Half-Life is a First Person Shooter (FPS) game developed by Valve and published by Sierra Studios for Microsoft Windows in 1998. It was Valve’s debut product and the first game in the Half-Life series. Players take on the role of Gordon Freeman, a scientist who must find his way out of the Black Mesa Research Facility after an alien attack. The main game consists of battles against aliens and human enemies using a variety of weapons and solving puzzles.

Unlike many other games of the time, the player is in almost constant control of Freeman, and the story is told largely through a series of scenarios seen through his eyes. Valve co-founder Gabe Newell said the team aims to create an immersive world, not a shooting gallery. They built Half-Life using GoldSrc, a heavily modified version of the Quake engine licensed from id Software.

Half-Life has gained acclaim for its graphics, realistic gameplay, and seamless narrative. It has won over fifty PC Game of the Year awards and is considered one of the most influential FPS games and best video game ever created. By 2008, it had sold over 9 million copies. It was followed by the Opposite Force (1999) and Blue Shift (2001) expansion packs developed by Gearbox Software. It was ported to the PlayStation 2 in 2001 along with another expansion, Half-Life: Decay, as well as macOS and Linux in 2013. Valve ported Half-Life to their Source engine in 2004, and a third Party remake of Black Mesa was released in 2020.

Half-Life has inspired numerous fan-made mods, some of whom have gone on to become standalone games such as Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat, and Sven Co-op. Half-Life 2 was released in 2004, followed by Half-Life 2: Episode One (2006), Episode 2 (2007) and Half-Life: Alyx (2020).

Half-Life is a first-person shooter that requires the player to complete combat missions and solve puzzles in order to beat the game. Unlike most of its peers at the time, Half-Life used script sequences like Vortigaunt to break through the door to advance the plot’s highlights. Compared to most first-person shooters of the time, which relied on cut-scene intermissions to detail their storylines, Half-Life’s story is told mostly through script sequences (bar one short cutscene). keeping the player in control of the first person perspective. Accordingly, the player rarely loses the ability to control the player’s character, who never speaks and never appears in the game; the player sees with his “eyes” throughout the game. Half-Life has no “levels”; instead, it divides the game into chapters, the titles of which flash on the screen as the player progresses through the game. Progress around the world is continuous, except for short pauses for loading.

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