Valve Corporation
Half-Life

Growing up with video games has undoubtedly become essential for a true nerd over the past twenty years.
Those like me who lived through the era of the Game Boy, the Sega Saturn, the PlayStation 1, and the first post-Dos-era operating systems, perfectly know the graphical evolution of video games and especially the genres.

With the advent of Doom and its relative Wolfenstein 3d, we gradually entered a digitized first-person world: a true video game revolution. While everything we had seen before was maybe limited to a screen where you could shoot at ducks with a plastic gun equipped with an optical pointer (the pinnacle of first-person effect provided by the early consoles), with the advent of the first Fps (First Person Shooter) the player began for the first time to immerse themselves within the game and feel the anxieties and risks of the controlled character.

The child of Doom and Wolfenstein 3d was Quake, another masterpiece built with a new graphics engine, more powerful than its predecessors, capable of finally rendering environments and characters semi-realistic and three-dimensional. What all these games lacked, however, was not the original setting or the variety of monsters. The problem was essentially the absence of a storyline. The protagonist killed ever worse monsters, advanced through levels, discovered secret lairs but we knew nothing about him or why he was there, except for some small snippets written in illegible characters that appeared as a pseudo-storyline at the start of the game.

“Half Life” is the first real step forward in FPS history. It marked the division between the past and the present of shooters.
Half Life was created and conceived by Gabe Newell and his team of programmers under the Valve brand. Gabe Newell worked at Microsoft and had already developed several architectures of the early Windows operating systems. His idea of creating an innovative video game involved a great risk. He would have to invest everything he owned at the time of his resignation from Microsoft into this project: Half Life. 
Apparently, the efforts were such that he was able to achieve the desired result and go beyond. Published in 1998 by Sierra, the game definitively hit the jackpot in the following years, receiving over 50 awards as “Game of the Year” and selling more than 2.5 million copies.

The novelty of Half Life lies especially in three elements:
1) The story: told during gameplay by the game’s secondary characters, due to the absence of introductory videos and the ‘mutism’ of the protagonist Gordon Freeman
2) The artificial intelligence: or the degree of interactivity of the enemies and secondary characters with respect to the gaming environment and the protagonist. This was obviously already present in previous FPS games, but it was rather crude. In Half Life (to give an example), if I encounter a monster, it’s not certain that it will come towards me to kill me.
3) The graphics engine: taken and modified from Quake’s graphics engine, it offers environments, characters, and metaphysical atmospheres, perfectly in line with the theme of the game. Years later, it is still my favorite graphics engine, far more captivating than all the realism of current games.

The plot unfolds mainly in the game’s main location: Black Mesa, a research complex vaguely reminiscent of Area 51, entirely surrounded by the desert. 
We are introduced to the structure via a monorail without knowing where we were picked up from or why. We only know that our protagonist is Gordon Freeman, an associate researcher in physics, assigned to the anomalous materials department.
The rest of the story I will not tell you.
If you’ve played it, you know it. If you haven’t played it (you must do so!) you will savor it.

After replaying it for years I can certainly say that “Half Life” is the best video game ever made. 
The following expansions made by other teams that later affiliated with Valve present different viewpoints and protagonists of the main storyline carried forward by Half Life. These expansions are:

Opposing Force
Blue Shift

Additionally, two mods of Half Life were made in online versions, which at the time no one would have ever believed would become (after some modifications) the most played online FPS games on the planet.
The mods are:

Counter-Strike
Team Fortress

I leave you (hopefully) with the curiosity or nostalgia to pick up that dusty CD tucked away in some drawer or immaculately collected on some shelf to install it again on your PC. 
I also point out the possibility of redeeming the entire Half Life collection plus expansions and mods on Steam, by entering the serial code of Gunman Chronicles (another old Half Life mod) or that of Half Life itself in the ‘Activate a Product’ section.

I hope I have not dared too much in reviewing this masterpiece, but it was solely a personal tribute driven by deep passion.