Good in the same way that David Attenborough is good. They were all stone-cold classics, but whereas Fandango and Thief sold modestly, Half-Life was a smash hit.Īnd it was good, objectively good. The magazines loved it, just as they had loved Grim Fandango and Thief: The Dark Project, which were released within a few weeks of each other. It put the fear into fear-etical physics. It came from nowhere and shook everything up. I'm talking about Half-Life, the original Half-Life. The few flashes of novelty were drowned out by boring mission packs and rote sequels, until a saviour emerged. In the late 1990s there was a flood of prefab first-person shooters using licensed engines. It held a Heckler and Koch XM8, and there was a cover system, and the player could pay to download an attractive new suit of bulletproof armour. Action gaming in the late 2000s and early 2010s was the colour of dull sand despite having all the latest shader technology. But for a few years the good 10% suffered from being forced into a square hole it was only 80% as good.Įventually a new wave of powerful consoles kicked things back into gear, but the gaming industry was then faced with the problem of spiralling budgets, creative exhaustion, and a kind of pervasive homogeneity. History remembers a small number of classics such as Civilization and Pirates, and forgets that the majority of games were rubbish.
The old saying that "90% of everything is crap" applies to the PC games industry as well. I don't want to rag on consoles too much. Too often this meant simplifying the game for consoles, and then porting the results to the PC with minimal changes. Half-Life 2 was developed at a time when the console port of a PC game was no longer an afterthought it had to be as good as the PC original. Eight years is the gap between the top-down, two-dimensional Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake and the artistically lit polygons of its PlayStation descendent Metal Gear Solid. I'm old enough to remember when eight years was an eternity in gaming terms.