Original Half-Life Storyline...

[fragwell12345]

Hi people... I've been browsing this forum for the past few months every single day like a lot of you have I am sure..

until today, I've had no need to post as all my questions have been answered in other threads.

This is just a quick one really but I would REALLY appreciate it if I had some responses.

With Half-Life 2 less than a day away now and my five year wait about to come to an end... I realised one thing...

I never completed the original game! Don'tget me wrong.. I enjoyed every second that I did play and still think it was worthy of the 50+ awards it won back then. If I remember rightly; I got a bit too 'involved' shall we say with playing Counterstrike @ constant LAN partys.

Anyway.. my lovely, forgiving, patient girlfriend... will be sitting down and watching me play (and hopefully playing a bit as well!) Half-Life 2 from tomorrow and I wanted to be able to give her a few well worded paragraphs of a synopsis of the original game just to make things easier.

I wondered if anyone either had a link to something like this on the Internet or could write me a short few paragraphs...

.. I would like/don't mind it covering what happens @ the end of the game despite having not played the ending myself.

Thanks people...

Happy Half-Life 2 playing!!!

Dave Thackwell

 

[KagePrototype]

Just dug this up...

The 3 day events of Half-Life, Opposing Force, Blue Shift and Decay, Taken from: http://website.lineone.net/~wingerden/

(With most if not all the BS speculation removed)

Day One

In the early hours of the morning a system-wide computer failure occurred throughout the Black Mesa Research Facility. The facility’s computer scientists swiftly re-established the computer network but the crash had resulted in numerous problems with the security system and electronic doors, and also with some other computer-dependent devices.

Dr. Rosenberg, the designer of the anti-mass spectrometer, met Dr. Keller in the Anomalous Materials Laboratory with concerns he had about the experiment. He had never intended the machine to be put under the strain it would experience when running at 110%, the scanners normally being run at a power level of 80% of their designed capacity. He warned Dr. Keller that the spectrometer would overload, which could result in significant damage and might be dangerous. Also a few other scientists had expressed concerns that such a pure specimen, with little internal interference to its displacement fields and a vast amount of potential displacement energy, would also be the most unstable sample ever analysed, the unusual spectral fluctuations supporting this. The worry was that scans of such untried intensities could release an unprecedented burst of displacement energy, potentially sufficient to cause the resonance cascade scenario that had been once been hypothesised – where an extremely powerful Earth-based displacement field would attract the natural fields in the Xen borderworld, the resulting influx of displacement energy tearing a dimensional breach between Xen spacetime and our own.

Many scientists doubted that a resonance cascade was actually physically possible, and in any case the facility’s containment system, which created powerful dampening fields to neutralise stray displacement energy, would collect any dangerous excesses that were released during the scan. Personnel had been trained in emergency procedures for if an anti-mass spectrometer overload did occur, and the senior staff felt that the theoretical and practical gains that could be had from further understanding the Xen crystals’ spacetime effects outweighed the cost of replacing a destroyed anti-mass spectrometer.

Dr. Freeman did not give himself enough time to travel from the Dormitories to the Anomalous Materials Laboratory. His late arrival was especially frowned upon due to the importance of the day’s experiment. Dr. Gina Cross inserted the sample into the test chamber’s sample delivery elevator; while Dr. Colette Green allowed the spectrometer to be run at 110% by disabled the appropriate safety system. Dr. Gordon Freeman activated the rotors of the anti-mass spectrometer while Dr. Colette Green monitored the system. All three of these scientists wore MK. IV HEV Hazardous Environment protective suits.

Gordon Freeman inserted the sample into the anti-mass spectrometer. A displacement field of incredible strength immediately formed within the crystal and then expanded rapidly. A powerful electromagnetic field was also produced which interfered with the electronic equipment, preventing the scientists in the control room from shutting down the spectrometer. The displacement field was of such strength that not only did it experience interference from the fields within the borderworld’s crystals, but also the one being created in our world interfered with the displacement fields on Xen. Displacement energy from the Xen crystals poured through “inter-space” and amplified the field on Earth, until it became self-sustaining – a resonance cascade. Dr. Gordon Freeman, located only metres away from the test sample, was caught within the resonating spacetime and momentarily propelled into the borderworld, before falling back into our own universe.

In the period shortly after the resonance cascade, the fluctuating displacement field of the dimensional breach caused vast numbers of various Xen life forms to randomly materialise throughout the Black Mesa Research Facility. Most of the Black Mesa personnel made their way from the base’s sub-levels to the surface of the facility in the hope of rescue. Gordon Freeman left the Anomalous Materials. Dr. Keller wanted to take immediate action to prevent the further expansion of the dimensional breach, but Dr. Rosenberg felt that their main priority should be the lives of the people in Black Mesa, and therefore they should send a signal so that military forces could be sent in to rescue them.

Rosenberg, Gina Cross and Colette Green used the Anomalous Materials Laboratory’s still functioning elevator. The elevator that would allow them to reach the surface was located in Sector A, but it was not properly functioning and Gina and Colette passed through the training facility’s Hazard Course to operate the manual controls. When they reached the communications facility, they re-aligned the dish and Dr. Rosenberg was able to establish a satellite uplink and made contact with the outside world.

It would take some time for the military to reach the facility and rescue everyone and in the meantime the dimensional rift was widening. Dr Keller was concerned that the rift could expand to such a degree that it would become impossible to seal, and therefore action had to be taken immediately. Although the dampening fields had failed to prevent the resonance cascade it was hoped that if the fields were re-initialised they could absorb the rift’s displacement energy and cause a resonance reversal, sealing the dimensional breach. While U.S. Marines arrived by helicopter Cross and Green reset the secondary and then the primary dampening locks, but Keller discovered that displacement energy was being beamed through the rift from the borderworld and this prevented the containment system from stopping the rift’s expansion. The resonance cascade had ended so the only explanation was that the sentient Xen beings were purposely holding the rift open – the only possible explanation was that not all of the aliens were here by accident, and this was an actual invasion.

The US Marines arrived and quickly put the facility under lock-down conditions and took control of Black Mesa’s central control centre. When the scale of the disaster became clear, marines arrived from various military bases by aircraft, by road and by the New Mexico Railway. The Black Mesa civilians that reached the surface were not evacuated – instead of the standard containment procedure, from the top came the command for a full-scale clean-up operation. Containment was the operation’s main priority; but in this case it was the containment of information as well as the alien threat. The soldiers could be ordered to “forget” all that they saw, but the scientists and security guards of Black Mesa could not be expected to keep quiet. The marines were ordered to silence them, and very few questioned their orders. Most of the Black Mesa personnel were immediately killed on sight, while others were detained for interrogation in various secured locations such as cargo containers within the facility’s freight yard.

Several scientists were freed from captivity by security guard Barney Calhoun. One of these was Dr. Rosenberg, and Calhoun helped him reach one of the old teleportation laboratories located beneath the freight yards, where two other scientists were waiting. They had formulated a plan to use the outdated machinery to teleport to outside of the military perimeter around the facility, but the old technology was not calibrated to account for the spatial interference from Xen’s anomalous crystalline structures. The displacement device could not accurately target an Earth target without a signal from an untested relay device that had been left in the Xen borderworld. Barney Calhoun was teleported to the borderworld to activate the device.

Although the dampening fields from the facility’s containment system had failed to cause a resonance reversal, Dr. Keller believed that the prototype displacement beacon at the Gamma Complex could be used instead to seal the dimensional rift and end the invasion. The beacon used some reasonably pure Xen crystals to generate a powerful displacement field, which previously had been used to create miniature dimensional breaches which would pull alien specimens to Earth and directly into a holding area for capture. For the beacon to cause a resonance reversal, its displacement field would have to be correctly calibrated to neutralise the one within the dimensional rift, but unfortunately the advanced sensor equipment in the Lambda Complex could not scan the rift because it was too close to the anomaly. The necessary analysis could be made if the Omega Satellite was launched into geo-stationary orbit, since it was equipped with sensors designed to detect displacement events and monitor the teleportation networks in the Black Mesa facility. Unfortunately no rockets could be launched while “lock-down” was in effect, and an “all-clear” signal would have to be transmitted.

Doctors Cross and Green headed through the Level 3 Dormitories and found a security guard with the necessary codes. While Dr. Freeman was using an experimental rocket engine to destroy a tentacle infestation in the Sector D silo, Cross and Green regained control of Black Mesa Air-Traffic Control and uploaded the codes to the delivery rocket in Silo E. Before the scientists in the High Altitude Launch Facility could launch the satellite they were killed by the military, which had reached them using the facility’s maze-like materials transport network. The marines did not know the nature of the scientists’ plan and therefore made no attempt to launch the delivery rocket themselves. A security guard told Gordon Freeman of what had occurred and Freeman fought his way through the rail network to Silo E.

Gina Cross and Colette Green used Black Mesa’s canal system to access a system of service tunnels and maintenance areas, which connected to the silo for the Gamma labs’ prototype displacement beacon. When the platform controls failed they manually raised the beacon to the surface. Gordon Freeman eliminated the soldiers in the High Altitude Launch Facility and resumed the rocket launch sequence. The Omega satellite entered geo-stationary orbit, and the scientists in the Lambda and Gamma labs used the sensor telemetry to correctly calibrate the displacement beacon to initiate a resonance reversal. Before the reversal could be attempted Gina and Colette had to pass through the Gamma Complex’s quarantine labs in order to activate the beam matrix, which provides the displacement energy to power the beacon.

 

[KagePrototype]

The 3 day events of Half-Life, Opposing Force, Blue Shift and Decay, Taken from: http://website.lineone.net/~wingerden/

(With most if not all the BS speculation removed)

Day Two

Gina Cross and Colette Green returned to the surface and activated the displacement beacon. The Xen beings detected the concentration of displacement energy and they attacked in force to try and destroy the beacon. This attack included an assault by the Xen equivalent of a fighter aircraft, an airborne “manta ray” creature armed with a disintegrating beam of energised plasma, as well as alien soldiers. The two scientists killed the large flying creature with rocket-propelled grenades and successfully activated the beacon. The beacon fired displacement energy into several samples of Xen crystal, which created a displacement field specially calibrated to be in anti-phase with the field of the dimensional breach, neutralising the displacement energy and causing the rift to go into recession. The displacement energy that the Xen aliens were transmitting through the rift continued to hold the rift open, however, so direct action would have to be taken against the Xen aliens to collapse the dimensional breach and stop the invasion.

Barney Calhoun returned from Xen after successfully completing his mission, but the teleporter’s power cell had been exhausted and there was not enough power remaining for Barney Calhoun, Dr. Rosenberg, Walter and Simmons to escape. Barney ventured into the auxiliary generator facility beneath the old test labs to activate the old plasma generators and charge a new power cell for the teleportation machinery.

After launching the satellite delivery rocket, Dr. Freeman had passed through flooded maintenance and storage areas. When Gordon reached a cryogenic storage area, he was told be another scientist that both the military and the Black Mesa personnel were following his progress using the facility’s security systems – the HEV suits were full of tracking devices. So far he had survived both alien and human attack due to the reactive armour of his hazard suit and removing this protection was not an option.

A small group of female assassins had been given the specific task of killing Dr. Freeman. The research associate had succeeded in killing large numbers of marines and was severely interfering with the military operation. The military surveillance allowed them to ambush him but the assassination attempt failed. Shortly afterwards, however, Freeman was captured by two standard marines, which had cleverly hidden themselves and then knocked him out from behind.

After activating the plasma generators Barney Calhoun was able to charge a power cell and send it to the old displacement field lab. A displacement field had to be opened four times; portals were created for Walter and Simmons first, then Dr. Rosenberg, who set the device on automatic to create a portal for Calhoun. During the portal-formation process the military managed to break into the old lab. Their commander had been informed by the facility’s Administrator as to the nature of the prototype test labs and that they presented a means of escaping the facility. Some soldiers had crawled through vents and cut through a door, others had used explosives to blast through the lab’s main entrance while some came up the elevator from the auxiliary power facility. Pinned down by gunfire, Barney Calhoun narrowly escaped with his life, reaching the portal just before the displacement field collapsed.

The location that Calhoun and the scientists had been able to reach was a vehicle checkpoint several miles from the perimeter of the facility. After emerging from the portal Barney Calhoun was caught in a harmonic flux and was momentarily teleported to Xen, and then to a storage room in the facility. Before becoming dimensionally stable and returning to the security checkpoint, Calhoun witnessed Gordon Freeman being dragged by the two soldiers. They had been given orders to take him topside for questioning, but the military vendetta that had developed against Freeman led them to try and kill him, in an unconventional manner. Barney Calhoun re-appeared at the checkpoint and found that Walter had opened the gate and Simmons had hotwired one of the facility’s SUV Explorer vehicles – and Rosenberg told him the wonderful the truth: they had escaped.

The soldier’s that had captured Dr. Freeman dumped him in a waste compactor and attempted to crush him. Gordon regained consciousness, however, and managed to clamber on top of the debris to avoid being crushed.

Spacetime was no longer as chaotic as it was immediately following the resonance cascade, and Xen animals were rarely falling out of their own dimension into ours. Against the expectations of Black Mesa’s scientists, the Xen military force had started to appear in formation in strategic locations – the dimensional breach allowed them to use their organic teleportation techniques to reach Earth and the sentient Xen creatures were taking the opportunity to make a coordinated attack. The containment operation became a full-scale war between human and alien soldiers.

On day two of the incident several new alien races appeared in the facility. They were not from Xen, but in fact from an entirely separate dimensional borderworld that Earth had only just begun to have contact with. In the past a combination of malfunctions and miscalculations during experiments with the Gamma labs’ displacement beacon had somehow extracted a few small creatures from their world instead of the Xen dimension - they were the young of the dominant species. Also extracted was a plant that formed large spheres of corrosive spores which were found to be appropriate to the creatures’ diet. The scientists believed they had captured a new Xen species and were unaware of the creatures’ true origins, and had sent to the labs at the Biodome facility for study.

This “Race-X” somehow detected the dimensional rift on Earth and decided to invade using their own organic teleportation technology. At first very a few “Shock Troopers” were sent to scout in our world and they seized humans that they encountered and teleported them back to their own dimension for study. They also released an inferior species, “Pit-Drones” to fight both humans and Xen beings in Black Mesa.

It was the siege’s second afternoon when the Marines were ordered to pull out of the Black Mesa facility. The stream of creatures from the Xen borderworld showed no signs of stopping, so a higher chain of command decided to completely destroy Black Mesa, without the knowledge of the U.S. military, which still wished to recapture the installation.

A large contingent of black ops forces were sent into Black Mesa, and the marines that had not yet been evacuated assumed that they were simply taking their place or had been ordered to capture a particular objective. Their mission was in fact to detonate a thermonuclear warhead. When the standard military pulled out many marines remained trapped within Black Mesa, and the black ops opened fire on any they encountered because they could not allow any interference in completing their objective.

The activation of the displacement beacon caused a resonance reversal that should have caused the dimensional rift to collapse and then be sealed, but something was creating an enormous displacement field from Xen to our world that was holding the breach open. When Gordon Freeman reached Level A of the Lambda Complex, the scientists there gave him a mission – to eliminate whatever entity was creating this powerful portal and controlling the alien invasion. Freeman was sent to the Xen borderworld using the Lambda Complex’s Large Displacement Field Generator. The unstable spacetime conditions caused new displacement fields to branch off from the main one, forming several stable portals between random locations on Earth and Xen. The dimensional rift also caused prototype Displacer personal teleportation devices to open portals to random locations on Earth or Xen instead of their pre-designated teleportation zones, as several unfortunate scientists and a fortunate Corporal Adrian Shepard were to discover.

 

[KagePrototype]

The 3 day events of Half-Life, Opposing Force, Blue Shift and Decay, Taken from: http://website.lineone.net/~wingerden/

(With most if not all the BS speculation removed)

Day Three

Gordon Freeman succeeded in reaching “Nihilanth”, the being that was controlling the attack – an enormous creature that drew displacement energy from the borderworld’s crystalline structures and was capable of manipulating spacetime at will. The incursions mankind had made on Xen during the teleportation experiments had shown the creature that humanity was a threat, and the dimensional breach had allowed it to teleport an army of creatures to Black Mesa in a massive counterattack. Gordon Freeman and the alien being fought each other in a pitched battle between Earth weaponry and alien spatial manipulation and eventually Freeman succeeded in killed the entity. The displacement field it was generating disappeared and the dimensional breach was no-longer held open. Human technology could create portals to Xen but the aliens’ biological technology could not, so the invasion from Xen was over. On learning that the dimensional rift had been sealed the G-Man offered Dr. Gordon Freeman employment, and earth's forces seemingly invaded and took over Xen.

In a secure underground storage facility, Race-X had managed to create an organic displacement gateway of a type completely unlike that used by humans or the Xen creatures. Although the dimensional rift had collapsed with the death of Nihilanth Race-X’s portal maintained a link between our world and theirs. A group of soldiers and scientists working together had prepared two experimental weapons that used small pieces of Xen crystal to fire beams of displacement energy, disrupting spacetime and disintegrating matter. The humans had used these weapons to destroy a veritable army that came through the portal but they were overwhelmed, and the shocktroopers seized them and teleported them to their home dimension for study. With the opposition disposed of, through the portal came a “Gene-Worm”.

Fortunately, Corporal Adrian Shepard took control of the experimental energy weapons and fired them into the Gene-Worm’s vulnerable body areas, its eyes and then the interior of its body, which opened whenever the creature tried to create portals to bring in reinforcements. The dying being retreated into the portal but lost control of its enormous dimensional energies and exploded.

Corporal Shepard had killed the black operators who had been arming a thermonuclear warhead, but shortly before Shepard reached the Gene-Worm the G-Man re-armed the device. Soon after the destruction of the Gene-Worm and the chamber that contained Race-X’s dimensional portal, the surface of the Black Mesa Research Facility was vaporised in a thermonuclear explosion, and the underground complexes were smashed and forever buried beneath the radioactive crater. The G-Man teleported him out of there before he went with the explosion, then sent Corporal Shepard to be detained.

Please note, I might not have removed all the speculation, the author took it upon himself to add a number of things. He pieced most of it from the clues found in the game though, he just took it upon himself to fill in the gaps...I think I got it all though, I can't remember anything I didn't figure out from the game myself whilst playing it...by no means is this official, this is just written up by an obsessed fan I once knew who played the game too much...

 

[Biggleska]

Niiice - Really enjoyed reading that .

 

[Ch1cKeN]

you REALLY should have just played through last night or something.

 

[SMT]

FFS, just link to the page.

 

[Yogibbear]

Cheers for that :cheers:

 

[KagePrototype]

FFS, just link to the page.

The one on the page is full of BS. I did it a day or two ago anyway out of boredom, so I dug it up...

 

[eiric]

[...]
Anyway.. my lovely, forgiving, patient girlfriend... will be sitting down and watching me play (and hopefully playing a bit as well!) Half-Life 2 from tomorrow and I wanted to be able to give her a few well worded paragraphs of a synopsis of the original game just to make things easier.[...]

Damn, do you get your girlfriends to play? Mine only plays Sims 2 all the time. I'm gonna try getting her to at least test HL2. =)

 

[Didymium]

Didn't Decay have a bonus level where you play as a vortigaunt? Has anyone here played it?

 

[simon]

well, nice read, now i'm 100% aware of what happend in HL1 and blue shift and opposing force, i played them all 3, but it's just so long ago, and i never payed much attention to the story at that time :/
i know i will now of course in HL²
thanks

 

[KagePrototype]

Didn't Decay have a bonus level where you play as a vortigaunt? Has anyone here played it?

Apparently, there wasn't anything of interest story-wise, and wasn't very fun to play either.

 

[fragwell12345]

Thanks very much for that response... was well worth the read... thanks for finding that for me...

 

[mullen]

thanks, that was a good read

 

[fragwell12345]

Ok... so.. can someone explain 2me exactly what the last 5 minutes of Half-Life is like. i.e what you're doing as Freeman and what you see...

 

[KagePrototype]

You kill Nihilanth, and then the G-man appears and offers you a job ( I dunno exactly what he says, he takes some time getting to the point). If you don't take it, he sticks you in a huge canyon full of aliens with no weapons, and the screen goes black and the credits roll. If you do take it (by stepping into a teleport), the screen goes black and G-man says "wisely done, Mr. Freeman. I will see you up ahead." Then the credits roll.

 

[urbanx]

this is exactly what he says ...if you are interested

"Gordon Freeman, in the flesh. Or rather, in the hazard suit. I
took the liberty of relieving you of your weapons. Most of them were
government property. As for the suit, I think you've earned it. The
borderworld, Xen, is in our control, for the time being, thanks to you.
Quite a nasty piece of work you managed over there. I am impressed.

"That's why I'm here, Mr. Freeman. I have recommended your services to
my eh-eh-eh-eh-employers and they have authorized me to offer you a
job. They agree with me that you have limitlesssss potential.

"You've proved yourself a decisive man, so I don't expect you'll have
any trouble deciding what to do. If you're interested, just step into
the portal and I will take that as a yes. Otherwise, hm, well, I can
offer you a battle you have no chance of winning. Rather an anticlimax
after what you've just survived. Time to choose."