Overview
We as a gaming community should all know about Half-Life. Even if you don’t like the genre you have to respect the masterpeice that is the Half-Life franchise. So I’m going to write this random guide on it and Valve. (POSSIBLE SPOILERS)
Half-Life (Franchise)
Lets say you’re new to the series, and you wanna know what the whole thing about Half-Life is. Well here is a guide to help you get introduced to it. Here are some videos to start you off.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krfbojTwQiE
If you want to know more on the franchise just contact me in the comments.
Mods from the first game
The game Half-Life had alot of community made mods, but Im going to talk about two in pirticular: Counter strike, and Team fortress. Both were fps multiplayer team based games. Both were bought by Valve and Counter strike Global Offensive and Team Fortress two were then made under Valve’s name. Both are still very popular now.
Half-Life universe
Half-Life and Portal are in the same universe. In the universe Black Mesa (Half-Life) and Aperture (Portal) are both science facilities. Black mesa was working on teleportation and Aperture was working on portal devices. Using the borialis as a test object for the portals. The borialis is a ship seen in Half-life 2 episode 2 and Thinking with time machine (a mod made for Portal 2.) In Half-Life you play as Gordon Freeman, a scientist who experiments with a crystal from the plane Xen, opening a hole between the worlds letting in aliens and headcrabs that begin infecting your fellow co-workers. In Portal you play as Chell, a test subject for the portal gun. You wake up in Aperture and begin testing with the portal gun, and you notice that towards the end of your testing the robot that has been guiding you is evil, and you finally defeat Glados in the final boss battle, but you get pulled back into the facilities, which leads up to the events of Portal 2. In Half-Life, you defeat the final boss Nilahanth and spread portals throughout the world, and the combine take over which leads up to Hal-Life 2. In portal 2 you awake in aperture facilities again as chell, you are told that the year is 99999. You then follow Wheatley, a core thingy. You explore the old Aperture facilties and expirement with conversion gel. You hear the pre-recorded messages of Cave Johnson, and that he thinks Black Mesa is stealing their technology. He is slowly dieing because he inhaled the gel from the moon that is a surface that can be used with the portal gun. He tries to transfer his knoledge into a robot, but instead uses his assistent Caroline for the transfer, creating Glados. You see the scribles of Rattman throughout both games, and in the comic Lab rat. In Half-Life 2 you try to take down the Combine, but to make a long story short Alyx’s The one who you follow throughout the game dad gets killed , leaving a GIANT cliffhanger which is why so much of the gaming community wants Half-Life 3.
Valve
Gabe Newell worked at Microsoft before Valve. When he saw and played Doom he wanted to do something similar. He started a company named Valve and started working on Half-Life and another game under the name Prospero* but that game was scraped due to how much work that needed to be put in to make Half-Life. After the release of Half-Life Valve started working on Half-Life 2 almost Immediately. Someone was able to leak the entire game and give it away for free online. The FBI didn’t help Valve at all, instead the fanbase helped them catch the hacker. They then made a triligy for Half-Life 2 based on the events after Half-Life 2 called “Half-Life aftermath”. The first 2 games were made and the third was delayed. Since 2007 we haven’t hade another Half-Life game. Gearbox made two addons for Half-Life. Half-Life Blueshift where you play as Barney Calhoun (a security guard for Black Mesa) and Half-Life opposing force (where you play as the military sent out to kill Gordon Freeman.
*If I misspelled that please let me know in the comments.
The End!
If you think I missed something let me know in the comments, Im only one person! Goodbye!