Two-thirds of a lifetime ago, a ten-year-old boy in a scratchy wool sweater sat huddled under an old down blanket. The first proper snow of the season had come the week before, and the boy hadn’t been dressed for building forts. Now here he was - bored, sick and sweaty. His mother entered the room with a mug of undrinkably hot milk with honey and butter. In her other hand was an issue of GAME.EXE, a computer gaming magazine. The words “HALF-LIFE” were plastered across the bottom of the cover. The boy loved reading, and loved computers, and the milk needed time to cool off anyway. He opened the magazine and flipped to page 8 after finding it in the table of contents. The boy grew older and switched languages, countries and continents, but his favorite game never changed.
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It’s hard to compress two decades into text, but I will attempt to do so when it comes to my relationship with the Half-Life series that began all those years ago, with that preview article
in that magazine.
The article was written in a second-person perspective that really stuck out to me, and was filled with screenshots that would later turn out to be of an unreleased rough beta version of the game.
It
ran through several dramatized, episodic descriptions of events in the game, then listed out the weapons used in the game, the enemies you would face and the tactics to deal with them. Finally, there was an interview with Marc Laidlaw himself. This single article was sufficient to make me completely insufferable to my parents for the next few months. “I want to play Half-Life,” I would say. At first, this meant asking to go to an Internet cafe a few blocks away from home, and for money to pay by the hour and use one of their beefy gaming PCs. Later on, it meant asking for a copy of the game, and for time on the “main” home computer - the only machine that could run the game at all, in glorious 320x240 resolution that gave me headaches.
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A couple of years passed. The move to the US threw everything into a pleasant state of disarray, but the one thing that hadn’t changed was having to ask my parents to use the computer to play Half-Life. I had found one of my own soon after arriving in the States, but it had no sound card. It was there, on my mother’s computer, that I finally beat the game. My thirteenth birthday present was a copy of the newly released Opposing Force expansion. My birthday cake featured an edible photo of myself playing in a fountain in downtown Chicago, which my mother doodled over with brightly colored frosting. I was now knee-deep in toxic green sludge, a crowbar in one hand, and a proud Lambda logo on my chest.
Most kids in my 8th and 9th grade classes didn’t share my enthusiasm for Half-Life. They played console games and were rightfully hyped about the Playstation 2 and X-Box. In search of like-minded people, I took to the Internet. My options for getting online in 2001 were limited to libraries - either during lunch at school, or at the Naperville Public Library, which was a hour-long walk from home. I discovered Planet Half-Life, an offshoot of the Gamespy network. Through it, I discovered the fact that my favorite game was designed from the ground up to be moddable. I learned of Counter-Strike, Team Fortress Classic, and Sven Co-op. I discovered the Handy Vandal’s Almanac and The Snarkpit, two communities focused on level design. Having no reliable internet at home, I downloaded the level editor - then called Worldcraft - onto a floppy drive and brought it home to install. For the first time, I wasn’t simply playing the game. My parents looked on as I worked to figure out the obtuse user interface, trying to remember what I’d read earlier in the day. They raised their eyebrows when I finally managed to compile and run my first level - a hollow, unlit concrete box 512 units across with a single prefab trashcan hovering in the center. There wasn’t much more I could do in the limited time I was allowed to use the good computer, but I had caught the bug. My notebooks were filled with doodles of level layouts, my mind filled with cheesy storylines to match.
Eventually my family moved to a house with proper internet access, and I got a set of hardware with enough power under the hood to run both the game and the editor. It could even produce sound! All the things I could only read and salivate about were now within my reach, and I gorged myself on them. Counter-Strike quickly fell by the wayside, but Team Fortress and Sven Co-Op did not. Natural Selection came out and blew me away with how different a Half-Life mod could look and feel from the original game. I stayed up past midnight, playing, building, and playing some more. I learned that projects can die - when the extremely tongue-in-cheek Scientist Slaughterhouse mod went silent.
The release of the Half-Life 2 trailer took everybody by surprise. I had called one of my like-minded friends and we synch-watched it together, pausing every few minutes to let the video buffer and gush about how amazing everything looked and how much we were looking forward to messing with the modding toolkit. The subsequent beta leak and resulting delays taught me to be patient.
The move to California was not long after, and my patience was immediately put to the test as most of my belongings were stuck with the moving company, including my computer. I must have gone through a full pack of printer paper in less than a month, drawing up concepts and layouts for Xen Rebels, a mod centered around a semi-peaceful human colonization of the realm set after the events of Half-Life. Once my computer arrived, it was right back to the late nights and groggy mornings for me. Our home Internet was bad but workable, and I spent countless hours with the new and more creative mods that were being released, including The Specialists - a strong attempt to recreate the gun-fighting and martial arts stylings of Hong-Kong action movies in a multiplayer game. Around the same time I was introduced to the strange new world of anime, and decided that I simply must change the two throwable knives offered by The Specialists into kunai and throwing needles. This of course required me to learn 3D modelling. At the time, this was done with Milkshape 3D, a model editor compatible with most contemporary game formats. Once again, countless hours of figuring out the interface and the workflow followed, set to the calming tones of the Unreal, Deus Ex and Half-Life soundtracks.
Creating models felt a lot more freeform than levels as I wasn’t constrained to a unit grid or forced to use convex geometry, and one day the new throwing weapons were in. I published the modified models on a forum to exactly zero fanfare. Around the same time, I began learning the basics of Photoshop in school, so modelling and texturing went hand in hand. To say my early textures were atrocious would be an affront to honest, hard-working atrocious textures the world over, but I continued my studies. My experience with working in 3D even netted me a 2nd place award at the school art contest - money which I immediately put back into upgrading my computer.
Half-Life 2 came out in November of 2004, to universal praise and celebration. I received the collector’s edition as a present for New Year, along with a copy of Raising The Bar. I beat the game the same morning, without a wink of sleep between unwrapping my present and the final darkness of the credits screen. The SDK didn’t ship with the game, but as soon as it was released I dove in. Soon after, the modding community blossomed, bigger and more vibrant than the original game’s, driven by the incredible flexibility of the engine. One of the first mods that appeared was made by a British man named Garry, and was called simply that, “Garry’s Mod”. It let players interact with the physics engine, and slowly sprouted more and more features. Many players used these features to pose character ragdolls, eventually creating entire comic series with storylines ranging from the comedic non-sequitur to dark and serious. Of course I felt the need to try my hand at it. That lead to the creation of The Plane - the story of Beet, a Combine Elite who managed to break free of his overseers’ indoctrination and find friendship, love, and revenge on his old masters. The only redeeming feature of that story was that it taught me how not to write stories.
I began getting more attached to the Gmod community than the expressly level design one at The Snarkpit. The few levels I publicly released were designed specifically as sandboxes to play and build in. The most popular ones were gm_orbit and rp_bahamut, maps set in space and featuring zero gravity for physical objects, allowing players to build smaller spaceships, or roleplay as the crew of a salvage and exploration vessel. Posting teaser images on the forums taught me a valuable lesson - what it felt like to be the one creating hype, instead of experiencing it. The constant demands were overwhelming. Some would simply want more work-in-progress screenshots. Others would drop ultimatums that unless a certain feature was designed a certain way, they would refuse to use the map. Others yet attempted to worm their way into getting the map early, offering to test it and provide feedback. I had almost deleted each project multiple times before finally releasing it.
Life happened, and things with Half-Life slowed down. When the Orange Box came out in 2006, I attempted to get it at a five-finger discount at a local Target. I got caught. Indirectly thought it was, Half-Life taught me that idiocy often leads to consequences. Buying it legitimately later in the year and playing through Episode Two reminded me that some stories aren’t written to end neatly.
It was in 2007 that I bought a membership for the Something Awful forums, and discovered an avid and very exclusive community of Gmod players. Over the course of the following decade, most of these people remained in constant contact with me, and will probably remain so for the foreseeable future. I became an admin once we opened our serves to the public - moderating the newcomers and mentoring the unskilled. One of the people had a project in mind, and I began creating models again. Miraculously, Milkshape 3D remained compatible with the Source engine, so I worked with it until I learned Maya. This project would eventually become known as Armored Combat Framework, and be released to the Gmod community at large. I learned how to iterate designs based on feedback, and how it felt to work in a well organized team.
Frontier happened around 2010, and was another lesson in teamwork - specifically what happens when things break down without role redundancy. Ambitions ran high, and the hype mounted. The programmer eventually left, and all that remains of the project is the very videos and images that were used to hype it in the first place, and a folder full of now-useless models, maps and textures. That was probably what prompted me to start pulling away from Half-Life and Gmod in general.
Black Mesa came out in 2012 and breathed a new life into my old obsession. I played through the original Half-Life again, then through the remake, noting the differences and the tweaks to make the gameplay more palatable to modern-day players. It felt good, like putting on an old but comfortable jacket. I’d fire up the SDK now and then, mostly to help newer, more driven designers. Two of the guys from Team Frontier went on to work in the industry full-time. There were whispers of a new game in the works, minor leaks of file and folder names hidden away in Valve projects. Episode 3 turned into Half-Life 3. A full sequel, rather than another short episode, as originally planned. “HL3 Confirmed” became a meme, but the people at the top remained silent.
Life kept happening, as it does. I lost people, I found people. I left home.
Every now and then I’d fire up HL or BM again, or drop by the old Gmod server. I’d build things and model things, and release none of it to the public. I watched as the Dota International became the most widely spectated event in gaming, making players, sponsors, and Valve millions. The realization slowly started settling in. Then Marc Laidlaw retired, and later posted the Epistle. The workers at Valve spoke of a lack of direction and stagnation that comes with a cornered market. Modding for an engine over a decade old, no matter how advanced, slowed down.
It’s a different world now. Unity and Unreal engines rule the scene. Survival and Battle Royale have become the new buzzwords. Microtransactions. Loot boxes. Streaming integration. Freemium. E-Sports. Mobile gaming. Virtual Reality. If a new Half-Life were to appear today, would it be changed by the zeitgeist, or would it stay the course set by its predecessors? I don’t know. But there’s one thing that the escapades of a mute, bespectacled research associate have taught me more than anything else: hope.
