Get the latest tech news

Half-Life

Around twenty years ago, people would have laughed if you told them that videogames would end up at the Smithsonian, but the Half-Life team really did want to make games that were more than just throwaway toys. The rule against cinematics — which made our jobs much harder and also ended up leaving a lot of my favorite work out of the game — was a kind of ideological stake in the ground: we really did want the game and the story to be the same thing.

The same realization led a highly respected Microsoft programmer named Michael Abrash to quit his cushy job in Redmond, Washington, throw his tie into the nearest trashcan, and move to Mesquite, Texas, to help John Carmack and the other scruffy id boys make Quake. It led another insider named Alex St. John to put together the internal team who made DirectX, a library of code that allowed game developers and players to finally say farewell to creaky old MS-DOS and join the rest of the world that was running Windows 95. The game’s loading screen and its box art show us a rather atypical FPS protagonist, someone very different from the muscle-bound, cigar-chomping Duke Nukem or the cocky budding Jedi knight Kyle Katarn: a slim, studious-looking fellow with Coke-bottle eyeglasses and a token goatee.

Get the Android app