Cole Luke - Blog
Half-Life gave me a full life: part one
Black Mesa Inbound
In 2003, I was being dragged around the charity shops by my mum, a lifelong ritual of a jewellery and antiques dealer. My only respite from the tedium; perusing the toys, the games and flicking through old video game mags to look at the pictures.
My gaming experience thus far had been on hand-me-down consoles; a much-revered Sega Saturn and Playstation One, which at that point were already the better part of a decade old. The shimmering, dithering polygons had sucked me into these simple, blocky worlds.
Watching my dad trundle down the nightmarish corridors of Alien: Trilogy, or obsessively finding every artifact in Tomb Raider. My big brother lamenting my manipulation of the controller as if it were a steering wheel in Sega Rally Championship. It was wholesome, cozy, fuzzy fun. I just knew there was more.
I had got tasters of the world beyond ‘the Sega room’ (as it is still called in my parent’s house today) – I vividly remember wistfully playing Turok: Evolution on an Original Xbox in a now extinct British electronics shop and playing against a random boy on Halo’s Blood Gulch. I yearned for these experiences at home. We did not have much but I was grateful and having fun.
Up to this point, PC Gaming for me had been a floppy disc release of 1995s Toy Story, 1999’s Stuart Little: Big City Adventure. The 2D nature of Age of Empires provided hours of fun, however I was desperate for the 3D experience.
I had heard whispers, seen grainy screenshots in old magazines. My brother spoke of it, of it’s reverence. On the back, PC GAMER, 96% proudly worn. I begged my mum to let me buy it for £3 on the condition that it was for my brother. It was, after all, a 15+!
I couldn’t wait to get home. I kept reading the back of the case and the manual:
“Monsters don’t walk blindly into your gunfire – they’re cunning as hell and they want to live as badly as you do.”
Gulp.
My brother was stoked, and touched, but mostly stoked. We couldn’t wait to install it. He mentioned we might have to register Half-Life with a new games service called, Steam, but it sounded like unnecessary fluff. Like that’ll ever catch on! I’ll stick with Xfire and Gamespy, thank you very much.
It was done, the game actually existed on our hard drive and we booted up Half-Life for the first time. I will never forget it.
Peering over my brother's shoulder, we began to make our way on the Black Mesa Transit System. What was this place? This labyrinthian complex with all those scientists struck awe and fear into me. Everything felt so vast. I was left asking “Why are we here?”.
“Mornin’ Mr. Freeman. Looks like you’re runnin’ late.”
It had never occurred to me that you could play as someone. Prior, I had played games rather unconsciously (and badly), not really aware of the setting. Lara Croft had been the most realised character for me thus far, but really she was just an avatar for my dad’s forays into killing exotic animals and stealing ancient artefacts in true colonial fashion.
But here we were, in the first-person being addressed by colleagues and friends. Even though it wasn’t me playing, it really felt like I was in this world and wow, it was scary.
Despite reading the game cover, I had no idea what to expect. To this day, the sound of the anti-mass spectrometer fills me with a sense of dread. The ominous hum slowly building up to the reality-ripping crescendo of the resonance cascade. It left its mark on my soul – this sounds ridiculous but I’m really not embellishing the truth here!.
Green flashes, explosions punctuated by the last panicked words of the scientist who a short while ago sounded so sure. Strange creatures dropped and fell out of being around me. It was getting too much for my wee heart. Then suddenly everything went black. I think my brother and I were breathing as heavily as Gordon does as he exists momentarily between worlds.
As quickly as we were gone, we were back, welcomed by the thunderous breakdown of what felt like the whole world and then, again, we were off.
Nothing prepared me for being plonked down in Xen with two buillsquids eyeing me up for lunch. The suckerpunch was being surrounded by the vortigaunt council. Unease oozed from me. I was so grateful it wasn’t me in control, how my brother could go on I will never know.
A detail I have omitted is that as a young child, I was extremely scared of aliens. I don’t remember why or where this fear stemmed from but it was quite literally crippling. I grew up in the middle-of-nowhere in the Scottish countryside and that age-old motif of aliens abducting and probing farmsteaders had somewhat traumatised me. For years, I was too scared to sleep on my left side as I wouldn't be able to see out of the window, allowing aliens to sneak up on me and eat me. And so, I slept exclusively on my right side. It got to a point where I was in extreme discomfort as I felt my organs slipping gradually to one side.
So to say the least, Half-Life was quite the ordeal for me. I could go on and on, reliving every beat of the game but that is beyond the scope of what I am trying to encapsulate here. I will however share the absolute triumph that was tacking the tentacle boss. My brother and I figured it out together, all the while I was so scared stiff that I daren’t make a noise myself, lest the beast locate me and smite me through the fuzz of our poorly-aligned CRT.
When we finally watched the wretched monster cower under the unrelenting force of the rocket booster, we felt we had truly accomplished the impossible. If I recall correctly, we were stuck for days. The sense of pride and relief was palpable.
Playing through Half-Life put us in many such predicaments, but, despite the imminent danger and the fear I felt in my bones, I wanted to see what was round the next corner. Half-Life was so intriguing and captivating to me that it eclipsed my desire to turn away from the screen when the going got rough. I was hooked.
When we finally completed the game, I was so overwhelmed by the journey my brother and I had been on. It felt like a multi-generational leap forward into the future despite it already being five years old. Games would simply never be the same again.
Perhaps foolishly, watching my brother fight his way through the trials and tribulations of Black Mesa and Xen had instilled in me a confidence that I could do it too. There was just one slight problem however.
I was too scared to play Half-Life myself. Every time I would boot it up, I would walk around Black Mesa just wishing nothing would go wrong. That the test would be a success and I could come back to work the next day. Just me and my fellow science buddies hanging out doing science.
Despite my prayers, every time I pushed the anomalous material into the anti-mass spectrometer, all hell let loose. That first headcrab would leap out at me screaming, and time after time I shut down the game, too petrified to continue.
This continued for… a long time. Eventually I started to get past the first headcrab and to the second, then the third and then OH SHIT A HEADCRAB ZOMBIE. Perhaps it was a little too much for me at the time.
I never did quite complete it until years later but none of that mattered. From my scavenged and thrifted PC Gamer’s, I knew something big was on the horizon.
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