
Valve’s in-house writer and author, Marc Laidlaw, who wrote the books Dad’s Nuke and The 37th Mandela, later developed and expanded the plot. Half-Life’s plot was originally inspired by the computer games Doomand Quake (both produced by id Software), Stephen King’s novella The Mist, and an episode of The Outer Limits called “The Borderland”. Arming himself, Gordon starts his journey to the surface. Soon, he finds out that the facility is infested with dangerous and hostile alien creatures. Upon waking up, Gordon leaves the test chamber and starts exploring the place. After the test goes unexpectedly wrong, a phenomenon called Resonance Cascade occurs and causes massive dimensional rifts, opening a portal between Earth and Xen. Gordon Freeman, a recent MIT graduate in theoretical physics, and also a recent employee at Black Mesa, goes to the Anomalous Materials lab to participate in an experiment that involves an alien crystal. The game is set during May 2000s in a remote area of New Mexico, USA at the Black Mesa Research Facility a fictional complex that bears many similarities to both the Los Alamos National Laboratory and Area 51.Įarly in the morning, Dr. Designed initially for Microsoft Windows and later brought to other platforms such as PS2 and OS X, the game uses a considerably modified version of the Quake engine, called GoldSrc.

The player takes the perspective of the scientist Gordon Freeman who struggles to escape an underground research facility after a failed experiment causes a massive alien invasion through a dimensional rift.

Half-Life, stylized as HλLF-LIFE, is a science fiction first-person shooter developed and published by Valve.
