96-613: Half-Life is a 1998 first-person shooter 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 scientist who must escape from the Black Mesa Research Facility after it is overrun by alien creatures following a disastrous scientific experiment. The gameplay consists of combat, exploration and puzzles. Valve
192-625: A jidaigeki -themed martial arts action game where player samurai fight a number of swordspeople before confronting a more powerful boss samurai. SNK 's Sasuke vs. Commander , released in October 1980, is a ninja-themed shooting game where the player character fights enemy ninjas before confronting bosses with various ninjutsu attacks and enemy patterns. It was one of the earliest games with multiple boss encounters, and one of SNK's earliest games. Phoenix , released in December 1980,
288-600: A port of Half-Life for the Dreamcast , with new character models and textures and an exclusive expansion, Blue Shift . Following the cancellations of several third-party Dreamcast games in the wake of Sega 's decision to discontinue the console in March 2001, Sierra cancelled the port weeks before its scheduled release in June, citing "changing marketing conditions". Blue Shift was ported to Windows. The Dreamcast port became
384-486: A survival horror total conversion trilogy involving zombies). Some Half-Life modifications received retail releases. Counter-Strike was the most successful, having been released in six different editions: as a standalone product (2000), as part of the Platinum Pack (2000), as an Xbox version (2003), and as a single-player spin-off, Counter-Strike: Condition Zero (2004), as well as in two versions using
480-556: A "boss song" that is more difficult, or a high-difficulty, computer-controlled opponent in sports games . In multiplayer online battle arena games, defeating a map boss usually requires teamwork of two or more players, but it brings various benefits to the team, such as buffs or lane push power. Some games, such as Cuphead , Furi and Warning Forever , are centered around continual boss fights. Bosses are usually harder to beat than regular enemies, have higher health points, hence can sustain more damage and are generally found at
576-413: A 200-page design document detailing nearly every aspect of the game. They also produced a 30-page document for the narrative, and hired the science fiction novelist Marc Laidlaw to help manage the script. Laidlaw said his contribution was to add "old storytelling tricks" to the team's ambitious designs: "I was in awe of [the team]. It felt to me like I was just borrowing from old standards while they were
672-650: A PC game in the US. The following year, it was the 16th-bestselling PC game in the US, selling another 286,593 copies and earning $ 8.98 million. The PlayStation 2 version received a "Silver" sales award from the Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association (ELSPA), indicating sales of at least 100,000 copies in the United Kingdom. Half-Life ' s global sales reached 2.5 million units by July 2001. Edge noted in 2003 that "a significant number of
768-536: A boss battle, but later appear as a regular enemy, after players have become stronger or had a chance to find more powerful weaponry. Many games structure boss battles as a progression of distinct phases in which the boss produces different or additional hazards for players. This is often reflected by a change in the appearance of the boss, or by a boss displaying increased frustration. The Legend of Zelda series and games inspired by it are recognized for having dungeons with bosses that are specifically vulnerable to
864-553: A boss fight against what appeared, by all accounts, to be a giant floating infant". The Electric Playground said that Half-Life was an "immersive and engaging entertainment experience" in its first half and that it "peaked too soon". During the AIAS ' 2nd Annual Interactive Achievement Awards , Half-Life was awarded "Computer Entertainment Title of the Year" and " PC Action Game of the Year "; it also received nominations for " Game of
960-810: A boss. They come in many variations, such as the Chargin' Chuck Swarm encountered in Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam , the Armos Knights from The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past or the Battle of 1000 Heartless from Kingdom Hearts II . A main requirement with most wolfpacks is that the whole group must be defeated in order to win; in order to prolong the fight, many wolfpacks, particularly in games with turn-based combat in lieu of real-time, will summon reinforcements to replenish their lost numbers. An example of this
1056-415: A choice on whether or not to accept the offer; if he accepts, Freeman is placed into stasis , and if he does not, then Freeman is teleported in front of an army of aliens to his inevitable doom. Half-Life in many ways was a reactionary response to the trivialization of the experience of the first-person genre. Many of us had fallen in love with video games because of the phenomenological possibilities of
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#17327918140401152-509: A concept for a horror first-person shooter (FPS) game. They did not want to build their own game engine , as this would have created too much work for a small team and Newell planned to innovate in different areas. Instead, Valve licensed the Quake engine and the Quake II engine from id Software and combined them with their own code. Newell estimated that around 75% of the final engine code
1248-503: A concept that Kung-Fu Master designer Takashi Nishiyama later expanded on when he created the fighting game Street Fighter (1987) at Capcom . The term "boss" was used in reference to the game's final boss by Mike Roberts in a review of the game published in the May 1985 issue of British magazine Computer Gamer , while he used the term "super baddies" for the end-of-level bosses. Sega's arcade game Fantasy Zone (1986) popularized
1344-495: A continuous first-person perspective for lack of time. Laidlaw said they discovered unexpected advantages in this approach, as it created a sense of immersion and enforced a sense of loneliness in a frightening environment. Laidlaw felt that non-player characters were unnecessary to guide players if the design had sufficiently strong "visual grammar", and that this allowed the characters to "feel like characters instead of signposts". An early version of Half-Life began immediately after
1440-511: A crystal of unknown origin. This causes a resonance cascade which severely damages Black Mesa and causes alien creatures to teleport into the facility and begin massacring its personnel. Venturing to the surface for help, Freeman discovers the United States Marine Corps has been dispatched to Black Mesa to eliminate both the aliens and the facility's personnel as part of a government cover-up . Returning below ground, he
1536-488: A final boss in Zelda II: The Adventure of Link ). A superboss is a type of boss most commonly found in role-playing video games . They are considered optional enemies and do not have to be defeated to complete the game. However, not all optional bosses are superbosses. They are generally much more powerful than the bosses encountered as part of the main game's plot or quest , more difficult even than
1632-410: A game that totally revolutionizes an entire genre, but Half-Life has done just that." Hot Games commented on the realism, and how the environment "all adds up to a totally immersive gaming experience that makes everything else look quite shoddy in comparison". Gamers Depot wrote that it was the most immersive game they had played. The final portion of the game, taking place in the alien world of Xen,
1728-414: A maze of conveyor belts or using nearby boxes to build a small staircase to the next area the player must travel to. Some puzzles involve using the environment to kill an enemy, like turning a valve to spray hot steam at their enemies. There are few bosses in the conventional sense, where the player defeats a superior opponent by direct confrontation. Instead, such organisms occasionally define chapters, and
1824-777: A more detailed version of the regular ending. Examples of a "true final boss" include the Radiance in Hollow Knight and the Moon Presence in Bloodborne . The term "Foozle" is used to describe a cliché final boss that exists only to act as the final problem before players can complete the game. Scorpia stated in 1994 that "about 98% of all role-playing video games can be summed up as follows: 'We go out and bash on critters until we're strong enough to go bash on Foozle. ' " A precursor to video game boss fights
1920-503: A number of titles in the Dance Dance Revolution rhythm game series contain "boss songs" that are called "bosses" because they are exceptionally difficult to perform on. In combat-focused games, a boss may summon additional enemies, reinforcements, or minions ("adds") to fight players alongside the boss, increasing the boss fight's difficulty. These additional enemies may distract from the boss battle or give time for
2016-408: A score of 96 out of 100. Computer Gaming World ' s Jeff Green said it was "not just one of the best games of the year. It's one of the best games of any year, an instant classic that is miles better than any of its immediate competition, and – in its single-player form – is the best shooter since the original Doom . " Next Generation wrote: "It is fast paced, it is dramatic, and it brings
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#17327918140402112-555: A second expansion pack, Blue Shift , in which players control Barney Calhoun , a security guard at Black Mesa, as he attempts to escape the facility. It was developed as a bonus campaign for the Dreamcast port of Half-Life, but was released for Windows on June 12, 2001, after the port was canceled. Gearbox created a cooperative multiplayer expansion pack, Decay , exclusively for the PlayStation 2 port of Half-Life which
2208-616: A special item that is located within that dungeon. Player(s) typically acquire this item while exploring the dungeon and is given opportunity to learn to use it to solve puzzles or defeat weaker enemies before facing the boss character. Boss battles are typically seen as dramatic events. As such, they are usually characterized by sometimes quite theatrical cutscenes before and after the boss battle and unique music. Recurring bosses and final bosses may have their own specific theme music to distinguish them from other boss battles. This concept extends beyond combat-oriented video games. For example,
2304-499: A temple) and fighting a boss character at the end of each level; in turn, this end-of-level boss battle structure was adapted from the Bruce Lee film Game of Death , where Lee's character fights a different boss character on each floor as he ascends a pagoda. The game was distinctive for giving both players and each boss a health meter , which leads to the game temporarily becoming a one-on-one fighting game during boss battles,
2400-814: A third-party remake of Half-Life developed by Crowbar Collective on the Source engine, was published as a free mod in September 2012 and later approved by Valve for a commercial standalone release. In November 2023, for the 25th anniversary of Half-Life , Valve updated the Steam version to revert content to its original 1998 state, fix long-standing bugs, and add content including the Half-Life: Uplink demo, four new multiplayer maps, Steam Deck support, rendering improvements, and support for 4K resolution monitors. Valve also released an hour-long documentary on
2496-429: A time limit by having a large number of players or parties working together to defeat the boss. Examples of such superbosses can be found in games like Pokémon Go and World of Warcraft , and are generally referred to as a raid . Toby Fox 's games Undertale and Deltarune both feature superbosses in the form of Sans , Jevil, and Spamton NEO. Some major video game series have recurring superbosses such as
2592-494: A typical dungeon campaign there would be one powerful enemy acting as the boss of the weaker minions that players would face beforehand, in the same sense as a crime boss, which later inspired the boss battles of role-playing video games . The first interactive video game to feature a boss was dnd , which was released in 1975 for the PLATO system . dnd was one of the earliest dungeon crawl video games and implemented many of
2688-544: A warzone between the Marines and the aliens. The tide of the battle begins turning against the Marines, and they withdraw from the facility after calling in numerous airstrikes . Entering an underground storage garage, Freeman fights his way past both aliens and Marine stragglers to reach the Lambda Complex. There, scientists inform him that the rocket launch proved unsuccessful due to a powerful alien creature known as
2784-463: Is Astaroth in Diablo IV . Many other wolfpack bosses empower themselves when one of the other enemies in the battle is killed to keep the threat level from falling over time. The final boss, last boss or end boss, is typically present at or near the end of a game, with completion of the game's storyline usually following victory in the battle. The final boss is usually the main antagonist of
2880-456: Is Bruce Lee 's Hong Kong martial arts films , including The Big Boss (1971), in which Lee fights a criminal gang before battling the eponymous "big boss", and Game of Death (1972), where Lee fights a different boss on each level of a pagoda , which later inspired the boss battles of martial arts action games such as beat 'em ups. Another precursor is tabletop role-playing games starting with Dungeons & Dragons (1974), in which in
2976-547: Is a fixed shooter where players's ship must fight a giant mothership in the fifth and final level. At several points in Namco's vertically scrolling shooter Xevious (1982), players must defeat an Andor Genesis mothership to advance. In side-scrolling character action games such as beat 'em ups, Irem 's 1984 arcade game Kung-Fu Master established the end-of-level boss battle structure used in these games, with players progressing through levels (represented by floors of
Half-Life (video game) - Misplaced Pages Continue
3072-683: Is a stage where players face multiple previous bosses again in succession. For example, in a run 'n' gun video game, all regular enemies might use pistols while the boss uses a tank. A boss enemy is quite often larger in size than other enemies and the player character . At times, bosses are very hard to defeat without being adequately prepared and/or knowing the correct fighting approach. Bosses usually take strategy and special knowledge to defeat, such as how to attack weak points or avoid specific attacks. Bosses are common in many genres of video games, but they are especially common in story-driven titles, and are commonly previously established antagonists in
3168-496: Is instructed by a scientist to make his way to the facility's Lambda Complex in order to put an end to the alien invasion. Making his way through Black Mesa, Freeman kills a giant alien creature in a rocket engine test facility before using a monorail system to reach and launch a multistage rocket , which the Lambda Complex team intends on using to close the portal allowing aliens to teleport into Black Mesa. He subsequently finds out that black operations agents have been sent to
3264-406: Is played through the perspectives of Gina Cross and Colette Green, two Black Mesa scientists. Half-Life received support from independent game developers, supported and encouraged by Valve. With the game, Valve included Worldcraft , the level design tool used during development, and a software development kit , enabling developers to modify the game and create mods . Both tools were updated with
3360-447: Is referred to as a boss battle or boss fight . Bosses are generally far stronger than other opponents the players have faced up to that point in a game. Boss battles are generally seen at climax points of particular sections of games, such as at the end of a level or stage or guarding a specific objective. A miniboss is a boss weaker or less significant than the main boss in the same area or level, though usually more powerful than
3456-558: The Guardian ranked Half-Life the third-greatest game of the 1990s, writing that it "helped write the rulebook for how games tell their stories without resorting to aping the conventions of film". According to Newell, Half-Life was budgeted with the expectation of lifetime sales of around 180,000 copies. However, it was a surprise hit. In the United States, Half-Life debuted at #8 on PC Data 's weekly PC game sales chart for
3552-594: The Kirby games. Others may be a recurring version of a previous boss, who is either weaker than previously encountered or is less of a challenge later in the game due to character or equipment progression. An example is Castlevania: Symphony of the Night ' s Gaibon and Slogra. Other video game characters who usually take the role of a miniboss are Vile ( Mega Man X series), Allen O'Neil ( Metal Slug ) and Dark Link ( The Legend of Zelda series, though he appears as
3648-549: The Federal Department for Media Harmful to Young Persons , which regulates depictions of violence against humans. Valve replaced the human characters with robots, spilling oil and gears instead of blood and body parts when killed, among other changes. In 2017, Half-Life was removed from the German censorship list. To acknowledge this, Valve released Half-Life Uncensored , a free downloadable content pack, that reverts
3744-405: The expansion packs Opposing Force (1999) and Blue Shift (2001), developed by Gearbox Software , and the sequels Half-Life 2 (2004), Episode One (2006) and Episode Two (2007) and Half-Life: Alyx (2020). Half-Life is a first-person shooter that requires the player to perform combat tasks and puzzle solving to advance through the game. Unlike most first-person shooters at
3840-431: The 16th place for May in the US, Half-Life exited PC Data's monthly top 20 in June. Half-Life became the fifth-bestselling PC game of the first half of 1999 in the US. Its domestic sales during 1999 reached 290,000 copies by the end of September. During 1999, it was the fifth-best-selling PC game in the US, with sales of 445,123 copies. These sales brought in revenues of $ 16.6 million, the sixth-highest gross that year for
3936-565: The 7.5m copies of the PC version were bought because the game offered such potential for community-driven expansion". As of November 16, 2004, eight million copies of the game had been sold, by 2008, 9.3 million copies had been sold at retail. Guinness World Records awarded Half-Life the world record for Best-Selling First-Person Shooter of All Time (PC) in the Guinness World Records: Gamer's Edition 2008 . Half-Life 2
Half-Life (video game) - Misplaced Pages Continue
4032-469: The GoldSrc engine). Other mods such as Counter-Strike and Day of Defeat ( DOD ) began life as the work of independent developers who later received aid from Valve. Other multiplayer mods include Firearms , Natural Selection and Sven Co-op . Single-player mods include USS Darkstar (1999, a futuristic action-adventure on board a zoological research spaceship) and They Hunger (2000–2001,
4128-649: The Hazardous Environment Combat Unit (a fictional special forces unit of the United States Marine Corps ), and Black Ops assassins. Half-Life includes online multiplayer support for both individual and team-based deathmatch modes. It was one of the first mainstream games to use the WASD keys as the default control scheme. At the Black Mesa Research Facility in New Mexico , physicist Gordon Freeman participates in an experiment on
4224-524: The Nihilanth keeping the portal open from their end, and he must venture into the alien's homeworld of Xen to kill the Nihilanth and close the portal; the Lambda Complex team proceeds to teleport Freeman to Xen. In Xen, Freeman encounters numerous dead scientists who teleported there before him. He comes across a large alien, the Gonarch, and manages to kill it after a long battle. Making his way towards
4320-452: The Nihilanth, Freeman finds a large factory dedicated to manufacturing alien soldiers. Eventually discovering the Nihilanth's lair, Freeman kills it and closes the portal. However, he is suddenly confronted by the G-Man , a mysterious interdimensional agent who disarms and restrains him before informing Freeman that his "employers" wish to hire him for an assignment. The G-Man then offers Freeman
4416-467: The November 15–21 period, with an average retail price (ARP) of $ 49. It rose to sixth place the following week, before dropping to position 10 for the week ending December 5. During the December 6–12 period, the game climbed back to sixth place; by this time, its ARP had dropped to $ 36. It placed between sixth and eighth on PC Data's weekly charts through the end of December, and its ARP rose back to $ 45 by
4512-600: The Ruby and Emerald Weapons. Some superbosses will take the place of the final boss if certain requirements are met. Some superbosses can yield special items or skills that cannot be found any other way that can give players a significant advantage during playthrough of the rest of the game, such as added experience or an extremely powerful weapon. For example, the "raid bosses" from Borderlands 2 give rare loot unavailable anywhere else. Some superbosses in online games have an immense amount of health and must be defeated within
4608-571: The Source engine. Team Fortress Classic , Day of Defeat , Gunman Chronicles (2000, a futuristic Western movie -style total conversion with emphasis on its single-player mode) and Sven Co-op were also released as standalone products. Half-Life is also the subject of the YouTube improv roleplaying series Half-Life VR but the AI is Self-Aware and Freeman's Mind . In 2003, Valve's network
4704-838: The Ultima Weapon and Omega Weapon in Final Fantasy and the Amon clan in Yakuza . The Warden from Minecraft could be considered a superboss, as it is vastly more difficult to fight than the final boss, the Ender Dragon. However, Mojang, the developer of Minecraft, has explicitly stated that the Warden was not intended to be fought by players. A wolfpack boss is a group of enemies who may be considered weak on their own, but in large groups can be considered strong enough to be
4800-470: The United Kingdom, and remained in PC Data's weekly top 10 for the entire month, peaking at #4. By January 19, after two full months of availability, global sales of Half-Life surpassed 500,000 units. In the United States, it was the fifth-best-selling PC game for the month of January. On PC Data's weekly charts, it rose to #2 from February 7–20, with an ARP of $ 35. Holding a position in the weekly top 10 for
4896-499: The Wikimedia System Administrators, please include the details below. Request from 172.68.168.150 via cp1114 cp1114, Varnish XID 974660335 Upstream caches: cp1114 int Error: 429, Too Many Requests at Thu, 28 Nov 2024 11:03:34 GMT Boss (video gaming) In video games , a boss is a significantly powerful non-player character created as an opponent to players. A fight with a boss character
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#17327918140404992-712: The Year " and outstanding achievement in " Art/Graphics ", " Character or Story Development ", " Interactive Design ", and " Software Engineering ". Jeff Lundrigan reviewed the PlayStation 2 version for Next Generation , rating it three out of five, and wrote that "it may be getting old, but there's still a surprising amount of life in Half-Life ". The PlayStation 2 version was a nominee for The Electric Playground ' s 2001 Blister Awards for "Best Console Shooter Game", but lost to Halo: Combat Evolved for Xbox . In 1999, 2001, and 2005, PC Gamer named Half-Life
5088-473: The basis of the Half-Life port for PlayStation 2, released in late 2001. This version added competitive play and a co-op expansion, Half-Life: Decay . In 2004, Valve released Half-Life: Source , a remastered version of Half-Life created in their new game engine, Source . It includes no new graphical elements, but adds new physics, water effects and 5.1 surround sound . It received negative reviews for its glitches and lack of new content. Black Mesa ,
5184-535: The best PC game of all time. In 2004, GameSpy readers voted Half-Life the best game of all time. Gamasutra gave it their Quantum Leap Award in the FPS category in 2006. GameSpot inducted Half-Life into their Greatest Games of All Time list in May 2007. In 2007, IGN described Half-Life as one of the most influential video games, and in 2013 wrote that the history of the FPS genre "breaks down pretty cleanly into pre- Half-Life and post- Half-Life eras". In 2021,
5280-400: The boss in question becomes progressively stronger and/or less vulnerable as their health decreases, requiring players to use different strategies to win. Some bosses may contain or be composed of smaller parts that can be destroyed by players in battle, which may or may not grant an advantage. In games such as Doom and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night , an enemy may be introduced via
5376-444: The boss to regain or regenerate health, but may also give players opportunity to regain health from health boosters and ammo dropped by the boss's defeated minions. A miniboss, also known as a "middle boss", "mid-boss", "half-boss", "sub-boss" "semi-boss", or occasionally "tank", is a boss-like enemy weaker or less significant than the main boss in the same area or level. Some minibosses are stronger versions of regular enemies, as in
5472-509: The cabal and playtesting, Valve identified and removed parts that proved unenjoyable. Birdwell said that while there were struggles at first, the cabal approach was critical for Half-Life ' s success, and was reused for Team Fortress 2 from the start. Much of the detail of Half-Life 's development has been lost. According to Valve employee Erik Johnson, two or three months before release, their Visual SourceSafe source control system "exploded". Logs of technical changes from before
5568-543: The censorship. Valve canceled a version of Half-Life for Mac , developed by Logicware, in 2000. Newell said the port was substandard and would have made Mac players "second-class customers". Rebecca Heineman , the co-founder of Logicware, denied this, saying that Valve cancelled the port as Apple had angered them by misrepresenting sales projections. She said the port was complete and three weeks from release. Valve released ports for OS X and Linux in 2013. Captivation Digital Laboratories and Gearbox Software developed
5664-653: The completion of specific additional levels, choosing specific dialogue options or after obtaining a particular item or set of items, such as the Chaos Emeralds in the Sonic the Hedgehog series or performing a series of tasks in Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker . These bosses are generally more difficult to defeat. In games with a "true" final boss, victory leads to either a better ending or
5760-434: The concept of a boss rush, a stage where players face multiple previous bosses again in succession. Michael Fahey of Kotaku noted in a podcast that usage of the term "boss" by Nintendo Power grew sharply around 1988, and that there was no clear single etymology of the term. In the same podcast, former Kotaku editor-in-chief Stephen Totilo speculated that bosses became known as such because they were "in charge of all
5856-564: The core concepts of Dungeons & Dragons . The objective of the game is to retrieve an "Orb" from the bottommost dungeon. The orb is kept in a treasure room guarded by a high-level enemy named the Gold Dragon. Only by defeating the Dragon can players claim the orb, complete the game and be eligible to appear on the high score list. In 1980, boss battles appeared in several arcade action games. In March 1980, Sega released Samurai ,
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#17327918140405952-505: The creation of Half-Life , featuring commentary from the original developers, designers and artists. Two days after the release, Half-Life reached 33,471 concurrent players on Steam, its highest-ever number. Half-Life was followed by an expansion pack , Opposing Force , on November 1, 1999, developed by Gearbox Software . Players control HECU Corporal Adrian Shephard , who fights a new group of aliens called Race X and Black Ops units after being split from his team. Gearbox developed
6048-460: The designer Brett Johnson, the level design was inspired by environments in the manga series Akira . Valve struggled to find a publisher, as many believed the game was too ambitious for a first-time developer. Sierra On-Line signed Valve for a one-game deal as it was interested in making a 3D action game, especially one based on the Quake engine. Valve first showed Half-Life in early 1997; it
6144-505: The disaster, with the environments already wrecked. Laidlaw worked with Johnson to create versions of the lab environment before the disaster to help set the story. He said: "These were all economical ways of doing storytelling with the architecture — which was my whole obsession. The narrative had to be baked into the corridors." Within a month of the cabal's formation, the other team members started detailed game development, and within another month began playtesting through Sierra. The cabal
6240-476: The end of a level or area. While most games include a mixture of boss opponents and regular opponents, some games have only regular opponents and some games have only bosses (e.g. Shadow of the Colossus ). Some bosses are encountered several times through a single game, typically with alternate attacks and a different strategy required to defeat it each time. A boss battle can also be made more challenging if
6336-414: The facility to neutralize even the Marines before being captured by two Marines and left for dead inside a trash compactor . Escaping through a waste treatment complex, Freeman stumbles across a large laboratory filled with alien specimens, proving that Black Mesa was aware of the aliens before the resonance cascade. Traversing through the surface of Black Mesa yet again, Freeman finds that it has become
6432-514: The field and felt like the industry was reducing the experiences to least common denominators rather than exploring those possibilities. Our hope was that building worlds and characters would be more compelling than building shooting galleries. —Valve president Gabe Newell Valve , based in Kirkland, Washington , was founded in 1996 by the former Microsoft employees Mike Harrington and Gabe Newell . For its first product, Valve settled on
6528-482: The final boss and often players are required to meet certain conditions in the game or complete a sidequest or the entire game to fight the superboss. The first such superboss (or secret boss) was Akuma in Super Street Fighter II Turbo , that required players meet certain conditions before he would appear as the final boss. In Final Fantasy VII , players may choose to seek out and fight
6624-453: The final month of development were lost, and code had to be recovered from individual computers. Half-Life was released in November 19, 1998. The revised version of Half-Life shown at E3 1998 was given Game Critics Awards for "Best PC Game" and "Best Action Game". Valve released two demos . The first, Half-Life: Day One , contained the first fifth of the game and was distributed with certain graphic cards. The second, Half-Life: Uplink ,
6720-489: The game. The player battles alone for the majority of the game, but is occasionally assisted by non-player characters ; specifically security guards and scientists who help the player. The guards will fight alongside the player, and both guards and scientists can assist in reaching new areas and pass on relevant plot information. An array of alien enemies populate the game, including headcrabs, bullsquids, vortigaunts, and headcrab zombies. The player also faces human opponents in
6816-479: The game; however, there are exceptions, such as in Conker's Bad Fur Day , in which the final boss is the antagonist's alien pet. Final bosses are generally larger, more detailed or better animated than lesser enemies, often in order to inspire a feeling of grandeur and special significance from the encounter. In some games, a hidden boss, referred to as the "true" final boss, is present. These bosses only appear after
6912-401: The introduction of gameplay elements relative to the story. The collaboration proved successful, and once the cabal had come to decisions on types of gameplay elements that would be needed, mini-cabals from other departments most affected by the choice were formed to implement these elements. Membership in the main cabal rotated since the required commitment created burnout . The cabal produced
7008-418: The level fun. First, it had several interesting things happen in it, all triggered by the player rather than a timer so that the player would set the pace of the level. Second, the level responded to any player action, even for something as simple as adding graphic decals to wall textures to show a bullet impact. Finally, the level warned the player of imminent danger to allow them to avoid it, rather than killing
7104-402: The multiplayer expansion Decay , and to OS X and Linux in 2013. Valve ported Half-Life to its Source engine as Half-Life: Source in 2004. In 2020, Crowbar Collective released an unofficial remake, Black Mesa . Half-Life inspired numerous fan-made mods , some of which became standalone games, such as Counter-Strike , Day of Defeat , and Sven Co-op . It was followed by
7200-401: The ones doing something truly new." Rather than dictate narrative elements "from some kind of ivory tower of authorial inspiration", he worked with the team to improvise ideas, and was inspired by their experiments. For example, he conceived the opening train ride after an engineer implemented train code for another concept. Valve initially planned to use traditional cutscenes , but switched to
7296-495: The player is generally expected to use the terrain, rather than firepower, to kill the boss. Late in the game, the player receives a "long jump module" for the HEV suit , which allows the player to increase the horizontal distance and speed of jumps by crouching before jumping. The player must rely on this ability to navigate various platformer-style jumping puzzles in Xen toward the end of
7392-476: The player sees "through his eyes" for the entire length of the game. Half-Life has no levels ; it instead divides the game into chapters, whose titles briefly appear on screen as the player progresses through the game. With the exception of short loading pauses, progression throughout the game is continuous, with each map directly connecting to the next, with the exception of levels involving teleportation . The game regularly integrates puzzles, such as navigating
7488-434: The player with no warning. To move forward with this unified design, Valve sought a game designer but found no one suitable. Instead, Valve created the "cabal", initially a group of six individuals from across all departments that worked primarily for six months straight in six-hour meetings four days a week. The cabal was responsible for all elements of design, including level layouts, key events, enemy designs, narrative, and
7584-459: The plot of the video game. Action-adventure games , beat 'em ups , fighting games , platform games , role-playing video games (RPGs), and shooter games are particularly associated with boss battles. They may be less common in puzzle games , card video games , racing games , and simulation games . The first video game with a boss fight was the 1975 RPG dnd . The concept has expanded to other genres, like rhythm games , where there may be
7680-549: The release of the version 1.1.0.0 patch . Supporting tools (including texture editors, model editors, and level editors such as the multiple engine editor QuArK ) were either created or updated to work with Half-Life . The Half-Life software development kit served as the development base for many mods, including the Valve-developed Team Fortress Classic and Deathmatch Classic (a remake of Quake ' s multiplayer deathmatch mode in
7776-556: The rest of February, it climbed to fourth for the month. The game remained in PC Data's weekly top 10 until the week of March 21 and dropped to position 11 for March as a whole. In the United Kingdom, it placed second in February—behind the debut of Baldur's Gate —and fifth in March. In April, it claimed #3 on Chart-Track's rankings and dropped to #16 on those of PC Data. On April 23, Sierra announced that global sales of Half-Life had reached almost 1 million copies. After maintaining
7872-400: The standard opponents and often fought alongside them. A superboss (sometimes 'secret', 'hidden' or 'raid' boss) is generally much more powerful than the bosses encountered as part of the main game's plot and is often an optional encounter. A final boss is often the main antagonist of a game's story and the defeat of that character usually provides a conclusion to the game. A boss rush
7968-400: The time, which relied on cut-scene intermissions to detail their plotlines, Half-Life ' s story is told mostly using scripted sequences (bar one short cutscene), keeping the player in control of the first-person viewpoint . In line with this, the player rarely loses the ability to control the player character , Gordon Freeman , who never speaks and is never actually seen in the game;
8064-474: The very idea of adventure on a PC out of the dark ages and into a 3D world. All that and not a single Orc in sight." IGN described it as "a tour de force in game design, the definitive single player game in a first-person shooter". GameSpot said it was the "closest thing to a revolutionary step the genre has ever taken". Several reviewers cited the level of immersion and interactivity as revolutionary. AllGame said, "It isn't everyday that you come across
8160-425: The week ending January 2. PC Data declared Half-Life November's sixth-best-selling PC game in the United States, a position it held for the month of December. While its US sales were below 100,000 copies by November 30, by 1999 it had sold 212,173 copies and earned revenues of $ 8.6 million in the United States by the end of 1998. In January 1999, Half-Life debuted at #3 on Chart-Track 's PC game sales rankings for
8256-535: Was a major influence and the team wanted Half-Life to "scare you like Doom did". The project had the working title Quiver , after the Arrowhead military base from The Mist . The name Half-Life was chosen because it was evocative of the theme, not clichéd, and had a corresponding visual symbol: the Greek letter λ (lower-case lambda ), which represents the decay constant in the half-life equation. According to
8352-407: Was a success at E3 that year, where Valve demonstrated the animation and artificial intelligence . Novel features of the artificial intelligence included fear and pack behavior. Valve aimed for a November 1997 release to compete with Quake II . By September 1997, the team found that while they had built some innovative aspects in weapons, enemies, and level design, the game was not fun and there
8448-552: Was announced at E3 2003 and released in 2004. The player controls Freeman 20 years after the Black Mesa incident in the dystopian City 17 , where he joins a rebellion against an alien regime. It was followed by the episodic sequels Half-Life 2: Episode One (2006) and Half-Life 2: Episode Two (2007). After cancelling several other Half-Life projects , Valve released Half-Life: Alyx in 2020. First-person shooter Too Many Requests If you report this error to
8544-464: Was by Valve. As the project expanded, Valve cancelled development of a fantasy role-playing game, Prospero , and the Prospero team joined the Half-Life project. Half-Life was inspired by the FPS games Doom (1993) and Quake (1996), Stephen King 's 1980 novella The Mist , and a 1963 episode of The Outer Limits titled " The Borderland ". According to the designer Harry Teasley, Doom
8640-490: Was disappointed with the lack of innovation in the FPS genre, and aimed to create an immersive world rather than a "shooting gallery". Unlike other games at the time, the player has almost uninterrupted control of the player character ; the story is mostly experienced through scripted sequences rather than cutscenes . Valve developed the game using GoldSrc , a heavily-modified version of the Quake engine , licensed from id Software . The science fiction novelist Marc Laidlaw
8736-524: Was generally considered the weakest. Besides introducing a wholly new and alien setting, it also featured a number of low-gravity jumping puzzles. The GoldSrc engine did not provide as much precise control for the player during jumping, making these jumps difficult and often with Freeman falling into a void and the player restarting the game. Wired 's Julie Muncy called the Xen sequence "an abbreviated, unpleasant stop on an alien world with bad platforming and
8832-408: Was hired to craft the plot and assist with design. 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 first-person shooter games and one of the greatest video games ever made . By 2008, it had sold more than nine million copies. It was ported to the PlayStation 2 in 2001, along with
8928-484: Was infiltrated by hackers. Among the stolen files were the unreleased Half-Life modification Half-Life: Threewave , a canceled remake of the mod Threewave CTF from Quake . The files were found by the independent reporter Tyler McVicker of Valve News Network on a Vietnamese FTP server in February 2016, and were unofficially released that September. On the review aggregation website Metacritic , Half-Life has
9024-416: Was intimately involved with playtesting, monitoring the player but otherwise not interacting. They noted any confusion or inability to solve a game's puzzles and made them into action items to be fixed on the next iteration. Later, with most of the main adjustments made, the team included means to benchmark players' actions. They then collected and interpreted statistically to fine-tune levels further. Between
9120-456: Was little design cohesion. They postponed the release and reworked every level. They took a novel approach of assigning a small team to build a prototype level containing every element in the game and then spent a month iterating on the level. When the rest of the team played the level, which the designer Ken Birdwell described as " Die Hard meets Evil Dead ", they agreed to use it as a baseline. The team developed three theories about what made
9216-546: Was released on February 12, 1999, and featured original content. A short film based on Half-Life, also titled Half-Life: Uplink , was developed by Cruise Control, a British marketing agency, and released on February 11, 1999. The protagonist is a journalist who infiltrates the Black Mesa Research Facility, trying to discover what has happened there. Half-Life was censored in Germany to comply with
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