Overview
What is this?This is a repository for background information on the Half-Life series gathered by Lilgreenman. Everything you see here is canon for the Half-Life /Portal universe.This was originally a thread on the halflife2.net forums and then the steampowered forums.Who’s Marc Laidlaw?Marc Laidlaw is the head writer, and the mastermind, behind Half-Life. Almost every moment of story development and line of dialogue in Half-Life and Half-Life 2 was written by him, and he is the driving force behind the series’ richly realized world. He is still the principal writer for the series, now assisted by Portal writers Chet Faliszek and Erik Wolpaw.Therefore, any information given by him on the series’ background is 100% true until directly contradicted by either himself or the games, which seldom happens.How do I contribute?Marc’s e-mail is [email protected]. He answers many questions about the series sent to him through that address (don’t get your hopes up about any Episode 3/Half-Life 3 information, though). Remember that his first name is spelled with a ‘c’, not a ‘k’.If and when you receive a reply, take a screenshot of it, then post either a transcript of the response or a link to the screenshot in this thread. I’ll add it to the bunch of posts at the top, and give you credit.(Credit goes to well-known community member mimaz98 (known today as Vyrnnus), for originally bringing the Vault to the Steam Forums, and to everyone at Combine OverWiki for cataloging all the information found here.)
Quotes
Half-Life 3
Quote:
Originally Posted by Marc Laidlaw
Thanks for your letter. Whatever we do next, I think we all expect it to be better than we’ve done before. It would be very hard to go on if we didn’t feel we were continually improving. And while we don’t want to repeat ourselves, it could be argued that HL1 and HL2 are very different, and that whatever happens next in the HL series can be very different from the preceding games but still be very good. That’s my hope anyway.
Nihilanth
Quote:
Originally Posted by Marc Laidlaw
Capture of vorts is fairly common. That particular Nihilanth was the last of its kind, and had never been captured, but some of its predecessors might have been.
Xen Controllers
Quote:
Originally Posted by Marc Laidlaw
The Xen Controllers were part of the Mihilanth’s support network, and they relied on the Nihilanth to throw them around where it wanted them to go, so if there are any left, they are probably stranded in what would not have been their natural native environment (nothing’s native to Xen). However, without access to a steady food supply (whatever it is they eat), they may well have simply died out.
Race X
Quote:
Originally Posted by Marc Laidlaw
Thanks for writing. Explanations outside the context of the game are not really something we want to get into. Most of the things that are hazy are that way simply because the right time and place has not come about for clarifying these things in the context of the games. So, I try not to say anything that would spoil revelations and backstory that we may want to use in the future or are currently developing. The relation between the Nihilanth race and the combine is one of those things. As for Race-X being from xen, I’m not sure any of the aliens we’ve seen were actually from xen originally. Xen is a borderworld–a place you have to go through to get to other places. It was colonized by certain creatures that could adapt to it. The Race-X creatures didn’t seem particularly well adapted to Xen. I imagine their home lay somewhere beyond.
Portal Storms and Headcrabs
Quote:
Originally Posted by Marc Laidlaw
Those things came through during the portal storms, which continue erratically to this very day. Some of the critters came early (immediately after the Black Mesa incident) and adapted to earth. I think the poison headcrabs must have eaten something poisonous at one point, and liked it so much they added it to their repertoire.
The Bullsquids are around here somewhere.
Eli’s Leg
Quote:
Originally Posted by Marc Laidlaw
Like many things in the HL universe, we like to reserve these things until we can make some use of them. There’s no point in carving a story idea in granite, only to get there and learn that it leads to bad, boring gameplay.
I hope mod makers don’t spend too much time worrying about whether they’re in conflict with Half-Life. If they get something “wrong”, we won’t change what we decide to do because of it. They can, if they want, show Eli losing his leg to a Bullsquid while helping Kleiner get to safety in Black Mesa; but if I have an opportunity to later show Eli losing his leg while helping kleiner get into City 17, I’ll go ahead and do that. I’m not out to spoil the fans’ fun!
Perhaps there are many many parallel universes, in each of which Eli loses his leg in an entirely different way.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Marc Laidlaw
He lost it to a Bullsquid while helping Kleiner get to safety, but I’m not sure if that was in Black Mesa or later.
Metrocops
Quote:
Originally Posted by Marc Laidlaw
CP/Metrocops are humans at the first level–basically unaltered volunteers. From here, if you are hardcore, you must volunteer for modification in order to become a soldier, so advancing in rank requires surrendering even more humanity.
This stuff was certainly thought through in advance; sometimes we just make things up though.
Xen and Beyond
Quote:
Originally Posted by Marc Laidlaw
We had a glimpse of the larger threat when we were working on Half Life 1. In other words we knew that once you cleared out the nihilanth, you were going to discover something worse beyond it. We knew that some immense threat had chased the Nihilanth and its creatures out of their own world and into Xen, from which location they were all to glad to seize the opportunity to continue on to earth with suppression through the citadels. But the exact nature of the threat was left to be solved in Half Life 2.
Xen/Combine Relation
Quote:
Originally Posted by Marc Laidlaw
Yes, that’s fairly accurate, and I’m pretty sure Doug was restating something I’d told him; I am not clarifying it, since it’s the foundation on which the series continues. What we saw in HL 1 was the very end of a long struggle between the Combine and the last of the Nihilanth’s race…although it’s a bit different than the word “prompted” implies. The Nihilanth’s “world” (if it could be said to have) was long since in the past as far as the Nihilanth was concerned; Xen was their final retreat, and they had their back to the wall, as it were, when the fissure appeared that let them spill into our dimension. Xen itself is sort of a dimensional transit bottleneck–an area of continual contention.
Episode Two Character (Magnusson)
Quote:
Originally Posted by Marc Laidlaw
We try not to answer questions about the story directly outside of the game–believe what you play, not what you read, is my motto. The waters are murky, unfortunately, when it comes to the Gearbox titles because we did not make them and i don’t feel compelled to abide by every story idea they came up with to make their game more fun. That said, it’s now public knowledge that you’ll be meeting at least one further survivor of Black Mesa in Episode 2. Hope you enjoy it.
Barney + Blue-Shift + Expansion Involvement
Quote:
Originally Posted by Marc Laidlaw
Hi, Daniel, I won’t be able to clear up much. It was a deliberate decision to have Gearbox never call him Barney in Blue Shift, only Calhoun. Raising the bar is not a game, so material is presented differently there; manifestations differ in every medium. Gearbox took our Barney and did their own best version, but I’m not sure that Barney is the same Barney I’m picturing when I picture Valve’s Barney. In the time BS was created, there were many Barneys. Only gradually have the redundant creature and character types slowly settled into iconic individuals…it’s an ongoing process. Gearbox did what was right for their games.
Even though they had feedback and guidance from us, they didn’t always listen to it, and they steered by their own lights, etc., etc. I wasn’t very close to the creation of the expansion packs, and much more concerned with how to move the story forward and open up the universe; so I only take the games created by Valve into consideration when I am working on the story…there are more than enough potential contradictions in our own designs without me worrying about contradictions in the inventions of other developers who were not part of our initial creative meetings. I know this is confusing to fans; it’s partly a byproduct of the way expansion packs were created, the way they were packaged and published, and also I was very new to this whole concept at the time.
It never occurred to me that large chunks of the story would be taken out of our hands, changes made beyond our control, and then have the stuff handed back with some odd unexpected kinks in it. So I try not to worry about it, and simply do my best with material directly in my control. However, as to your last question, there was pressure on us to set Half-Life 2 at Black Mesa, which a lot of us felt would be creative death; it was important to break new ground. Nuking Black Mesa was a good way to ensure that we had a way to avoid setting Half-Life 2 there. You might say I gave the G-Man his orders. The whole issue of canon is something the fans came up with. I guess you will be able to identify as canon those story