Its multiplayer mod scene was as big as Doom’s, and gave us Natural Selection, Cry of Fear, and Sven Co-Op, all of which went on to become standalone games. That’s all on the single-player side, but Half-Life’s influence goes beyond that. From there they propagated, and everything from Call of Duty to Mirror’s Edge signposts paths with Half-Life’s tricks. These techniques for pulling your eyes would be further refined in Half-Life 2, where a flying ship might draw your attention up to note a climbable spot, or a green light shine on an exit. A vent will have a convenient light shining out of it so you know where to go, a switch gives off sparks to suggest it’s connected to the sparking wire hanging in the water, a jumping sea-monster makes you look up at a shark cage, bubbles suggest life-saving breathing spots. It hints at puzzle solutions the same way. To ensure you catch these moments, Half-Life guides you with trails of blood, screams and lights. Every game that uses deaths on the other side of doors, or bodies carefully arranged on toilets or in beds to tell a little story that you arrived too late to see, owes a significant debt to Half-Life. This formula-environmental storytelling spread across an impressive but collapsing testament to man’s hubris-would see its ultimate manifestation in BioShock. Every game that gives you light as a limited resource, from Amnesia to Outlast, has that tiny bit of Half-Life in its DNA. While several shooters after Half-Life copied its blend of horror and action, like the FEAR series (which also successfully imitated Half-Life’s squad AI), its influence was most felt in the first-person horror genre. You turn it off to recharge for a moment, flick it back on, and light up a rearing headcrab’s underside. You crawl through a vent, throwing that pool of light ahead of you, knowing it could run out before you reach the nearest exit. Half-Life’s flashlight and its recharging battery are essential to its scares. Just like Alien, or Night of the Living Dead, or It. Then we see their ordinary world turned upside down, made dark and broken. There’s the slow burn, where we’re introduced to the characters at their most mundane, though with teasing hints of what may be about to go wrong. The first third of Half-Life is, as Laidlaw says, explicitly horror.
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