Thinking back on it now, the first time I can ever recall having heard about Half-Life was, actually one of the dumbest possible gaming anecdotes one could have lodged into one’s long term memory. It’s so dumb it might actually be bullshit. A memory of a dumb lie made up by a kid retold so many times that the lie itself forgets it’s actually fiction. That kind of temporal confusion is fitting for a game like Half-Life, which deals at least in part with the motifs of timespace magic, interdimensional travel and mysteries of the cosmos. I’m not going to spend too much time discussing Half-Life as a game specifically - its status as a bona-fide classic is indisputable, especially in the FPS space. This piece is about the ways in which this game has been able to reach through time and space to hold me in thrall in multiple moments across multiple memories, all of which weirdly contribute to who I would eventually become as a person with a relationship to video games. The person writing these words here today. As I cast my memory backwards to some of my earliest impressions of games generally, I remember vague images and impressions first. A lot of these came from other people. One of the most potent and influential was my older brother.

I think we can all relate to the feeling of being influenced by someone who you thought was just inherently cool. At a certain age as a kid, older siblings and friends and friends of siblings were like barely but just accessible arbiters of what was dorky or not. For me, listening to my bro and his friend (in the case of this anecdote, this guy's name is Mat) talk about video games was the absolute SHIT. My brother would regale me with stories of this lady with two guns backflipping around shooting at a fucking TIGER and I would sit and listen in awe and disbelief until the day eventually when we would go to Mat’s house and I would sit behind the two of them while they played Tomb Raider 2 and I would be dumbstruck that what I was seeing onscreen was vaguely like my brother’s vivid depictions.

But this time my brother wasn’t talking about backflipping around the Great Wall and shooting a tiger. My brother was holding court to my dad and I with what I now recall as the dumbest possible gaming anecdote:

“Dad, today Mat and I were playing this game, Half-Life, and you have like a crowbar and Mat like, hit it, on like, a pipe in the game and it made a noise and it was so realistic that Mat’s mom was like 'what was that noise?' from the next room, isn’t that crazy?”

You see what I mean about why, as I think back, now this anecdote seems exactly like the kind of thing an older brother hyperbolizes just for the shits. Like no way did this lady actually get fooled that utterly by the sound effects in this game. How high did they have the volume? So much doesn't add up. What remains consistent, however, is how clearly I can recall that moment. The feelings of wonder and amazement at the shocking advances in realism we were enjoying from the video games of 1998. Just like how clearly I can recall the next time we eventually went back to Mat’s house to play Half-Life and to my shock would find that the game was as amazing as I had ascribed it in my imagination, perhaps moreso. At the time there was simply no other contemporary that I had been exposed to that I could equate what I was seeing to. I was too young at that point for Quake and Unreal Tournament (that would come later) so as far as I was concerned, Half-Life was my first love, and became the new high watermark for what I understood video games to be capable of.

I mentioned 1998, which y'all might remember was a particularly sick year for gaming. A cursory glance at the year’s Wikipedia page shows a handful of some of the most critically acclaimed games ever made. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Metal Gear Solid, Banjo-Kazooie, Spyro the Dragon, and Starcraft are just a few. As I got older, because I came from a “Nintendo household”, my exposure to some of the more mature “cooler” content on Playstation or DreamCast was limited to what I would get at visits to friends. As a result, the PC became not just the platform on which I saw the most mind-blowing new games, but also a refuge for when I wanted to finally check out Doom after replaying Mischief Makers for the 10,000th time. As sick as Mischief Makers and Super Mario 64 were, it was becoming clear that the kinds of gaming experiences I was drawn to were taking place on the PC. So from a young age I was fascinated with the different, often esoteric ways in which it seemed like PCs delivered a gaming experience. They were often complex, hard to understand, again, usually more mature gaming experiences. They came in giant, keystone-shaped glossy boxes from the game store with thick tomes of manuals within. I remember not having any idea how to install anything, and getting games to run was a captivating challenge in itself.

I was obsessed.

It probably helped that at the time, a game like Half-Life in particular delivered to my young ten year old sensibilities exactly what I wanted from a piece of entertainment. It was at once, charming, suspenseful, terrifying, and action-packed. I was the kind of nerdy kid who already had an affinity for pulpy action stories featuring badass scientists pitting their wits against interdimensional alien invaders. The fact that this kind of story was packaged in the most technologically advanced video game I had ever played would make a powerful impression on my tastes as a young gamer. From that moment onward, first-person action games became the genre that I most associated with not just the fastest and most brutal action, but also the most immersive story and narrative experiences. The scripted set pieces of desperate scientists, ruthless commandos ambushing, aliens stalking, all were so engaging on a storytelling level that I began to judge all games with this same kind of cinematic quality. While I sometimes felt left out from the experiences my friends who were reading through the deep lore of the Final Fantasy games were having, I still developed a taste for narrative storytelling that took a less-is-more approach, put you right behind the eyeballs of the principal actor, and let the action speak for itself.

I basically spent the next three years playing and replaying Half-Life and its expansions. I had just moved to a new state and didn’t have anything else to do other than tweak the family computer and replay Command and Conquer (another early addiction...) over and over. It was during these years that even though I often couldn’t afford new games or consoles to play them on, I was constantly installing and experimenting with ROMs, vaporware, MAME CDs and all manner of old school emulation. I was economically- and replayability-minded, and all it took was the prospect of being able to play Golden Axe and Knights of the Round forever for free to make me even more obsessed with PC gaming. In 2001, it was through a PC gaming community that my relationship with Half-Life metastasized again.

As a lonely nerd in a new town, one day my dad took me to a local LAN cafe (I know) and it was there for the first time that I actually played Counter Strike 1.5. This was my first time meeting people who loved Half-Life as much as I did and I was in my element! I learned about Team Fortress and Battlefield and so many other games that would become staples for me, but it was a tip of another kind entirely that would bring me back to Half-Life. One day, hanging out at the LAN cafe as I was known to do, one of the regulars was holding court talking about how they were making Half-Life 2 and I was absolutely dumbstruck. Before this moment, I had had no concept of consuming video games media outside of G4TV and gaming magazines. The fact that this random guy at the LAN cafe would have the scoop on such an anticipated property absolutely blew my mind. Even crazier, the guy then pulled out his laptop and connected it to one of the big monitors (at the time used almost exclusively for Halo) and started showing extensive gameplay footage!? Not trailers either, just long stretches of uninterrupted gameplay and even concept art?? “Oh yeah, the game leaked already,” I remember the guy saying with almost shocking aloofness. This was almost too much to take in all at once. Finding out that A. the most anticipated game I could ever imagine anticipating was being made but B. it had already been hacked and leaked!? This moment would change the way I regarded games forever. This would be my first experience with hype. I still felt like I was still reeling when my dad came and picked me up later that afternoon. I made sure to ask the regular where he had procured such an extensive treasure trove of exclusive content. He pointed me to a now-defunct file storage, mods, and demo-hosting site that had an attached forum. This was my first time being exposed to a message board and I was once again struck with the feeling of being drawn ever deeper into a community because of such a powerful feeling of relation and belonging that I hadn’t had before. Those next few years of posting on that forum and anticipating the release of Half-Life 2 with all of those other freaks was some of the most fun I had on the internet up until that point, and it would be a community I would only engage in more as the already vast sea of mods grew even bigger once Half-Life 2 finally came out. It was through this community and this forum that I would discover what would become ANOTHER of my most anticipated games ever, but that’s a story for another day...

Half-Life casts a long shadow in the gaming world, so maybe it's all rather predictable that I would come to identify the franchise as so formative in my love of gaming. I used to play one of the Half-Life games about once a year. Sometimes more! The last time I sat down with one of them was Half-Life 2 Episode 1 this past year. I played the incredible, fan-made Black Mesa before that and look forward to returning to Half-Life 2 with Episode 2 later this year. Perhaps even more enduringly, I still fire up Steam every day as one of my go-to streaming and storage services for games. No matter how I look at it, my gaming life snakes its way back to Half-Life in so many ways. From how the game itself shaped my expectations and tastes, to the people and spaces I would come to frequent as someone who gamed not just as a hobby, but used games as a helpful prism through which the world could be viewed. Half-Life is a critical piece of the story about me and my relationship to gaming, and it would be incomplete if left out. It is for these reasons, that I believe it is an inarguable entrant on the list of

KEVIN AND MATTHEW'S LIST OF THE TOP TEN MOST VIDEO GAMES OF ALL TIME.