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    The Final Hours of Half-Life

 
Part 1 - Introduction
Part 2 - The Microsoft
            Millionaires
Part 3 - The Valve
            Difference
Part 4 - Reassembling
            the Pieces
Part 5 - Squashing the
            Final Bug
Part 3 - The Valve Difference
When Valve started brainstorming about concepts for the game, one of the first ones brought up was a book Newell had read by Steven King called The Mist. "[The book] talks about this 'thing' that happens at the Arrowhead secret military base," recalls Harrington, "and this mist comes out like a big fog bank." Behind the bank is a slew of monsters who ravage a city and trap all these people in a grocery store.

Thankfully, the grocery store idea was dropped, but the parameters of King's story intrigued the team. "We thought it would be fun to do a scary action game," explains Harrington.

"Valve set out to do a class B game and not a class A game."
- Michael Abrash
What was then called Quiver would go through much development before the team would be satisfied with the story, much less the game. Yet the team didn't want to be too picky - Harrington wanted to ship a product as soon as possible. It was a wise move. For a new company, trying to create a blockbuster game often results in bankruptcy.

"Valve set out to do a class B game and not a class A game," says Abrash. "The model for starting a company, and the one I think Gabe and Mike followed - Carmack would tell you this in a second - is to just ship something." As Abrash explains, if a company sets out to do a killer game, it gets stuck "behind the curve" and ends up being too late with the product, which generally turns out to be a B game (or worse) anyway.


In his HEV suit, meet Gordon Freeman, the character you play in Half-Life.
Eventually, the story for Quiver morphed into what we now know as Half-Life: The tale of an MIT-grad called Gordon Freeman who works at the Black Mesa Research Facility in Arizona. You're Freeman, an average Joe who has never carried a weapon, let alone killed anyone. However, inside the research facility, things are not as they seem - shady characters and secret experiments abound. On the fateful day when the game begins, a disaster strikes the facility, and things take off from there.


The military plays a role in the game’s story too.
From the outset, Valve was intent on building a game around a story and not vice-versa. It wanted to make a dense environment that provided for something new around every corner. Valve wanted living and breathing characters. A plot. Puzzles. And a lot of action.

"For a long time," explains Newell, "3D action games seemed to keep treading down the same path - an increasing focus on a narrow definition of gameplay and a focus on the rendering [graphics] instead of the gameplay." Valve was intent on bringing something new to the game environment apart from snappy graphics. Not everyone thought it was a good idea.

"We'd occasionally get people who would say things like: 'Stories? Who needs them? I just want a rocket launcher that fires faster,'" says Newell. "It's pretty scary to be spending a big chunk of your own money and be going in a direction that's different than the norm." It's a sad commentary on the game industry that Valve was "different than the norm" just because it wanted to develop a cohesive story to accompany the game's action elements.


Mapping out level design for Half-Life on a white board.
Michael Abrash says that Valve realized something early on that helped it craft a highly balanced game: "For the most part, level designers can't design games," he says. "What Valve figured out was that you needed a creative committee to design a game. A level designer worries about things such as how to lay down the bricks, but not necessarily the story and the scope of the game."

With that idea in mind, last summer, Valve commissioned novelist Marc Laidlaw, whose award-winning novels include Kalifornia and the 37th Mandala, to help flesh out the plot and characters. "We didn't want the story to rely on one character coming and telling you the whole tale at one point and that was it," explains Laidlaw. "We wanted to gradually ease the player into the story and provide little clues along the way."


Einstein-esque scientists populate the game’s Black Mesa Research Facility.
So, Valve created a cast of characters that would inhabit the game - Einstein-esque scientists who would talk to the player, security guards called Barneys (in homage to Don Knotts' role as the pretentious, lovable fool on the Andy Griffith show), and of course the player, Gordon Freeman. "In a lot of shooters," cautions Laidlaw, "for all you know, you could be a weapon walking around a level. It's pretty clear in Half-Life that's not the case."

Of course, all this was still on paper at this point. "We weren't even sure it was technically possible to make the characters talk," says Laidlaw. That's when Valve's software engineers came into play - the people who would lift the world of Half-Life from paper to digital reality.

Next: Improved Technology