<\/div>The game begins with Morgan waking up in her penthouse apartment on the morning of March 15, 2032. From there she heads to the roof and takes a private helicopter to the nearby TranStar building where she meets up with her brother Alex. Apparently the Yu siblings are executives in the TranStar corporation. Morgan is about to travel to the TranStar space station in orbit around the moon, but first she needs to run through a battery of tests.<\/p>\n
The helicopter ride here reminds me a bit of the…<\/p>\n
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Half-Life Tram Ride<\/h3>\n
<\/div>\nThe first Half-Life game begins with a long tram ride into the Black Mesa research facility. There’s no gameplay, no dialog, no threat, and no story. The only agency the player has is in deciding where to aim their camera as the tram glides along.<\/p>\n
The whole sequence was a showcase for graphics and worldbuilding. The game showed off lots of animated doors and machinery, which was a big deal back in 1998 when game space was usually made from static geometry.\u00a0 These features also acted as foreshadowing for the future areas of the game and what sorts of things we were going to get to see, explore, and blow up in the coming gameplay. The automated tram announcer filled in a bunch of details about how the world worked and what sort of installation we were about to explore.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The entire sequence ran for more than five minutesAnd probably a good bit more than that in 1998, since the ride carried you through multiple loading screens. They’re nearly instant now, but that wasn’t the case back then.<\/span>. And since this wasn’t a cutscene, you couldn’t just skip it.\u00a0<\/p>\n On one hand, the entire sequence was brilliant. It was really nice to have a game take some time and establish a setting and mood before the shooting started. The world felt a little more real and alive thanks to the countless details revealed on the tram ride.\u00a0<\/p>\n On the other hand, this sequence broke just about every rule and guideline about how you’re supposed to construct games. You’re supposed to get the player interacting with the world as quickly as possible. At the very least, you should be teaching the player the audio and visual language of the game. Stuff like:\u00a0<\/p>\n And so on.<\/p>\n And if you’re not teaching the player the language of the game, then you should 100% be introducing characters and getting the story going in order to draw them into the world and get them engaged emotionally!<\/p>\n The Half-Life tram ride ignores all of that. It’s all worldbuilding and show-off art assets at a point in the game where you don’t even know who you are or what your goal is.\u00a0<\/p>\n People heaped praise on the game at launch for the tram ride. I remember lots of people declaring it “The greatest intro sequence of all time”. But over the last 23 years that enthusiasm has waned. In the process of doing this write-up, I did a search for “Top X Best Game Intros of All Time!” articles. There are a lot of those sorts of lists floating around out there, but among the many lists I read, only one mentioned Half-Life<\/a>. And it wasn’t even close to the top of the list.\u00a0<\/p>\n Sure, the people who write those lists tend to be young, and so the lists GENERALLY favor titles of the last 15 years. But even among the gaming codgers that frequent this site, I just don’t see the original Half-Life intro getting the love it used to.\u00a0<\/p>\n My guess is that the tram ride represented a much-needed swing towards narrative. Players really were looking for a game that would pull them in and establish a proper setting and mood before the shooting started. At the same time, I doubt anyone was actually hoping for a world where every game began with 5 minutes of unskippable narration, loading screens, and “next-gen” graphical flexing before the player needed to pick up the controller. In retrospect, the Half-Life tram ride was an over-correction. But it was indeed a correction to a real problem<\/i>.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Few AAA games could get away with five minutes of unskippable non-interactive introduction these days, but even fewer could get away with the DOOM approach of dropping you into an endless context-free fight and telling you to read a disconnected .txt file if you want to know what’s going on.<\/p>\n Games don’t need to tell a grand story, but they do need to create a mood and a sense of place. So I appreciate the Half-Life intro for how it contributed to that idea, even if it seems a bit self-indulgent today. <\/p>\n\n
How The Mighty Have Fallen<\/h3>\n
<\/div>The Helicopter Ride<\/h3>\n