Half-life games are made to shake up gaming, but outside VR there’s little room for them to do that.
There’s no studio quite like Valve. As the owner of Steam, the de facto gaming platform on PC, the company has the resources to approach game development like a state-funded laboratory rather than a studio having to worry about monthly payrolls or quarterly earnings reports. On the one hand, this encourages unfettered freedom. On the other, it means that there’s an expectation for Valve games to be not just games, but watershed moments in the history of the medium. No series represents this philosophy quite like Half-life – a series that we recently learned has had more games canceled than released. Half-life is Valve’s champion, its Ivan Drago representing the very apex of the smarts and technologies available to the studio – and gaming as a whole. First there was the original Half-life, with its opening tram ride into the bowels of Black Mesa giving us an elegantly minimal yet cinematic experience like no game had given us before. This moment alone pulled first-person shooters out of the ultraviolent grime and rugged polygons of the Quakes and Unreals into a clean new era of smart narrative and crispy graphics. Seven years later, Half-life 2 set gaming on a path that can be charted up to this very day. It’s the point at which those little details – frosted glass in an apartment complex, reflective water sloshing around the waterways surrounding City 17, weighty, believable physics – took one of the biggest leaps of all time towards videogame verisimilitude. The Half-life series exists to disrupt the industry and propel games towards a future we could never envision until Half-life shows us. This lofty standard is why in 2020, after years of silence, Valve created a seminal VR game no one was expecting in Half-life: Alyx. It’s also why Half-life 3 – as we imagine it, anyway – might still be a long way away. The idea of Half-life games as ‘disruptive by design’ was echoed by Valve CEO and founder Gabe Newell in an interview with IGN. Talking about why it took so long to make another Half-life game until Alyx, his stop-start response got straight to the heart of Half-life’s meaning to Valve. Newell said: “The big gap really is– maybe we’re stupid– but it didn’t seem like there really was an obvious– we don’t just crank Half-life titles out because it helps us make quarterly numbers”.
