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Has any videogame story been told from more perspectives than Half-Life’s Black Mesa incident? 

Including expansions, the vanilla game offers three points of view alone, while countless mods have added to the Black Mesa lore, introducing new playable stories centring on lawyers, black ops assassins and even alien slaves. 

Half-Life: Echoes is the latest in this tradition of framing the Black Mesa disaster from a new angle, and it’s easily the best singleplayer mod for Half-Life in years, offering incredible level design, thrilling survival horror and blistering action. It also weaves itself into the broader Half-Life fiction in some clever ways. 

Created by first-time modder James Cockburn, Half-Life: Echoes puts players in the shoes of Candidate Twelve, another Black Mesa employee who arrives for a normal day at work when the resonance cascade transforms the facility into the world’s most technologically advanced abattoir. Like Freeman, Shepard and the rest, you must navigate and survive Black Mesa’s labyrinth, battering zombies and blasting marines while the G-Man observes it all. 

Familiar ground

What make Half-Life: Echoes stand out from other Black Mesa retellings is the sheer level of craft and ambition that has gone into it. To begin with, the mod’s 20-odd maps are enormous and stunningly detailed. Even the very first area you spawn in, an underground car park, impresses with its cavernous scale and moody lighting. 

As with the original Half-Life, Echoes commences with a peaceful tour of its own segment of the Black Mesa facility, though smartly it lets you explore on foot rather than confining you inside a train. When the cascade occurs, it does so at a distance, unfolding as a gradual infrastructural collapse rather than an instant demolition. Lights flicker and tremors shudder through the earth, while the scientists and security guards speculate on what’s going on. One of my favourite aspects of the mod is how smoothly it repurposes dialogue from the old games to assemble its own conversations and narratives. Even when the seams are visible, it’s beautifully done. 

Broadly, Echoes mimics the arc of Half-Life, but distils its key elements into more potent forms. The arrival of the marines, which in the original game is barely touched upon, is here given the kind of treatment you’d expect from a Call of Duty game, featuring a jet flyover and an almost parade-like column of solders, tanks, and twin-rotor helicopters. 

The first half of Echoes is almost pure survival horror, limiting your arsenal to just a few weapons and making clever use of scripted scenarios to surprise the player. In a splendid Alien-esque sequence, a strange sluglike monster hunts you through a tight cluster of corridors and vents as you desperately try to find a way out. Meanwhile, your personal resonance cascade comes in the form of a gargantuan monster, which traps you inside a train carriage alongside a bunch of other scientists before destroying everything in sight. That same monster hunts you throughout the mod’s running time, appearing at various points just to make your day that little bit more terrifying. 

Once Echoes starts doling out the heavier weapons, the mod ups the ante rapidly. Perhaps a little too rapidly, as the difficulty spikes with the intensity, resulting in several transitional combat encounters that are much tougher than anything either before or afterward. 

Fortunately, the last hour of Echoes moderates its tsunami of opponents with plentiful weapons and ammunition. The climactic battle happens on a scale that outclasses Half-Life’s infamous Surface Tension chapter, a fight that repeatedly escalates like a microcosm of the mod as a whole. Two decades on, Half-Life’s combat holds up, and Echoes makes fantastic use of its weapons and enemies. 

As the work of a single person, Echoes is a remarkable feat of design, while its detailed environment design and sharp pacing more than make up for the outdated visuals. That said, there are a few minor flaws. Although Echoes is vast in scope, in running time it is short, easily completable in a couple of hours. It also concludes in an abrupt sequence which, while an interesting addition to the overall Half-Life plot, feels artificially bolted onto the tail of the game.     

Lastly, and this isn’t really a flaw, but anyone coming to the mod hoping to see new features, such as weapons or enemies, will come away disappointed. Ultimately, these are tiny issues in what is essentially a fourth Half-Life expansion, playable for free. Echoes is that well made. 

While Crowbar Collective has been remastering Half-Life 1 with Black Mesa and even expanding it with Black Mesa: Xen, another team of modders have been diligently downgrading Valve’s sequel, remaking it with the original Half-Life’s engine. We reported on Half-Life 2 Classic last year, but since then there have been some big changes and, most recently, the release of a new demo. 

The goal for the Half-Life 2 Classic team was to recreate all of Half-Life 2 with the original Half-Life engine, GoldSrc, but last year they were still figuring some things out. For instance, did they want to try and match Half-Life 2’s style and fidelity, or did they want to downgrade everything, making the models look more like the first game’s? This year, they settled on the latter. 

In June, the team unveiled some of the new models. “The demo we released last year had models ported directly from Half-Life 2,” They wrote. “Since then, we’ve gotten a lot of feedback and decided to remake character models to fit with the style of Half-Life.”

Coast levels are also being made from scratch. The team discovered that they were simply too big for GoldSrc and, not having the engine code, they couldn’t increase the maximum limit. All the coast levels are being remade, with coast_05 being the first. 

Demakes like this aren’t just a way for people with ancient rigs to play newer games. Not many people, after all, are going to struggle to run Half-Life 2. In this case, it’s fascinating to see how the original engine can handle a much more ambitious game, and it’s an interesting ‘what if’, imagining a timeline where Valve didn’t make the Source Engine. 

The new demo appeared earlier this week and shows off Ravenholm, featuring new models, NPCs and the gravity gun. You can download it from ModDB.

While we’re reminiscing about Half-Life for its 20th anniversary, let’s take a moment to celebrate its iconic protagonist. You all know him, of course. His unkempt beard, those wild eyes, that flattop haircut that just screamed, “I was in the military but they kicked me out because I was too awesome”. Yes, Ivan the Space Biker had a timeless look that served him well for the five minutes he was Half-Life’s hero. Then wee Gordon Freeman nicked his job. 

The first time I saw Half-Life in 1998, Gordie had already made himself comfortable in the role, but only a year before, it was Ivan the Space Biker’s job to show off Valve’s fancy FPS (thanks for the reminder, Combine Overwiki). He sported a bulky space suit, some glorious facial topiary and generally looked like he had seen some shit. And then smoked it. 

Ivan was used in early tests and promotional material before Valve had really settled on a protagonist. The original concept for Ivan was a beardy computer programmer in a bulky environmental suit, but when it came to actually designing him, the concept was tossed aside and he became this burly lumberjack-looking dude. 

Big macho Ivan turned out to be a bit too conventional of a video game protagonist for Valve, which wanted a more cerebral hero. Sadly, after all the work he did promoting the game, Ivan was thrown in the bin and the gig was given to Gordo instead. He had glasses and a little beard, so you knew he was pretty smart.  

Bring Ivan back for Half-Life 3. 

This article was originally published in PC Gamer UK 262, back in January 2014. It's reproduced here, for Half-Life's 20th anniversary, with author Robert Yang's permission. 

20 years ago, Half-Life was released to a rapturous commercial and critical reception. It is a game about... well, it depends on who you ask. For some people it’s about Gordon Freeman, an everyman physicist who struggles to survive the inter-dimensional alien invasion of a secret government research facility. For others it’s about a mute sociopath who murders anything that moves, as he bunnyhops (always hopping) with bloodlust. More cynically, Half-Life is just another game about jumping on things and shooting things in the face to get to the next level.

But as a longtime Half-Life modder and game developer, I also know Half-Life in a very different way: in its map logic scripting, SDK source code, 3D models and animation events, 2D skins and texture flats—I’ve even studied the way Valve named the individual game files and folders. Game developers must make millions of small decisions all the time, and each decision is in conversation with a million other decisions. How big can a Half-Life level be, how many colours and shapes can it have, what can it look like? Well, it depends on how much texture memory and 3D map geometry memory you’re allocating in the engine. Half-Life’s guts influence what Half-Life can show you and what Half-Life can do.

And what Half-Life’s guts say is that everyone else is wrong. Half-Life is not a game about Black Mesa, Gordon Freeman, headshots or puzzles. Half-Life is fundamentally a game about... trains.

Black Mesa inbound

Half-Life begins with a seven-minute work commute. The Black Mesa facility swirls to life around your monorail: co-workers run late to work, forklifts rush through maintenance tunnels, an idling helicopter waits for passengers. It is an iconic and oft-imitated stretch of scene-setting.

The chapter was pitched initially as more of a tech demo than a bit of subtle atmosphere. According to former Valve writer Marc Laidlaw, it began when a programmer implemented a new type of game object called a ‘func_tracktrain’. Unlike its simpler ancestor func_train, inherited with the Quake-derived codebase, func_ tracktrain could run on a long stretch of path_track, branch onto different tracks, and bank and pivot into turns. To show off the new functionality, the programmer asked Laidlaw to write some use of func_tracktrain somewhere in the game. Laidlaw interpreted the request more literally and asked himself, what were the possibilities afforded by using a train?

1. Level crossingHalf-Life’s first chapter is made of six different map files that load as you cross certain thresholds along the track route. At the time, Half-Life pioneered an innovative ‘seamless’ loading technology between map files without separate loading screens. The player could backtrack between maps and NPCs could even follow the player across level transitions. Today, many games implement some form of ‘level streaming’ where the engine begins slowly preloading new map data in the background as soon as the player is close enough to a transition point, thus drastically shrinking level load times. Half-Life didn’t have that, but it still used the technique to its advantage.

2. Parenting issuesThe monorail tram ‘door’ is a fake door that is part of the tram wall and cannot open. The Half-Life engine did not support ‘entity parenting’, so designers could not glue or ‘parent’ a functioning door to the func_tracktrain of the tram. They couldn’t glue glass windows, other passengers, or even pieces of rubbish to it either. One workaround: start the player inside the tram already, so a functional door is not necessary.

3. TrackingTo tell the func_tracktrain where it can go, the level designers placed a series of ‘path_track’ points. Each point had a unique name and the name of the next path_track in the sequence. When the func_tracktrain runs, it travels along these points in order and connects all the dots. If the train suddenly flew off the track, that meant there was probably a typo in configuring one of a hundred path_track points. It was tedious work.

4. TwinsTo give the illusion of a ‘seamless’ level transition, two map files must share the same room. If a map ends with a dark section of concrete tunnel, then the next map must start with an identical copy of the concrete tunnel. However, it means that if the designers ever change that tunnel later, then they must also update the twin copy in the other map file, which can get messy and time consuming. Thus, transition areas in Half-Life are often featureless narrow hallways with few details.

5. MemoriesHow many megabytes of memory does your graphics card have? A few gigabytes? Back in 1998, game developers counted every megabyte: each map file in Half-Life was limited to two megabytes of texture memory. These days, a single shrubbery in the new Call of Duty probably uses two megabytes of texture memory, an entire Half-Life level’s worth by itself. Perhaps we’re too wasteful these days.

6. Vis-a-VisS-shaped bends and hallway-room-hallway structures were great line-of-sight blockers for ‘visibility culling’, where a game engine avoids wastefully drawing hidden scenery. Why spend precious cycles rendering something behind a wall? Valve designers had to pre-calculate a ‘potentially visible set’ (PVS) of which rooms can see into which rooms. If any walls got destroyed, it would become obsolete, which is one of the reasons few games have deformable worlds.

7. End of the LineSo the tram door was a fake door that couldn’t open, but at the end of the chapter, the security guard miraculously opens it. How? Valve’s hack was ingenious: when the train first arrives, the game seamlessly loads a new map file of the same exact room (see ‘Twins’) except it swaps out the old tram for a new func_tracktrain with a door-shaped hole in the side, and the moving door is actually another func_tracktrain. Who said trains always have to be train-shaped? This trick is legendary among Half-Life modders: how the Valve developers used one unrelated system to fix a different system.

The Shark Cage

In the summer of 1997, Half-Life was essentially just a pile of random moments and encounters. Marc Laidlaw was hired as writer to sort through that pile of game content and bring some semblance of coherence to it, but by then much of the action had already been prototyped. Half-Life’s development history suggests that Valve were concerned less with story as a goal in itself and more with ferrying the player linearly from setpiece to setpiece, to sustain the thrill of constant movement and progression. Half-Life, itself, is a train.

The chapter ‘Apprehension’ is halfway through the Half-Life rollercoaster. In the middle of this dimly-lit ‘water level’ is a shark cage sequence ripped out of a monster movie. When the player enters the cage to pick up the crossbow, it plunges into a pool with an ‘ichthyosaur’ creature that circles menacingly before biting its prey in the face. Trains are surprisingly relevant here because, remember, trains do not necessarily look like trains.

1. RunwayWhen the player first enters the room, they set off a trigger_once that makes the monster_ichthyosaur perform a scripted_sequence to jump out of the water and devour a screaming monster_scientist. The jumping movement of the animation draws the player’s eyes upward, toward the suspended shark cage and balcony. To continue, the player must walk along a platform all the way around the cage, thus viewing it from all sides and likely noticing the crossbow weapon inside.

2. Node graphNPCs in Half-Life are a lot like trains, they mostly go where the track leads them. But instead of a path_track, a designer must place info_node points that automatically link with nearby nodes into a web-like ‘node graph’. To pathfind somewhere, the AI will look at all the different links between nodes to assemble its route. Here, Valve put many of the ichy’s waypoints underneath the cover of the catwalk, to discourage the player from freely sniping at the monster from above water. Good node graphs are often the difference between AI looking dumb or clever in any game.

3. Pickup baitThe crossbow comes with only five bolts. Killing the ichthyosaur on easy or medium mode requires four, and on hard mode it is eight. That means the player can only miss one shot with a weapon they’ve never used, against a monster they’ve never fought. To make it easier, the player solves a slightly earlier simple puzzle for some valuable MP5 alt-fire grenades—which are useless against the ichy, but act as bait to trick the player into picking up 20 extra bolts for a weapon they don’t even possess yet.

4. The cageThe centrepiece of this room is a shark cage containing a crossbow, suspended from the balcony. When the player walks along the beam and drops down into the cage, it breaks and falls into the water. The cage is actually a func_tracktrain, running on a series of path_track points that guide the ‘cage train’ downward at roughly 6.5 metres a second.

5. The GateOnce in the water, the player’s ultimate goal is to open this rusty gate to get to the next room. However, the rusty wheel turns very slowly and the player must hold down the ‘use’ key the entire time or else the gate will close by itself. It takes 12 seconds to completely open the gate—the exact same length of time that Gordon Freeman can hold his breath. All this is probably too difficult to do while fending off the ichthyosaur; thus, indirectly, the game forces you to kill it first.

...or at least that was the intent. Playtesters probably managed to open the door for only 6-8 seconds and then quickly slip through the gap, despite the roving shark monsters trying to kill them. To prevent that from happening, Valve added an invisible trigger in front of the gate wheel, which instantly alerts the ichthyosaur to the player’s presence and slams it into combat mode. This is technically cheating on the developers’ part, but it’s only cheating if you get caught.

6. Flying sharkThe code for the monster_ichthyosaur is actually based on the same code used for flying monsters. After all, what is swimming but flying underwater? So if NPCs are actually trains (see ‘Node Graph’), then we can think of the ichy as simply a mindless homicidal flying shark-train.

7. Bubble funGiven the superb drownability of water in Half-Life, every second spent beneath its surface counts. To help the player navigate, even in foggy and murky waters, Valve used columns of bright bubble particles flowing up, because the human eye is typically drawn to movement. They used these bubbles frequently in underwater sections to highlight tunnels, passages, or pockets where the player could surface for air.

Year of the Dragon, a Half-Life mod that replaces Gordan Freeman with Spyro the Dragon, has finally entered early access. You can download and play the Office Complex demo over on ModDB and glide, charge, and breath fire all over the early-game Half-Life level as a talking cartoon dragon instead of a boring MIT graduate.

While modder Magic_Nipples (nice) isn't necessarily going to recreate the entirety of Half-Life to work with Spyro's original moveset, they're at least making it possible for others, bringing the former PlayStation icon to the GoldSrc and Xash3D engines for modders to play around with. 

You'll need Half-Life to give it a go, of course, and not all controllers are compatible quite yet, but what's there looks like a near perfect recreation of the original Spyro. Give it a go and let us know how it feels to finally play Half-Life as it was always meant to be. 

I was convinced They Hunger would hold together about as well as a skeleton in a hurricane. Not only is it a 20-year-old Half-Life mod. It’s a 20-year-old zombie Half-Life mod. Given how gaming scraped the bottom of that brain cavity seven or eight years ago, I struggled to see how They Hunger could shine through two decades’ worth of derivative undead-fests. 

Less than two hours in, They Hunger had proved me wrong. I realised this after it tried to crush me between two zombie-driven trains, then let me drive one of those trains through a sequence of tunnels filled with walking corpses. I’m not sure what the best way to rekindle an old friendship is, but I think shouting “Choo-choo motherfuckers!” as you splatter a shambling horde with your cowcatcher is pretty hard to beat. 

Released in three parts between 1999 and 2001, They Hunger is a singleplayer, story-focussed total conversion for Half-Life. Created by a team of modders led by Neil Menke, it charts a zombie outbreak in the fictional town of Rockwell, which you’re thrown right into the middle of after your car falls into a lake after being struck by lightning. 

Unlike mods such as Counter- Strike, which used Half-Life’s tech to create a very different experience, They Hunger follows the design ideas of Valve’s seminal shooter closely. It tells a linear story using environmental storytelling and scripted setpieces, with levels built to convey a coherent, believable world. Even most of its weapons and enemies are reskins of those used in Half-Life. The crowbar, for example, becomes a lethal umbrella. John Steed would be proud.

Dead good

What made They Hunger stand out, and what makes it stand out today, is how the quality of its level and setpiece design rivals that of the game it’s based upon. The mod starts out with an indulgent cutscene that includes a radio report discussing “atmospheric disturbances”, followed by long shots of your car’s fateful journey into a ravine. Once you escape the water, you must cut through a churchyard where zombies burst out of coffins, before navigating a pumping station and an unstable volcanic crater as you attempt to reach the site of that broadcast. 

Chapters two and three are more ambitious still. The second episode has you escape from an infested police station, before making your way to a sprawling mental asylum where the source of the outbreak is located. Inside, you descend into a secret underground laboratory, before escaping in a lengthy scripted sequence wherein the asylum slowly and brilliantly burns to the ground. 

As you’d expect given its heritage, They Hunger is a whip-smart shooter. But it also stands up as a horror game. Like Looking Glass’ Thief, the dark and cloying atmosphere is aided by its lumpen lo-fi graphics, while the sound design is suitably eerie. The way its scuttling skeletons (which are reskinned vortigaunts) whisper “flesh creature” before they attack is profoundly unsettling.

While creepy, they Hunger knows how to balance its horror with more lighthearted moments. The third chapter commences with a tense sequence in a hospital, followed by a more tongue-in-cheek section in which you battle through a farmyard populated by zombie animals. 

As I said, They Hunger works fine visually, but if you struggle with its default presentation, help is at hand. The mod is so old now that it has its own suite of mods, most of which are dedicated to improving the visuals. The two main mods of interest are They Hunger-Remod by Zikshadow, which makes updates to most of the game’s character models, and My Weapons Pack, which improves the models on weapons and your character’s hands. Together they help fend off some of the ravages of time.

It lives

Getting They Hunger up and running today isn’t too challenging. There are several versions on ModDB which are compatible with Steam. Completing it is a little trickier. I encountered several points where the mod would crash to menu or crash to desktop. Some of these appeared to be caused by certain enemy sound effects and could be bypassed with a little luck. Others were linked to broken script triggers, and could only be avoided by noclipping through the map to the end of that area. 

Having to resort to workarounds is not ideal, but it’s worth it to experience a brilliant zombie adventure. They Hunger crams more inventiveness into its campaign than most bona fide zombie games, while balancing silliness with tension well. It may look a little desiccated and moan when it gets up, but there’s life in They Hunger yet.

One of my favourite parts of PC gaming is seeing modders push old game engines to their limits, by creating maps and levels that likely wouldn’t have been possible back when the game in question originally released. A quick glance at Half Life: Echoes immediately shows it is one such mod.

Created by first-time modder James Cockburn, Half Life: Echoes retells the story of Black Mesa’s alien outbreak from what the developer cryptically refers to as a “new perspective”. Elsewhere, on the mod's ModDB page, this new perspective is identified “Candidate 12”, another drone in Black Mesa's gigantic hive, at least until the Resonance Cascade.

It’s a fitting theme for the mod, which basically aims to exaggerate all of the strongest elements of the original Half Life. Echoes comprises over thirty new maps, all designed solely by Cockburn. And they’re not small either. Take a look at the images below.

Even considering how long in the tooth GoldSrc is looking today, that’s some mighty impressive map design. They’re so big that Cockburn recommends playing it on a fairly up-to-date PC, because the detail is such that it’ll cause slowdown on older machines.

The mod has been in development for over four years, having been originally announced back in 2014. The response by users has been overwhelmingly enthusiastic. Echoes currently has a rating of 9.4 on ModDB, with one reviewer calling it a “modern-day masterpiece”.

Below is a launch trailer which shows off some of the mod’s scripted events, including an impressive flyover of the Black Mesa area by a host of military aircraft, and an admittedly less impressive scene of a zombie throwing a barrel at the player. That said, I do now want to see a Half Life mod that retells the Black Mesa disaster from the perspective of Donkey Kong.

Half Life: Echoes can be downloaded here, although be warned it’s designed specifically for the Steam version of the Half-Life, and isn’t compatible with either Half Life: Source or Half Life for Windows (if you somehow have the CD case from 1998 still hanging around).  

If you want to see more mods that do madly ambitious things with old game engines, you should check out the Forgotten Sepulcher, a ridiculously huge fan-made Quake level.

Year of the Dragon is a mod for the original Half-Life currently being created by modder Magic Nipples. When complete, it will let you play Valve's classic shooter not as a nerdy physicist who is somehow able to demolish SWAT teams, but as lovable purple dragon Spyro.

Year of the Dragon has been in the works since November of last year and has made plenty of progress. In the video below you can see how a third-person camera works with Half-Life, as well as check out the gliding mechanics in action. The gib test for Spyro's death animation is a bit off-putting, to be honest.

Thanks, Kotaku.

Occult Scrim looks like a fun twist on Half Life: it's not quite a fully top-down shooter, but it's nearly there, with the camera floating way overhead. Your job is to blast through enemies to rack up points, which you'll spend on new weapons and items when you return to your base, an armoury.

It's still very early days for the mod, and it doesn't yet have a release date, but it looks remarkably polished. The perspective works well, and your character—a black ops assassin—automatically adjusts their aim up and down depending on where your enemies are. It looks like it plays far quicker than the base game, with lots of enemies on screen at one time. 

The camera has two positions: you can bring it slightly closer to the action if you want to get extra precise. Even when it's zoomed out, the guns feel meaty and solid. I'm not sure how many of the weapons are new and how many come from the base game, but I'm impressed nonetheless.

Enemy behaviour has been tweaked from the original to make them more challenging to fight, and they'll do things like roll and strafe out of the line of fire. You'll face bosses, too, like the one below. 

Click here for its ModDB page. It's one I'll be keeping an eye on as it comes together.

Way back in 2012, the Black Mesa mod for Half-Life had lofty plans to entirely rebuild the game in the Source engine.

If you'd been awaiting the release of much-anticipated the Xen levels, we have bad news—it's been delayed again, despite the mod moving from a free-to-play to Early Access model in order to take on new staff and strengthen the development team.

"We are truly sorry for getting everyone's hopes up and then delaying... again," said project lead Adam Engels via a recent statement. "We worked very hard to make December, but we are not yet ready. As a team, we take FULL responsibility for that. We have an internal deadline we are confident in, and we will be getting everyone more details as we get closer to that date.

"Thank you again to our community and Early Access supporters. The funding from Early Access has allowed us to hire many new talented developers, and has allowed older developers to put more time in the project. Simply put, Xen has proven to be an enormous undertaking, and while we are managing it to the best of our ability, it is proving to take longer than we estimated."

But while Xen release has been pushed back, there will nevertheless be an update next month. Focusing initially on improving stability and "enabling the new tech on the Earthbound section of the game", the final chapters will drop once everything's "fully stabilised". Tweaks include lens flare, texture blends, and improvements to the dynamic lighting—for the full breakdown, pop by the update on Steam.

You can pick up the Black Mesa mod now for $8, saving 60 percent off the full price. 

Half-Life 2 also continues to thrive, and Gunship Mark II's work-in-progress Half-Life 2: MMod is also gearing up for release.

Thanks, GameInformer.