Not too long ago, I went back and replayed Valve’s Half Life 1, fully beating the original game for the first time on my own. Previously, I’ve beaten the game as the fanmade remake Black Mesa and in a duo through Sven Co-op, but until now, I had never actually completed the entirety of Half Life 1 completely on my own.

I don’t have any screenshots from this playthrough (as I forgot to), but I do have some old screenshots of Half-Life gameplay that are still cool to this day, and with Half-Life fresh on my mind, I think it would be worth talking about them.

Some scientist from Unforeseen Consequences that more than likely dies soon after.

Half Life and Physics

It’s really odd seeing my perspective on Half-Life change in real time as I’ve fallen more and more into Physics. I first got introduced to Half-Life when I was about 12 or 13 (when I made my first Steam account, all those years ago), and at the time, I had a vague idea that I wanted to be a programmer or something of the sort, perhaps a game developer. Over the next five or so years, I became increasingly more certain that I wanted to become something within the realm of an applied computer scientist (not a software developer though), even doing competitive programming challenges for fun in my free time.

So now, as a college student, It’s more than a little weird seeing this game I’ve played countless times in the past that is so heavily tied with Physics and beginning to understand many of the references or ideas that it makes out.

The resonance cascade in Half Life 1. Source

For those who aren’t aware of the story of Half Life 1, it follows the protagonist Dr. Gordon Freeman, a recent Ph.D. graduate of MIT in Theoretical Physics (and an expert on teleportation), as he tries to escape the underground research facility Black Mesa while stopping the invasion of aliens from the hostile, unknown dimension Xen after a teleportation experiment gone completely awry, creating a horrible calamity to occur known as the Resonance Cascade.

Portal

A similar game many of you may know, and another childhood favorite of mine, is Valve’s other series (and Half-Life’s sister series) Portal. I’ve played through Portal, Portal 2, and the unofficial game Portal Stories: Mel.

A screenshot from Portal 1. Source

The same effect for how Half-Life has evolved in my eyes has undergone with Portal. As well, for those who don’t know, the Portal series is also extremely Physics-based, following a similar general idea to Half-Life in that it follows Chell, a test subject at the underground research facility of Aperture Laboratories, who is woken up a while after all of the other subjects and scientists were executed by GLaDOS, the maniacal all-powerful artificial intelligence in charge of the facility, and it follows her trying to escape the facility through solving portal-based puzzles and quick-thinking rather than the run-and-gun violence that Gordon Freeman has to use against aliens and soldiers.

A big part of what is interesting, as well, is that both gameseries exist in the same universe, with the calamity in Half-Life 1 being the direct result of Black Mesa attempting to develop Portal technology (and failing). In another Valve series (another favorite of mine) known as Team Fortress, they do the same sort of plot structure of having two big competing companies that just result in getting nothing done because they are both individually incompetent and essentially just exist to compete with each other.

Boneworks

Moreover, the Half-Life gameplay structure continued to influence games I liked even as I got older. When I was about 14 years old, I got an Oculus Quest and loaded the game Boneworks by Stress Level Zero onto it, and it was a complete riot! This game was so much fun, and I remember waking up extra early and rushing home every day just to be able to play it after class, and the game follows almost exactly the same structure as Half-Life, except instead, its plot is designed around the happenings of a VR world. Essentially, the main character, Arthur Ford (who is modeled after Brett Driver from FreddieW or RocketJump), is lead security personnel at Monogon, a megacorporation leading the development of a virtual reality system that essentially acts as an entirely new world, and it follows him as he attempts to obtain godlike control of this new world by entering the base layer of the world (kind of like a root shell on UNIX) known as the Boneworks, but in the VR world, he has to fight his way through, as there are entities (essentially programs) designed to stop this, like nullbodies and cleaners.

The story of Boneworks is essentially like if you mixed Serial Experiments Lain’s Masami Eiri with Half-Life’s Gordon Freeman. It plays like Half-Life in VR, but Arthur Ford has Eiri’s (or Deus’) goals: becoming the god of the new virtual plane at all costs, however unlike Deus, Ford is successful (and the consequences of these actions result in Stress Level Zero’s subsequent game, Bonelab).