2004 was as pivotal a year for the video game industry as 1999 was for film, and two of the titles that had the biggest impact have been getting an extended retrospective. While World of Warcraft wasn’t necessarily my favourite MMO, I can’t deny the larger impact it had on the MMO market as a whole. (I wrote at length about this impact in my first peer-reviewed academic article back in 2009 too. Hopefully one day I can share that with you).
The other game with a massive impact was Half-Life 2, and there’s an extended documentary about it up on Youtube to look back at how it changed video games:
Like many gamers of the early 21st century, I played Half-Life 2 on release, playing through the full campaign, stealthily and working through every nook and cranny
Watching the clips hit me right in the feels with Nostalgia, so I fired up the install and started another playthrough. The game came back to me fast, the keys are instinctive, and the maps well worn in my memory. I moved through quickly too. The names of the various chapters of the game evoked memories: Water Hazard, Ravenholm, Nova Prospekt, each with their identifiable sections and set-pieces: the chopper fight, the flaming traps, deadly snipers along the rail line, swarming ant-lions and more.
The sections proceed naturally, a testament to the storytelling by the creators of the game. As I’m playing through, each part has me wanting to see what’s next, even though I’ve played this at least a dozen times. (Twenty years ago, I’d restart the game shortly after finishing it, as I wanted to replay some of the early chapters again. It speaks to how dynamic the gameplay is, with very different feels between the foot, jetboat, and buggy sections).
It’s not a perfect game, but it’s close. There are occasional parts where you can see some of the rough seams, and not everything is interactive. It’s fairly linear, without the dynamic ways of working through situations that can be seen in some of its contemporaries (Deux Ex, Thief, and System Shock 2 come to mind, but again, those are exemplars of the genre, in the pantheon of all time greats).
And while the graphics looks a bit dated compared to more modern games, they’re still fine: with a great view to the distance, and so fast on a modern machine that gameplay is smooth and seamless. But I don’t find the “date” on the visuals a negative either: it’s still clearly a game, and the low-fi version of it allows for a certain amount of projection to take place. It’s “cool” media, to borrow McLuhan’s parlance, or how Scott McCloud wrote in “Understanding Comics” (around the same time this game was released) of how the less visual information conveyed on the panel allowed the audience to map themselves on to the figure on the page.
Gordon Freeman becomes Everyman, in this lo-fi version.
The amount of influence this game has had is also evident in the playthrough. I’m not a video game historian (well, I haven’t been for a while), but the entire Call of Duty / Modern Warfare section of the games industry draws a line through Half-Life 1 and 2 (and Counter Strike and Team Fortress more specifically). The design language of modern gaming can be seen here in the simple and direct playthrough, the embedded tutorials and tooltips throughout, the smooth ease of use of the various elements of the game.
For anyone who reads this who has never played Half-Life 2, you owe it to yourself to give it a shot. Its iconic for a reason, and any history of the video game industry needs to spend a few hours racing along the canals or walking through Ravenholm. It holds up remarkably well.
