Alf Life: The Definitive Review
About that time when the valve first opened.
Amidst all the hypervisible celebrations of Half Life’s 25th Birthday lay a particularly niche and personally relevant video, which did far more to coax profound memories of my first encounters with Black Mesa than Valve’s own and wonderfully professional documentary (about how great Valve is). The video that piqued my interest was a speedrun by KaNanga, commentated by the magnificent Tomatoanus1. While it is an academically technical showcase of speedrun techniques, it’s also a lovely whistle-stop dash through the game’s entirety (almost, there are some shortcuts and skips). It brings up a wash of emotions, beautifully resounding with two eras of nostalgia; that of encountering the original and that of encountering speedrunning for the first time. I remember marvelling at the early Half Life runs. I saw runners flinging themselves off every conceivable vertiginous drop, aiming with unlikely confidence for the final rung of some ladder far, far below and thus catching it entirely as planned, instantly avoiding any fall damage. This, among the audacity of just running past 99% of the enemies, filled me with glee. It was such fun to see the game stretched so far, and tantalising to wonder where the human limit lay for optimising these runs. But that memory of speedrunning would quickly fade under the raw power of remembering Half Life’s arrival. The memories there of stupendous redefinition, of a new age dawning, of the sheer thrill of seeing so much innovation are potent. Half Life felt like an explosion of momentum pushing progress in the art of videogame design, as if some huge distance had been suddenly leapt in a single bound.
The late ‘90s were a wild time where the most commercial mainstream PC games were also the avant garde, and where being surprised and witnessing progress was almost a constant. We can stake out a wonderful lineage of milestones that perhaps starts at Ultima Underworld2 in 1992 and ends up, via Wolfenstein 3D and Doom, Quake, Half Life, then on to Unreal Tournament, System Shock 2 and Deus Ex to show how much can be accomplished in just eight fucking years. Occupying quite a nice position as a maturation of sorts for the first-person shooter, namely a transition away from ‘shoot everything’ to ‘traverse the hostile environment’ in a more adult notion of how the first-person viewpoint and skilled environmental construction can provide an exquisitely compelling experience. It’s quite hard to relate the sheer joy of Half Life’s world navigation, of how Black Mesa forms as a real place in your mind that’s far more tangible than the odd abstractions and stand-in arenas of Doom or low-detail shorthands of System Shock et al. Partly it comes from an aesthetic sensibility that was chasing realism (to a large extent) but also with a restrained, semi-academic/semi-industrial style that rarely strayed into cartoon territory. This is despite frequently abusing a token green radiation glow and an entire ending chapter in a stupid fantasy world that was utterly unnecessary. And yes, I am going to throw away the game’s narrative climax with a single sentence. And you want to know why? Because it’s embarrassingly unnecessary.
Half-Life is a game about primal fears. You will probably feel all of them; the dark, heights, dangerous terrain, drowning, the alien, the other, entrapment. The game’s momentum comes from Freeman and the player overcoming these fears in a constant dash to escape. Taking the game on in traditional fashion requires the balancing of fight and flight, and despite the ludicrous trajectories of the speedrun, which shame the game’s formal combat challenges, tackling the game as a fight to ‘get anywhere but here’ as an ingénue player is frantic and scrappy. It carries an odd authenticity, namely in how a lab assistant becomes a merciless and skilled killer. Maladroit assaults with the crowbar are little more than panicked windmilling in those early stages, especially for those who lacked mouse-and-keyboard experience. In 1998, the player and Freeman could learn combat skills together, through clumsy encounters and terrorising entrapments such as coming across the army dudes with the fucking grenades3. Of everything novel in Half Life, the army dudes with the fucking grenades were perhaps the most impressive. I remember the raw, animal fright when hiding, and having one pop a grenade at my feet. I had been flushed out by the AI! This felt like the icing on the cake, an unexpected delight and yet another hallmark of progress within Valve’s remarkable debut. And there’s that primality again; the army dudes with the fucking grenades were the predator making you the prey. The mashing of fight with flight at the synaptic level was utterly intoxicating, seemingly a splendid complexification of that reptilian, instinctive thrill that the first-person shooter seemed to singularly provide. Half Life had magically upgraded that primal joy of killing for survival that had been Doom’s most consuming achievement. Only with Half Life’s clever AI techniques and environmental funnelling, it had pulled off the bigger trick - pushing the player's motive towards escape rather than victory.
Of course, no overview of Half Life would be complete without paying tribute to its most enduring feature, that of the traversable duct. Half Life’s wondrous array of utility tunnels, air ducts, vents, pipes and the like is an object lesson in repeating structures without repeating models and textures. Somehow, not one pipe or tunnel feels like another - they all carry a unique texturing that further cements the idea of making a journey across Black Mesa’s sprawl. These connecting conduits landmark the game’s zonal shifts. From the early lift shafts and air vents to the railway tracks and meat grinder conveyors, to the rocky tunnels leading to Surface Tension, Valve showcased an environmental sensibility that seemed to step well beyond any contemporary’s attempt at varied and plausible locales. And yet they all remained sagely restrained behind a realist aesthetic. It’s something that Valve would carry forward with Half Life 2’s representation of lost and forbidden maintenance spaces which, as I pointed out (with extreme authority) in a previous piece, has everything to do with the environs of Alien, Aliens and Die Hard. But Valve’s genius here is to steal the ambience and utility of those environments without copying their deployment in the source movies. And, naturally, to successfully iterate them. As with the sense of landmarking a journey, those connecting tunnels give Black Mesa its sense of plausible reality, something which is contravened in Half Life 2’s meta-Mesa the Citadel, which is far too much of an unknowable Death Star to carry the same weight. However the prison of Nova Prospekt comes close and, of course, Half Life 2 completes a lovely symmetry with its celebration of the outdoor, of the wilderness. Although you can start to assign a quasi-religious reading to Gordon’s traversal within the game’s sequel, which feels far more contrived and manufactured a narrative tale. It’s almost that of a messianic hero escaping to the wilds in order to return to his flock with the powers to save them all. Especially with its facile one-man kill of the headquarters for an entire alien invasion echoing the clanging conceptual error at the end of the original.
As I said earlier, Xen is embarrassingly unnecessary and unnecessarily embarrassing. Valve has dropped a number of conceptual clangers throughout its Half Life lore and none is quite as significant as its original, foundational fuck-up. The reason being that Half Life’s propulsive ride is about escape, so having to turn it into a rushed and ham-fisted destruction of bosses feels utterly pointless, undermining the singular beauty of freedom being the ultimate prize. Freedom as the crowing reward is particularly potent given the subtexts of extreme capitalism, virtual slavery and the cheapness of human lives in Black Mesa. Considering the game’s specific triggering of the primal response, freedom to live another day is precisely the correct goal, for that is the survival instinct’s sole purpose. To end with a battle to overcome evil infantilises the game’s struggle down to the status of a fairy tale, but like the G-Man, Half Life’s paeans to things that are vacuously cool rather than conceptually rigourous are the only places where Valve stumbles. But Valve consistently4 stumbles with this, even elevating often terrible or inconsistent ideas to legendary statuses. The G-Man absolutely exemplifies this. A shadowy figure adding (actually fairly hollow) intrigue, he is much more obviously a rip of the X-Files’ Cigarette Smoking Man, carrying precisely the same shadowy menace and sense of omniscience, but ultimately an inscrutable sinister presence whose purpose is to be an inscrutable sinister presence. With the sequel, he becomes precisely the same, utterly ludicrous totem for a tabula-rasa antagonist, particularly when the G-Man became Half Life 2’s stand-in for God. Far from being cool, he is now silly. And it’s worth noting that the more the Cigarette Smoking Man became involved in the journey of Fox Mulder, the sillier that story became.
Not wanting to end on a downer, I can at least credit the speedrunners once again for making Xen a place of wonder. There are Tau Cannon jumps of such boldness and confidence that I shrieked with delight on first witnessing them. Such is the prowess of speedrunners to exploit the powers and spaces in the games they run. And perhaps it’s that notion of the optimised fly-by that I encourage you to engage with. It’s fast and possibly infuriating with its blasé5 disregard for formal challenges, but it’s a fine way to fire up those dormant memories in the native spaces of a 25-year-old original. And that’s a fitting word to close on. For everything that Valve made toweringly impressive with Half Life’s monolithic arrival, its originality is perhaps the highest virtue. Half Life 2, despite some fabulous new features, never quite captured the same sense of surprise. It never felt like the same leap across the same distance. And perhaps that’s why we’re all waiting to see a third. How can anything really leap quite as far, or arrive with the same confident redefinition of an entire gaming paradigm as Half Life did? We can obviously never know until it happens, but provided it isn’t silly, I’d still love to see Valve’s failed attempts to answer.
[21]
“I hope you are all doing well. If not, then as always, I'd just like to remind you that no feeling is final. No matter what's going on or what's weighing you down, there is a tomorrow and it cannot take that away from you. You are not defined by what's going on or clouding your mind, and one day you'll be able to look back and see it as strictly where you were, rather than who you were, because you are not, and never will be, defined by those feelings. It's important to reflect on how far you've come, so please remember to do that now and then, and also remember to give yourself credit for any mental health gains. You're the one getting you through tough times, not the media you use to distract you like movies, or music, or videos on YouTube explaining speedruns, or books. You're the one doing the work and you're the one who deserves the credit.”
Yes, this is actually a bit arbitrary but I think Core's Corporation is too hyperniche and FTL's Dungeon Master too rudimentary to mark quite the same milestone. It's also worth pointing out that this is all about PC platform supremacy so if it was on an Amiga or ST or is fucking 3D Monster Maze on a fucking ZX-81, it doesn't fucking count, OK? NOR DOES FUCKING GOLDENEYE. (Actually that does count, quite a lot).
Yes, yes, yes, yes, I know I really mean the Hazardous Environment Combat Unit but we didn’t have lore bibles and exhaustive wikis in 1998.
There’s a lot more I can write about this, largely to do with the duality of Portal vs Portal 2 as particularly acute lessons in conceptual rigour. Hint: if you have to retcon your first game to preserve a completely unnecessary narrative continuity in your laugh-a-minute sequel, you might have a few issues.
Absolutely unrelated but whenever I use the word 'blasé', I will always say it twice, then follow up with "and may I send this out to the one known as A J Fresh? Peace, my brother".