyard!), learning Worldcraft and making maps, and writing all sorts of crap for PHL. I've since realized that I'm a horrible writer, but despite that I still think Walter's World isn't terrible and I guess I'm still slightly proud of it in some weird way.

Half-Life and TFC is one of the primary reasons why my college career only lasted one year. I got kicked out of school (academic suspension, I never went to class and stayed on my computer all day). But - both directly and indirectly - Half-Life had a pretty sizable impact on my life and career. I know that's totally sad to say, but it's true. And I'm not alone either, I know of plenty of people who would not be working where they are working or living where they are currently living if it wasn't for a certain FPS released a decade ago. So happy birthday, Half-Life, and THANK YOU GORDON FOR F***ING UP IN THE TEST CHAMBER!

John "Chief" Phillips, Site Director
Everybody went nuts over the two or three weeks that we'd get for Christmas break in school, and I for one had an awesome and relaxed break when I was 13. Half-Life was released in November of '98, but I was none the wiser I'll admit, I was too busy playing Rainbow 6 on the "MSN Zone." But after the break and school resumed, all I heard about was this simply amazing game where you could kill scientists with a crowbar and the kill "a giant baby" at the end.

In my mind's eye I could see it perfectly, to me Half-Life was this super-amazing high-end game that rivaled my beloved R6 series. So naturally I start bugging the crap out of my mom to give me a bigger allowance so I could go out and get this orgasmic game. Eventually she snuck me a few extra dollars and I ran into town to buy the game, and my dreams came true. Never before did I see anything so vivid, so interactive in a game before. My next battle was to again beg my parents to let me use the Internet longer so I could play Half-Life: Deathmatch and eventually Team Fortress Classic and Counter-Strike.

This game became the rave of all my friends. My good friend Dave Dienes would start Counter-Strike servers on his computer (he was the techno-junkie of our friends at the time, the best and latest of everything) and I'd hop on with my dial-up and Danny G would come on with his new cable connection and I'd still have a lower ping than he, and we'd just go nuts. Here I am nearly a decade later and I still get giddy over the prospect of new Half-Life releases, and here I am getting my hands dirty in the industry and working daily to keep alive the site that Kevin began so many years ago. One game changed everything for me, I threw myself into modding and writing and ten years later I'm still doing it. Thanks, Valve.

Alex "ACPaco" Capriole, Senior Staff Writer
I first read about Half-Life in the very first issue of PC Gamer I bought for myself way back in 1998 (I was just 12 years old at the time). It was only a couple of paragraphs long, a preview blurb that went something like this: "Imagine you're shaken from a nap in the janitor's closet of an underground lab facility. You're not sure what's going on, and when you get to the elevator it's out. Up the shaft, you suddenly hear gunshots, a guard screaming and a low, menacing growl..." This kind of drama was really futuristic, state-of-the-art stuff for a shooter game back in those days when Quake was still the FPS standard. I forgot about the article, however, until late 1999 when, while shopping for random gaming goodness with grandma at a Best Buy, I saw that orange box with a bespectacled dude on the cover and "Game of the Year Edition" stamped across the top. Up until this time I had only ever played adventure games like Space Quest and Monkey Island and the shareware version of Quake. Half-Life totally blew me away, however, and I judged all other games against it until its sequel was released in 2004. It would take me roughly 6 whole months to finish the single-player game, after which I got heavily addicted to TFC. I also spent a lot of time between 2000 and 2002 cranking out custom maps for deathmatches, single-player missions, TFC capture the flag and even some Day of Defeat campaigns, but I'd rather not discuss those right now... or ever again if I can help it.

Nick "InZaneFlea" Eichenberg, News Editor
Half-Life. To say it was a game that changed my life is, well, an understatement. A friend of mine who at some point in time also introduced me to Diablo II mentioned this Half-Life game to me in school one day and said that I absolutely must play it. At that point in time I was a console gamer, playing on my N64, enjoying good times with Mario and Zelda. Then I managed to get Half-Life installed on my quite horrible PC and began. I was floored almost instantly. If you were to ask my parents, they could tell you that I didn't leave my room for two entire days, skipping class and all. I was enthralled, amazed.

Then I found the level editor. Now, many years later, I'm a senior at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh about a year from graduating with a degree in Game Art and Design. I look back and realize that the largest turning point in my entire life was opening up that indiscreet folder that held Worldcraft 2.1. Since then I've met a lot of the people that head up this beautiful Half-Life community, including our very own Chief Phillips, and Interlopers.net's Blink. And I hope one day to be sitting at my office at Valve, telling those fine people how they all changed my life, by supporting the mod community.

Gregory "Capt. Insane" Hall, Staff Writer
For being only 22 years old, my memory is pretty shot I'm sad to say. However, I can, assuredly, admit that I do in fact remember 1998 when the gaming industry was forever changed with the release of Half-Life. Yes, that means I was only 12 when I got it, but if you compare it to games today, it doesn't really deserve an M rating - the worst you saw was a few piles of bloody bones. Not like today (see Doom 3). Half-Life also marked a few personal milestones. First, it pulled me into computer games more. This was also when my brother b0rked our PII by adding a Voodoo2 video card (it killed the DVD encoder). Shortly thereafter, my brother built his own computer for this first time, and the two of us convinced my dad to get us a cable modem. This was before Comcast bought out the company who provided the @home.com email addresses.

I thoroughly loved Half-Life, but I was never able to beat it entirely without using cheat codes. I got to the beginning of "Forget about Freeman" before I got stuck. In fact, I consider the original HL better than the latter installments in this respect; I beat HL2, Ep1, and Ep2 without using cheats. This could have been because I was better at computer games by this point, but who knows? I also think HL was better because of the big boss creatures. Oh Half-Life, how I love thee. Now where the f*** is Episode 3?

Ian "eulogy" Norton, Staff Writer
Much like the computer I had when the original Half-Life came out, my memory is pretty bad. My mind doesn't think in years, it thinks in games. I don't think "November, 1998", I just think 'Half-Life'. I was only 11 when Half-Life came out (had to whip out the calculator for that one), and was really into Quake 2, ridiculing the old farts on my favorite server (hosted by the dial-up ISP that was stationed only about a mile away in the small town I live in) for being schooled by an 11 year old. Half-Life undoubtedly changed my life, being revolutionary in so many ways, possibly the most of any game I've played. I didn't dabble too much in modding other than making models that never saw animations or textures, but I had been a fan of community mods since Quake. The mod community obviously has helped lengthen Half-Life's lifespan far beyond what anyone could have guessed, and continues to thrive even to this day, 10 years down the road. The release of Half-Life was truly a milestone in gaming history, which is realized more and more as time passes. I think back to how amazing the graphics were; my jaw left gaping at the sit-in-a-tram-for-20-minutes intro alone. Unlike a lot of games, Half-Life wasn't only about graphics, it was about deep story, amazing gameplay, and a ton of room for modifications to work with. I'm just glad the probability of a resonance cascade scenario is quite impossible in Real-Life. I liked Half-Life so much that I even dressed up as one of the grunts for Halloween one year. Happy Birthday HL!

Dennis "Golgotha" Goldsmith, Staff Writer
Being an avid Quaker in the late 90's (the gaming kind... not the guy on the oatmeal box), I was a bit skeptical when some of my friends told me about a game that was "even better than Quake 2". Having been sorely offended by this blatant sacrilege of the classics that I had enjoyed playing for years prior, I vowed to never have anything to do with this upstart known as "Half-Life." Nail guns, rocket launchers and BFGs could never be replaced by cutting-edge graphics, voice acting, or a story line. Wait... did someone say "story line"? A first-person shooter with an actual story?

After watching my cousin play the game at his house for about three or four hours, I suddenly realized that I really, really wanted to play this game. I stopped at a local video rental store on the way home (that luckily sold software as well) and picked up my first copy. From six that evening until God-knows-when I slew aliens, battled marines, and cursed the man with the briefcase... alas, I had found a new love. The game not only provided every bit as much action as its predecessors, but through it I also experienced one of my extremely rare "Holy $%#)!" moments of gaming.

Taking its place alongside the first Cyberdemon and Makron battles (from Doom and Quake 2, respectively), I encountered Half-Life's Gargantuan - a monstrous, armored beast who shook the very ground beneath you with each step, wielding its devastating flame-throwers and radioactive-foot-stomping-thingie. I'm pretty sure that I actually peed a tiny little bit the first time I tried to escape this abomination, sending bullets ricocheting harmlessly off of its horrid carapace while fruitlessly attempting to bunny hop backwards into a corner. It was this, along with several other truly epic moments in Half-Life, that solidified its place among my all-time favorites.

Stephen "Aratos" Whitehead, Forum Moderator
First time I heard of Half-Life was somewhere in the region of '99. A friend of mine got theHalf-Life: Generation set for his birthday (the one with HL and Op Force), and he was somewhat excitable about it to say the least. Ranted on and on about it all the time, until eventually I went round to his house and had a play. Naturally, I ended up buying the pack myself shortly afterwards, and naturally my mother quickly banned me from playing it because 10-year-olds shouldn't be playing such things. Said ban lasted a matter of months before being replaced with the content lock. Took me another year to get past that...

When I completed Op-Force in 2000 (for some reason I found it more fun than the original), I was quite honestly scared - the first time a game had had an emotional effect on me other than the elation following beating the final boss. The endings of both HL and Op-Force are both experiences that have stuck in my mind since.

Much as it slightly embarrasses me to admit it now, I used to be somewhat fanatical about those games, totally drove my friends crazy. Half-Life's always going to hold a special place in my heart.