Technology

Credit: half-life.com

There’s a long-running joke that US video game studio Valve can’t count to three. There’s been Portal 1, Portal 2…Half Life, Half Life 2, Half-Life 2: Episode One, Half-Life 2: Episode Two. The company has famously kept fans waiting and wondering, hoping that protagonist Gordon Freeman’s journey will finally come to an epic conclusion. Hoping that the bewildered scientist who fought off headcrabs and zombies with nothing but a crowbar will save the Earth and take a well-earned rest.

In 1998, Half Life was the game that set the standard for modern story-led gaming. It replaced the levels of guns (like Doom’s BFG) and monsters with a narrative-led gameplay within a stunningly thought-out world. The game starts with a five-minute subterranean train ride, showing the scale of the game and setting the scene for your story. You, Gordon Freeman, are a junior scientist at a top-secret government laboratory and at ground zero when an experiment goes terribly wrong.