Half-Life (series)
video game series developed by Valve
Half-Life is a series of first-person shooter games created by Valve. The games combine shooting combat, puzzles and storytelling, and are played entirely from the first-person perspective.
The original Half-Life, Valve's first product, was released in 1998 for Windows. Players control silent protagonist Gordon Freeman, a scientist working at the Black Mesa Research Facility who must survive an alien invasion caused by the facility. The use of innovative scripted sequences instead of cutscenes was influential on the first-person shooter genre, and the game inspired numerous community-developed mods, leading to the release of the multiplayer games Counter-Strike and Day of Defeat. Half-Life was followed by the expansions Opposing Force (1999), Blue Shift (2001) and Decay (2001), developed by Gearbox Software.
In 2004, Valve released Half-Life 2, developed using their game engine Source. It features a more dystopian setting, stronger focus on characters and physics-based gameplay. Set twenty years after Half-Life, players control Freeman in joining a resistance to liberate humanity from an alien force known as the Combine. It was followed by the episodic sequels Episode One (2006) and Episode Two (2007).
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