🍉 Melon 🍉

I recently mentioned that my first contact with Half-Life was opportunistically warezing its demo at art school. Since the game turns 25 years old today¹ I thought I'd talk about how big a role it played in the next few steps of my path.

I didn't see it until many years later, but Valve did a series of strange pre-release advertisements for the game, and one of them had a giant staring baby face with the caption "LIFE WILL BE DIFFERENT". I don't know if it was intended as a play on "Half-Life" or what. But in retrospect, first seeing it only after the game had so clearly had such a massive impact on the course of my life and career... it was hard not to read it with an eerie sense of that.

According to this wiki, the Day One demo leaked about two months before the game's retail release, so I probably downloaded it in September of '98 - right around the time Grim Fandango released its demo. Those two games made such a massive impression on me that I knew where my spending money was going for October and November. I remember a friend driving me home from the Software Etc where I'd bought Half-Life on this day 25 years ago, us stopping to fill up the gas tank on a stretch of highway in Arlington, Texas, and the price of gas being just under $1 a gallon, like 98 cents or so.

I more or less inhaled Half-Life's single player campaign as soon as I was back at my computer after the holidays, and found it so intimidatingly impressive that I didn't immediately want to make single player levels for it. Whereas its multiplayer deathmatch mode was just a couple clicks away, it was reasonably playable on my dial-up modem connection, and people were doing cool maps for that very soon after release. So sometime in January of 1999 I downloaded WorldCraft 2.0 - a program I already had some experience using, to make a Quake map of our dorm building in 1997 - and started playing around with HL1's textures and level design features.

My first attempt was vaguely inspired by a song off Dark Side of the Moon, set in a giant clock tower. I probably also had the final sequence of Great Mouse Detective lurking in my subconscious from seeing it as a kid. I built some decent looking geometry and had fun playing with lighting, but looking at it now the reason I lost momentum on it was probably that it was miserably cramped, yet also extremely vertical - not at all good for deathmatching, with various areas connected by the same duct crawls that had worked pretty well as section breaks in the single player levels. I think I just didn't understand deathmatch flow very well yet.

My next few attempts were trying out different ideas: "Duality" was a Crossfire-inspired outdoor map with two still extremely cramped freestanding base structures that could each summon an air strike (giant damage triggers + some scripted sounds and vfx) against the other. "Triadica" was a variation on this idea with 3 bases - less cramped, better geo, lots of modernist indirect lighting using valve-qrad's very cool "texture light" feature that is vaguely reminiscent of Apple Store interior design as I look at it today. Finally, "Kill Jar" was an almost jokemap-sized square room with some weapons and a system of alternately-toggling force fields very obviously inspired by my seeing The Phantom Menace the week or two before, which dates it pretty precisely to early June of 99. In retrospect, if I'd managed to release this one online it probably would have gotten a lot of mindless fun play on pub servers.

But I didn't release any of these maps. My "level art" skills (architectural sense, decorative geo, texturing, lighting) were decent but I could tell their layouts and playability were below the standards of the user-created maps I was playing on pub servers during that period. I needed a good strong layout that I could work some magic on, bring to completion, and get out into the world.

So I went back to an old, familiar well: the interior of the Upper School Commons building where I went to high school, which had a bizarrely (for any real world structure, much less something as institutional as a school) good deathmatch arena sort of multi-tier layout. I'd actually already built the space as an FPS level twice before, once for a Doom level I finished at the beginning of 1996 and distributed around school on floppy disks², and again for an ultimately-unreleased Quake recreation in the summer of 97. Each of those revisions had made it successively clearer to me what was interesting about the interior as a 3D playable game space, so my HL1DM version was heavily stylized and focused on a good flow between the two Z levels and around the various weapons and pickups that I'd placed, with a growing sense of how decent balance worked. I posted a few work-in-progress versions for feedback on the Radium forums³, so it was the first real level design community, the first game development community of any kind, I was involved with.

I finished that map in late June of 1999, and posted it in the queue for Radium's level review process. I still remember the feeling of checking the site a few days later and finding a strongly positive review of my map - the first public praise for level design work I'd done, complimenting its strong atmosphere and use of the Xen textures.

At this point I felt emboldened to expand my ambitions, and maybe give single player level development another try. Grim Fandango was the other game from the past year that had made a big impression on me, and I particularly loved the feeling of a whole town open to explore in the game's second chapter, Rubacava. And some college friends of mine who'd left school early to take jobs at ION Storm Dallas had told me some intriguing things about Deus Ex, the game that their sister studio down in Austin was working on: first person gameplay in a semi open world with characters you can talk to, faction relationships to negotiate, a story that changes based on player decisions, all with the non-cutscene-based real time storytelling pioneering by Half-Life. Oh, and I guess I was reading all of Sandman around this time as well, and Gilliam's Brazil had seared itself into my brain.

So for the rest of that summer, and on into the fall and winter break, I devoted almost all my free time to planning out and building a demo - a tiny chunk of the grand vision I was developing - for a single player Half-Life mod set in a setting I might have called urban fantasy, if I'd known there was a term for it: a world where, much as Deus Ex posited that "all conspiracies are true", all mythology was real, a giant alt-1920s/30s art deco city called Babylon where angels, demons, djinn, vampires, lycanthropes - you name it - were living clandestinely among humans and fighting a huge power struggle just out of sight.

It was a huge, pulpy, overambitious mess that I would now recognize as being simply "a big bag of things I thought were cool", but I was at least approaching it in a mildly sensible way: choosing a tiny, manageable piece to build, thinking through each decision fully, and building it in 3D before figuring out the next bit.

The level was a train station with a lot of art deco and art nouveau flourishes, and tons of custom art - my texture painting skills got much stronger in the course of doing this. It was also fun scavenging and recording custom sounds to define the station's audio ambiance. A loop from a Duke Ellington song, mucked-with in SoundForge to sound like it was coming from an old tube radio. The train that whooshes past one of the platforms periodically was mixed partly from stock train sounds and partly from the train that passed near the house where I grew up in Watauga, Texas. It was also a great exercise in learning how to tell a story in a 3D space, figuring out how to put believable blockages in front of the player, dangle new plot and world details in front of them, and use small bits of HL-style scripting to move the story forward. The Deus Ex / Black & White style player choice⁴ came down to "take a security guard by surprise and kill him"⁵ vs "find another way around him", but thinking through all the contingencies was a valuable design experience.

As 1999 ended I was getting pretty obsessed with this project. I was working at a bookstore at the time, and remember using the blank backs of coupons to sketch out, in moments when the store got quiet, all the details of the areas I needed to build next. When I got back to school in January 2000 to start the next semester, my attention was still on my personal project, and I realized that I now wanted to do game development way more than become an animator or any of the other stuff my major was preparing me for⁶ - I'd finally found something I was legit good at. I dropped out in February⁷ and started working like a demon to finish up this demo, figuring as a portfolio piece it would be by far my best bet at getting a job at a game company. By March I'd sent my resume to Looking Glass⁸, Valve, and a bunch of other studios. And by early April, I was on a flight up to Madison, Wisconsin to interview with a studio called Human Head who was looking for level designers who also happened to know 3D Studio MAX. And by the beginning of May, I was packing my stuff into a U-haul to move there for my first game development job.

So yeah... for me personally, Half-Life came out... and Life was Different. I'd been designing 3D levels for years before, but all the pieces Half-Life put together - along with the experiences of playing Grim Fandango and Thief: the Dark Project⁹ - made something click in my mind, and I could see the next 10+ years of the medium unfolding, with scripting-heavy haunted houses merging with systemic/simulated gameplay merging with in-depth 3D storytelling and world building. There was nothing more exciting to me, and on some level I knew from that moment, stepping off the tram at the Sector C Test Labs, that this medium was where I wanted to be.

1. Wheeze, wheeze... I need a moment...

2. Yes, I made a Doom level of my high school. This was about 3 years before the Columbine assholes kinda ruined that for everyone.

3. Visiting any of the Radium URLs via the archive.org wayback machine today tells you that the site has been "excluded" from its archive - I wonder what the story is there?

4. Yes, this was an early "videogame moral choice" of the kind I would much later regret having anything to do with. But in my defense, I was a 20 year old amateur.

5. This was the only "combat" in the mod, and it wasn't even really combat; it was using a revolver with a single bullet as an adventure game object.

6. This was a few years before SCAD had a game development major. I think there might have been one class where you could dink around with the very first version of UnrealEd, but I never took it.

7. I don't want to downplay how terrifying and foolhardy this was and how badly it went down with my parents, but that's a whole other story.

8. Which I didn't know only had a couple months left to live... RIP.

9. This is another post for another time, but good lord there will never, ever be another 1998. Absolutely astounding year for the development of games as a medium.