Our Valve contact has reminded us that today sparks the 10th birthday of everyone's favourite sci-fi first-person shooter series, Half-Life. The mute every-day-man, Gordon Freeman, first dealt with the Black Mesa Incident back in 1998 as the protagonist in Valve's debut product as a development studio.

Launched 10 years ago today, Half-Life was greeted with overwhelming review scores (Metacritic of 96%), earned over 50 Game of the Year Awards, and birthed a franchise with over 20 million units sold to date.

Clearly Freeman's success throughout the last 10 years resonates now as Valve is one of the most respected games developers/publishers/distributors in the industry.

Can you remember when you first played Half-Life?

Summary:

^^that was awesome

Half-Life 1 is available on steam for 98c today only too.

hahaha

"Blah blah blah Mr Freeman"

wow, cant believe its been 10 years:

still remember the joy of playing through this on my amdk6-2 300 with voodoo2 (struggled, had to upgrade to a tnt2 for moar frames)

First played this in 2000 on a celeron 566, onboard video into a Voodoo2.

HL always crashed for me when I got up the bit with the ninja bitch in black vinyl. Shame I was getting into the plot too.

Can you remember when you first played Half-Life?

I sure can! I remember walking around a corner then waiting 5 minutes for it to load, then walking around another corner and waiting again. Also sometimes, you'd walk around another corner and it would load some more.

Ha, nicely done.

Remember that this game basically invented the story-based FPS. I remember watching the intro movie and thinking that this was going to be the best game ever.

(it was pretty close).

this game scared the s*** out of me back in the day...

I played it because I was told the enemy were smarter. After 5 minutes I turned it off, never to play it again. Smarter must have translated to "Smarter than the last shooter and only if you had ever played shooters and not multiplayer".

Yeh but the AI was pretty good for its time, even though it was scripted. Apart from Quake 2 this is one of the first games to use online keys thus forcing me to go out and buy it. Money well spent IMO

haha that vid is tops parabol :D

yeh i remember buying halflife thinking this'll changeup the deathmatch a bit... then dethon got the gluon gun, spawn rape, spawn rape, spawn rape, this game sux, the end. :D

yeh i remember buying halflife thinking this'll changeup the deathmatch a bit...

Or HL2 deathmatch?

toilet-death, toilet-death, toilet-death.

if it wernt for half life every fps would still be like quake

ie s***

HLDM rocked if you could use that gauss cannon+jump pack properly. Otherwise you were noobd all day.

Ha I remember lanning back in the day to HL, one of the guys was super leet. Would always pwn everyone, then I spammed that charge up lightning bolt gun and fluke killed him, gawd he was pissed, then he came back a 2nd time and I killed him again! MWHAHA....then he pwned my ass the rest of the game :(

if it wernt for half life every fps would still be like quake

nah. halflife brought nothing new to the game. it was made from the quake/q2 source so that's not surprising. everything in multiplayer hl was already done in quake with mods.

so hl1 is about $1.50au on steam today? id buy it again because.. well just to throw money away

Still the best game ever made IMO.

First played it in 2002 on Celeron with onbaord video.. i used cheats to finish it -.-

Half-Life 1 is available on steam for 98c today only too.

Until someone points out the conversion rate and we end up paying AU$89.95

$1.50 or so for a game...why not.
Thought i might as well buy it when it's cheap, otherwise i probably won't ever bother playing it

Who could forget the most awesome game ever created that is spawned!!?!

HLDM was mad cainer.

Can you remember when you first played Half-Life?

yeah I can.. I packed the bear neccesities into my backpack (mobo/K62 300 chip/512mb ram, tnt vid card and Quantum 6gig hdd) and went to Launceston, Tassie to hook up with the old Vision locals (little bro and his mates) for a lan or two :)

playing the CS betas meant far more to me though.

fun game, great to play on dialup, and best of all free of hackers.


my, how things change :/

repect koopz, k6-2 brothers

hl1 was awesome right up until you got to zen.

then it sucked balls.

hldm, cs v1.. aww those were the days.. where u had to lead with your sniper cause of flag, head shotting SAS nubs (the clan)

I agree with nF. I was so confused for a few years about what purpose Zen had and that guy with the fat head. Even today, I am not sure where in the game it's explained.

I wonder if there's a new vid that covers episode 1 and 2...

why do they always have to put aliens in games to f*** them up?

- duke 3d
- hl1
- far cry

thats all i can remmeber now

How did aliens f*** up duke3d???

they busted up his ride

if anyone is interested, the mod team that is remaking half life using the orange box source engine have just updated their site with new images etc. its looking bloody sexeh.

^^ they should use the crytek engine

Far Cry wasn't aliens it was genetic technology.