No one who had witnessed what had happened was allowed to survive it. Of course, that wasn’t the case: the scientists, who had been hiding from the hideous aliens in their offices, ran in relief in the direction of the soldiers, who put an abrupt end to the joy with some well-aimed salves from their machine guns. And so the game managed to mislead me: I thought it was good news when other survivors told me that the military had been sent to rescue me and everyone else. I was Gordon Freeman and I just wanted to escape from Black Mesa. I was young and had little experience with games of this kind and therefore no distance whatsoever to what was happening. The outstanding sound design and the scripted sequences offered a glimpse of what awaited me and embedded the experience into a larger narrative context. And while I was trying to survive in this horrific environment, I was picking up bits and pieces about what had actually happened. I was right in the middle of the events from the very beginning, when a rift between dimensions was opened and gruesome aliens carved a trail of blood and debris through the facility. Only the eyes and ears of Gordon Freeman provided the player with information about a catastrophe of gigantic proportions that took place in the research complex “Black Mesa”. Half-Life rid itself of all the fancy glitter. In the great console war between Sony and Nintendo, the (too) many minutes of movie like sequences in Final Fantasy VII were often used to prove the supremacy of the PlayStation. Rendered sequences also added value to games. Real actors provided a story for Jedi Knight and Wing Commander, that the game engine supposedly could not. When it was released in 1998, cutscenes were highly fashionable. Half-Life was the first game that told me its story in real time and through the environment. To understand this, you have to consider the time in which Half-Life was released and my age at that time. When I looked up the video for this text, it was exactly as I remembered from playing Half-Life 20 years ago. I can not recall any other line of text in a video game that gave me chills like this one. The radio message was interrupted and never finished.
“Forget about Freeman! We are cutting our losses and pulling out! Anyone left down there now is on his own! Repeat: if you are not already, you are–“
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