Half-Life is 20 years old today, and more original than ever

There are no collectibles in Half life. It's amazing.

This is not how I would have rented the revolutionary first person shooter, who is 20 years old today, when I first played it. At this point, I might have described how Half life infused sci-fi shooters with a sense of realism. This caused an extraterrestrial invasion in a scientific research center called Black Mesa, where an ordinary man (or at least one theoretical physicist trained at MIT), Gordon Freeman, is forced to fight for his life – but he can also play with a microwave lunch of the scientific colleague. I might have discussed his immersive story, which never took players out of their first-person perspective. I would have probably referred to the distinctive opening level, which presents Black Mesa players with a five-minute tram ride.

Half life helped define a generation of first-person shooters. And because of that, many of his original innovations are now taken for granted. (The Half life Manual, for example, states that weapons are in "realistic places" instead of turning in the air.) Thus, by 2018, the elements that modern video games have left out stand out – sometimes just title but often ways that make Half life to feel incredibly elegant

According to modern standards, Half life can not erase the bar we have set for a big budget game. Its levels are constantly scripted and linear, sometimes with semi-secret zones. You can not modify weapons, improve equipment, or make supplies. You will probably not create meaningful relationships with the secondary characters as you will only rarely interact with one of them for more than one minute. In a year where critics have praised God of the war To humanize the old Kratos one-dimensional killing machine, it's more obvious than ever that Gordon Freeman is a figure with a crowbar. We do not even know why he is so good at handling it!

But the result is something that seems urgent and useful, rewarding success instead of completism. Before you start Half life once again last week, I did not realize how much I took grinding, cleaning, and aimless wandering for granted, even though I was supposedly pursuing a crazy cultist or league of supervillains.

There is a lot of incredibly funny unrealism in Half life, like the five character models that represent the entire staff of Black Mesa, the strangely indestructible gates that force players to make dangerous long detours and the mandatory level where enemies lock you in a poorly secured prison and take all your business. But its clean design and tightly controlled rhythm are perfectly suited to the story. The game encourages you to constantly advance, doing practically nothing beyond what keeps you alive.

Valve is adept at creating the illusion that you find an intelligent solution to the problem, although this is clearly the only option available. Even hidden paths, including one that lets you skip an entire level, are accessible in the same way as those who desperately try to escape. I may not know Gordon Freeman, but I know we want the same thing: to get out of Black Mesa as quickly as possible, audio diaries and manufacturing equipment are cursed.

Few fencers have been as ambitious and economically designed as Half life, but the game stands out more than ever because the linear, story-based, and player-based shooter has not been a cultural force for years. Rock Paper Shotgun writer John Walker argued that Half-life Bombastic's 2004 sequel killed the genre, dragging developers into a death spiral of increasingly expensive sets. But Half-life the formula simply had very clear limits. The game was neither serious nor conspiracy; his story goes to Gordon Freeman who successively fights bigger monsters. Nevertheless, this made shooting games in the first person the default vehicle for "serious" narrative games, and the more ambitious these stories were, the more uncontrollable and restrictive their language of violence became absurd and compelling.

Half Life 2 knowingly winks at this fact. He brought back similar mechanisms, but with a plot that made Gordon an involuntary pawn manipulated by a force from another world. Other characters have begun to point out that, although he is a supposedly brilliant scientist, he can not do anything except activate rocker switches and kill aliens. "You have destroyed so much," laments at some point. "What exactly did you create?" Can you name even one thing? I did not think. The speech is transparent, but it is not. false.

And after that, linear first-person shooters have practically deconstructed themselves. BioShock used mind control as a metaphor for players' lack of will, starting with a reference to Half-life crowbar famous. Spec Ops: The line turned the cliché military fight into a nightmare that actually made you feel guilty for choosing to play it. At the same time, Valve's level editor let freelance modellers create first-person shooter games without guns. Dear Esther and The parable Stanley, which offered an identical (or higher) storytelling potential without it being necessary to explain why you are constantly killing people. Half life is a wonderful game about a silent man on a narrow path with a deadly arsenal. But you can not tell as many stories this way.

The fans of the series waited for a revival of the Half life series, which ended on an unbearable cliffhanger in Half-Life 2: Episode 2. But the mythical Half-Life 3 is almost certainly dead, and Marc Laidlaw, author of series pinned, published his online plot. According to rumors, Valve would create a prequel for a new virtual reality headset, but given the time elapsed since the launch of Valve's solo game (and the speed with which virtual reality projects can collapse and burn) , the chances are not favorable.

Although I doubt that the story of Gordon Freeman is over, the first Half life still seems innovative, even if it is familiar comforting. Valve has built a series by ensuring that players keep moving forward – but sometimes it's better to look back.