Half-Life is a series I hold closely to my heart. Part of this has to do with my brother showing me Half-Life 2 shortly after I completed the first Portal game, though before Portal 2 was even released. I remember not wanting to play it, despite how cool it looked, because I wanted to play the first game before the second. My brother said I shouldn't because of how bad the graphics were, but we got the game anyways on this new program we called "Steam." I instantly fell in love with Half-Life.

Half-Life is a historic game for many reasons. Around its release in 1998, the typical first person shooter was already a common occurence, with games like Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake. In these games, you would spawn into a level, shoot the enemies, find keys to doors, and escape the level. Half-Life was different in that the entire first few minutes of the game situates you in the center of a story, and establishes the setting of where you will be for the rest of the game. When you get the chance to walk around on your own, you can find friendly NPC's, which were not normal at the time. At this point in the game, you don't have any weapons, so you don't instinctually kill anyone, but you are encouraged to interact with them and can even hear realistic dialogue from them. More than that, you can interact with your environment, typing on coworkers computers, tripping alarms, blowing up microwave casseroles, and getting soda from vending machines. These are elements that Valve pioneered, as they did not exist in FPS games before Half-Life.

Additionally, the level structure for the game was much more than just "shoot the enemies and escape the level." Often escaping the level was presented more in narrative terms, such as when you are told to launch a rocket that will help the scientists clean up this mess, or when you are told that in order to progress, you must activate generators and fuel receptors to defeat certain aliens. This gave progression through the levels a sense of narrative weight and progression.

Gordon Freeman is a 27 year old physicist that you play as in the Half-Life games. You are told a few minor things about him in the opening of the game, like your clearance access, that you have a PhD from MIT, and your age and name. Later games flesh out your character more, like your penchant to climb in vents beginning long before the events of the first game. Other than that, Gordon Freeman is a mystery that we know very little about.

Gordon is what many refer to as a silent protagonist. While that was normal at the time of the game's release, with Doom guy only uttering sounds when he got hurt, the Half-Life IP has stuck with keeping him silent, as you never hear him speak, even in modern games. Many question if Gordon must be mute or otherwise nonverbal. The answer I like to stick with is that Gordon can speak, but only if you speak for him. When you have a silent protagonist, you can infuse the character with your thoughts and your personality. Whenever I play Portal, another franchise with a silent protagonist (named Chell), I also infuse her with my personality.

I view Chell as someone angered by the injustice of being locked in the facility, and she won't have it. Gordon Freeman however, I view as just a guy who wanted to come into work and study particle interactions with anomalous materials. Him getting caught in the crossfire, in my eyes, makes him a protagonist that doesn't want to be the center of the show. He just wants to do science and fire some lasers. I view Gordon as a much more anxious guy, but one who is clearly capable of handling the anxiety, as well as the stress of being shot at. What's great about all of this is that this is my head canon, and when you play the games, you can have a different view sincce the games give you so much to work with. We are Gordon Freeman.

Half-Life is host to many iconic weapons. Its bastardization of the photon pack shows up in a form called "The Gluon Gun." How cool is that?! The submachine gun and the shotgun are among my personal favorits, good for killing just about anything you encounter in the games. And while the Tau canon is also iconic, one weapon stands above them all: the crowbar.

I believe that the crowbar is emblematic of Gordon in that both are tools of physics turned into weapons of survival. I mean, there's a lot of physics behind crowbars, with them being levers that reduce the amount of newtons needed to pry open a surface via mechanical advantage. Gordon being a physicist would know this, but both are turned towards using their advantages in order to survive and help others along the way. To the average gamer, the crowbar seems a strange and unlikely weapon, but has become infamous in its status, almost synonymous with the IP itself.

Growing up, I remember shortly after buying Half-Life, I was forced to go to sabbath school, which asked us to make with playdough something that we look forward to in our future. I remember I made a crowbar out of the playdough because I was so excited to get back home and play my new game. My dad was not amused that I brought secular ideas into church, but I digress.

I remember on one occassion when my family was installing a fan in our house and needed to use a few tools, including a crowbar. Our crowbar was all black, and when I discovered we had one, I remember wanting to hold it for the longest time because it made me feel powerful, like I was Gordon himself. While this may worry many that a child was running around with a crowbar, I wasn't. I was just playing with it on the ground as a kid may play with a hammer, only this time I felt like I just entered the game, and became the main character myself.

I'll write more here soon ~signed by me on 1/17/26

I'll write more here soon ~signed by me on 1/17/26

I'll write more here soon ~signed by me on 1/17/26