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| Half-Life | |
| Developer: | Valve Software |
| Publisher: | Sierra On-Line |
| Release date: | October 31, 1998 |
| Genre: | First-person shooter |
| Game modes: | Single player, multiplayer |
| ESRB rating: | Mature (M) |
| Platform: | Windows, PlayStation 2 |
| Media: | CD |
Half-Life is a first-person shooter computer gameA computer game is any sort of game that is played using a computer. General Although often associated, computer games are not necessarily video games although all but the earliest video games (such as Pong, which used dedicated analogue circuitry) are co developed by Valve Software and published by Sierra On-Line in 1998, based on a heavily-modified QuakeFor an overview of the Quake game franchise go to Quake series. See earthquake for alternate use of "quake" term. Quake was also a brand of sugar-sweetened cereal which was popular in the U. in the late 1960s. See Quisp. Quake is a first-person shooter (F game engineIn computing, a game engine is the core software component of a computer game. It typically handles rendering and other necessary technology, but might also handle additional tasks such as game AI, collision detection between game objects, etc. The most c. It was first published for PCThe term personal computer or PC has three meanings: IBM's range of PCs that led to the use of the term see IBM PC. A generic term used to describe all microcomputers (mentioned here). A generic term sometimes used to describe a computer based on IBM's ors running Microsoft Windows, and was later ported to Sony's PlayStation 2 video game console (versions for Sega's Dreamcast and Apple Macintosh were completed, but never released commercially). Half-Life, often shortened to HL, has been heralded by computer game critics for its gripping storyline, which would influence the development of other first-person shooters in the years to come.
In the game, you play a scientist named Gordon Freeman who is a survivor of an experiment that goes horribly wrong, ripping dimensional seams that allow aliens from a parallel dimension to invade Earth. The game refers to it as a resonance cascade. As you try to escape the overrun facility you soon discover that you are caught between two sides: the aliens, and the forces of the United States Marine Corps which has been dispatched to cover up the experiment—including you. You also learn that the accident may not have been an accident after all, and that the aliens didn't start it, but were being kidnapped and experimented on. You discover the true intentions of the G-Man who appears regularly throughout the game to monitor your progress.
The setting for the game, the Black Mesa Research Facility, bears many similarities to both the Los Alamos National Laboratory and Area 51.
The plot was written by Valve's in-house writer and author, Marc Laidlaw who wrote the books Dad's Nuke and The 37th Mandala .