1998 video game

Half-Life is a 1998 first-person shooter (FPS) 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 theoretical physicist who must escape from the Black Mesa Research Facility after it is overrun by aliens following a disastrous scientific experiment. Its gameplay consists of diverse combat, exploration and puzzles.

Valve was disappointed with the lack of innovation in the FPS genre and aimed to create an immersive world rather than a "shooting gallery." The game runs on the engine GoldSrc, a heavily modified version of the Quake engine, licensed from id Software. The science fiction novelist Marc Laidlaw was hired to craft the plot and assist with design. Unlike other games at the time, the player has almost uninterrupted control of the player character; the story is mostly conveyed through scripted sequences rather than cutscenes.

Half-Life received acclaim for its graphics, gameplay and narrative and won more than 50 PC "Game of the Year" awards. It is considered one of the most influential FPS games and one of the greatest video games. By 2008, it had sold more than nine million copies. It was ported to the PlayStation 2 in 2001, along with the multiplayer expansion Decay, and to OS X and Linux in 2013. Valve ported Half-Life to its game engine, Source, as Half-Life: Source in 2004. In 2020, Black Mesa was released, an unofficial fan-made remake of Half-Life developed by Crowbar Collective using the Source engine.

Half-Life inspired numerous fan-made mods, some of which became standalone games, such as Counter-Strike (2000), Day of Defeat (2003), and Sven Co-op (1999). It was followed by the expansion packs Opposing Force (1999) and Blue Shift (2001), developed by Gearbox Software, and the sequels Half-Life 2 (2004), Episode One (2006), Episode Two (2007) and Half-Life: Alyx (2020).

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