TOAt the beginning of Valve’s Half-Life 2, the influential first-person shooter that turns 20 this month, taciturn scientist Gordon Freeman is trapped in a dystopian urban landscape. Armed soldiers patrol the streets and innocent citizens wander around dazed, devoid of purpose and future. Dr. Wallace Breen, Freeman’s former boss at the Black Mesa scientific “research center,” looks down from giant video screens, espousing the virtues of humanity’s benefactors, an alien race known as The Combine.
As Freeman stumbles through these early levels of Half-Life 2, the player becomes acclimated to the horrific future that lies before them. It’s not the happiest of settings, but there are some friendly faces (security guard Barney, Alyx and Eli Vance) and even moments of humor, as Dr. Isaac Kleiner’s pet, a beaked, face-eating alien named Lamarr, He goes crazy in his laboratory. He feels safe. It feels fun. It feels familiar. There’s even a lever! And then, the omen. “That’s the old passage to Ravenholm,” Alyx Vance murmurs during Freeman’s chapter five tour of the Black Mesa East facility. “We don’t go there anymore.” You feel a chill run down your spine; you know you will end up going there.
“(Ravenholm) was a totally different environment than the player had had up to that point,” says Dario Casali, a level designer and member of the informal City 17 Cabal, a group within Valve that worked on Half-‘s most famous level. Life 2. . “It was an outlier of a map set surviving from a fairly early version of the game, arising from the need to give the recently introduced Gravity Gun a place to shine.”
The lack of ammunition for Freeman’s traditional weapons is the impetus that pushes Ravenholm and Half-Life 2 into horror game territory. Ravenholm, a former mining town, previously hidden from the Combine, is now a desolate place, plunged into darkness, its citizens corrupted by an intense bombardment of headcrabs (those face-eating aliens). “We used small spaces so that slow zombies (people affected by headcrab) could get closer to you,” Casali reveals. And the player can no longer destroy them with a machine gun or pistol; You must resort to the heavy Gravity Gun, collect everything you can find around you and throw it at the monsters that are attacking Freeman. Paint cans, pieces of wood and even corpses became the player’s ammunition.
Like most of Half-Life 2, Ravenholm is a cinematic experience, inspired by horror films like Saw and 28 Days Later. When Combine forces attack Black Mesa East, Freeman escapes through the dark tunnel leading to Ravenholm. Instantly, a sudden change of atmosphere descends like a chill over the player: a gloomy set of dark buildings, faint, almost nonexistent music, two crashed headcrab rockets, and something swinging from a barren tree. Closer inspection reveals the lower half of a corpse, pecked by crows.
Headcrab zombies appear out of nowhere, moaning their painful exhortations; but soon these will be the least of Freeman’s worries. Designed to fit the map, Ravenholm’s “fast” zombies climb sewer pipes and run across rooftops, leaving little safe haven for the adventurous scientist. Freeman must also contend with hunched creatures that hurl poisonous crabs.
Fortunately, Freeman is not without help; Soon, he encounters Father Grigori, responsible for Ravenholm’s saw traps and passionately redeeming his “flock” with a shotgun. Casali says: “My take was that this guy had slowly lost his mind due to headcrabs and turning his congregation into zombies. Because Ravenholm was so isolated, I figured he didn’t even know about the Combine invasion and thought the devil had come to town. “Father Grigori and his flock of zombies were the perfect excuse to intensify the terror.”
Freeman follows Grigori through Ravenholm to a final climactic battle in (appropriately) a graveyard. “I thought Ravenholm really needed an action-packed ending worthy of a horror movie,” says Casali, “and what better place to do it than in a cemetery!”
While that final encounter, with Freeman and Grigori besieged by an army of zombies and headcrabs, releases some of the built-up tension while exploring the spooky streets of Ravenholm, the level still leaves a lasting impression on anyone who’s played it, such is the abrupt change in tone and style. The segment lasted practically from the beginning of Half-Life 2’s long development (a version appeared in Valve’s famous E3 2003 demo) and evolved into the ammo-short end-game horror fest.
As one of the most notable games of the last 20 years, Half-Life 2 defined the future of gaming with its groundbreaking visuals and extraordinary physics engine. As part of the City 17 Cabal, the work of Casali and his colleagues was fundamental. “The desire to surpass the original Half-Life was very strong and we were constantly motivated by the quality of the work that the other teams were doing,” he recalls. “It was magical.”