Half-Life is a 1998 first-person shooter game developed by Valve Corporation and published by Sierra Studios for Windows. It was Valve's debut product and the first game in the Half-Life series. The player assumes the role of Gordon Freeman, a scientist who must escape from the Black Mesa Research Facility after it is overrun by alien creatures following a disastrous scientific experiment. The gameplay consists of combat, exploration and puzzles.
Video game modding is the process of alteration by players or fans of one or more aspects of a video game, such as how it looks or behaves, and is a sub-discipline of general modding. A set of modifications, commonly called a mod, may range from small changes and tweaks to complete overhauls, and can extend the replay value and interest of the game.
Half-Life: Opposing Force is an expansion pack for the first-person shooter game Half-Life. It was developed by Gearbox Software and published by Sierra On-Line for Windows on November 19, 1999. Opposing Force was the first expansion for Half-Life and was announced in April 1999. Lead designer Randy Pitchford noted that he believed Gearbox was selected to develop Opposing Force because Valve, the creators of Half-Life, wanted to concentrate on their future projects. Over the course of development, Gearbox brought in a variety of talent from other areas of the video games industry to help bolster various aspects of design.
Half-Life 2 is a 2004 first-person shooter (FPS) game developed and published by Valve Corporation. It was published for Windows on Valve's digital distribution service, Steam. Like the original Half-Life (1998), Half-Life 2 is played entirely from a first-person perspective, combining combat, puzzles, and storytelling. It adds features such as vehicles and physics-based gameplay. The player controls Gordon Freeman, who joins a resistance to liberate Earth from the Combine, a multidimensional alien empire.
The Black Mesa Research Facility is a fictional underground laboratory complex that serves as the primary setting for the video game Half-Life and its expansions, as well as its unofficial remake, Black Mesa. It also features in the wider Half-Life universe, including the Portal series. Located in the New Mexico desert in a decommissioned Cold War missile site, it is the former employer of Half-Life's theoretical physicist protagonist, Gordon Freeman, and a competitor of Aperture Science. While the facility ostensibly conducts military-industrial research, its secret experiments into teleportation have caused it to make contact with the alien world of Xen, and its scientists covertly study its life-forms and materials. In a catastrophic event known as the "Black Mesa Incident", an "anti-mass spectrometer" experiment conducted on Xen matter causes a Resonance Cascade disaster that allows aliens to invade Earth, and is the catalyst for the events of the series.
Half-Life: Blue Shift is an expansion pack for the first-person shooter video game Half-Life (1998). It was developed by Gearbox Software and published by Sierra On-Line. Blue Shift was the second expansion for Half-Life, originally intended as part of a Dreamcast port of Half-Life. Although the Dreamcast port was cancelled, the Windows version was released as a standalone product on June 12, 2001, for Windows. It was released on Steam on August 24, 2005.
Doom WAD is the default format of package files for the video game Doom and its sequel Doom II: Hell on Earth, that contain sprites, levels, and game data. WAD stands for Where's All the Data?. Immediately after its release in 1993, Doom attracted a sizeable following of players who created their own mods for WAD files—packages containing new levels or graphics—and played a vital part in spawning the mod-making culture which is now commonplace for first-person shooter games. Thousands of WADs have been created for Doom, ranging from single custom levels to full original games; most of these can be freely downloaded over the Internet. Several WADs have also been released commercially, and for some people the WAD-making hobby became a gateway to a professional career as a level designer.
Half-Life: Decay is a multiplayer-only expansion pack for Valve's first-person shooter Half-Life. Developed by Gearbox Software and published by Sierra On-Line, Decay was released as part of the PlayStation 2 version of Half-Life in 2001. It is the third expansion pack for Half-Life, and like its predecessors, Decay returns to the setting and timeline of the original story, albeit portraying the story from the viewpoint of a different set of protagonists: two scientists working in the Black Mesa Research Facility. Decay is a cooperative multiplayer game, designed to be played by two people working together to pass through the game's levels.
Mod DB is a website that focuses on general video game modding. It was founded in 2002 by Scott "INtense!" Reismanis. As of September 2015, the Mod DB site has received over 604 million views, has more than 12,500 modifications registered, and has hosted more than 108 million downloads. A spin-off website, Indie DB, was launched in 2010 and focuses on indie games and news.
Concerned: The Half-Life and Death of Gordon Frohman is a webcomic by Christopher C. Livingston that parodies the first-person shooter video game Half-Life 2. The comic is illustrated with screenshots of characters posed using Garry's Mod, a tool which allows manipulation of the Source engine used by Half-Life 2. The comic ran from May 2005 to November 2006 and had 205 issues.
Half-Life is a series of first-person shooter games created by Valve. The games combine shooting combat, puzzles and storytelling, and are played entirely from the first-person perspective.
This is a list of characters in the Half-Life video game series, which comprises Half-Life, Half-Life 2, Half-Life: Alyx, and their respective expansion packs and episodes.
Black Mesa is a 2020 first-person shooter video game developed and published by Crowbar Collective. It is a fan-made remake of Half-Life (1998) made in the Source game engine. Originally published as a free mod in September 2012, Black Mesa was approved for commercial release by Valve, the developers of Half-Life. The first commercial version was published as an early-access release in May 2015, followed by a full release in March 2020, for Windows and Linux.
Half-Life VR but the AI Is Self-Aware is a role-playing themed livestream and machinima series staged within a recreation of the video game Half-Life using a virtual reality version of Garry's Mod. The series, live streamed to Twitch with highlights later uploaded to YouTube, follows Gordon Freeman accompanied by the Science Team as they loosely follow the events of the original Half-Life game.
Research and Development is a free mod for the first-person shooter video game Half-Life 2: Episode Two. Developed by Matt Bortolino and released on July 17, 2009, it is a non-violent first-person puzzle video game, and has been compared to Portal. It received critical praise for its unique gameplay and high development quality.
Half-Life: Echoes is a modification of the first-person shooter video game Half-Life created by British developer James "MrGnang" Coburn and released on August 10, 2018. The mod was under development for four years and uses the GoldSrc engine.
Entropy: Zero 2 is a 2022 first-person shooter video game developed and published by Breadmen. It is a single-player modification for Half-Life 2 (2004) and is a sequel to Johnny "Breadman" Richardson's previous project, Entropy: Zero (2017). The game was released on Steam on August 20, 2022, as a free download for owners of Half-Life 2. A Linux version was also released on May 27, 2023.
