Half-Life is a science fiction first-person shooter video game developed by Valve Corporation, the company's debut product and the first in the Half-Life series. First released in 1998 by Sierra Studios for Windows PCs, the game was also released for the PlayStation 2; Mac OS X and Linux ports became available in January 2013. In Half-Life, players assume the role of Dr. Gordon Freeman, a theoretical physicist who must fight his way out of a secret underground research facility whose research and experiments into teleportation technology have gone disastrously wrong.
Valve, set up by former Microsoft employees, had difficulty finding a publisher for the game, with many believing that it was too ambitious a project. Sierra On-Line eventually signed the game after expressing interest in making a 3D action game. The game had its first major public appearance at the 1997 Electronic Entertainment Expo. Designed for Windows, the game's engine, GoldSrc, was a heavily modified version of id Software's Quake game engine with code portions from the id Tech 2 engine. |