What even happened in Half-Life 1?

half-life 1 is a very vague game it's vague how exactly the game was intended to be played it's vague whether or not gordon is to blame for everything that happens it's vague if g-man is an ally or not hell we can't even agree on if gordon was wearing a helmet over the course of the game or if the gearbox expansions are canon but above all else the story is vague now this isn't a bad thing at all it's all part of the fun of the half-life series on my recent video discussing the combine and half-life 2 there were a handful of comments saying things like this video has so many leaps and logic and as i said that's part of the fun of the series these games leave so much to the imagination any answer you come to about what is going on is going to have some major leaps and logic and that right there is why it's so fun to discuss these games with friends all these years later as mysterious as the state of humanity is in half-life 2 we're shown even less of what's really going on in half-life 1. and as many times as i've played the finer details of the story are still incredibly vague in my mind so viewer let's try to sort out what exactly happened in half-life 1. full spoilers ahead and fair warning i'll be touching on a couple of things that just straight up aren't represented in black mesa the popular fan-made remake of half-life 1 and for the purposes of this video i won't be considering the gearbox expansions opposing force blue shift and decay canon and i won't be considering any lore that we discover in half-life 2. this video is just coming from the perspective of it's 1998 you just installed this cool new game what can we figure out about the story we're going to be talking about everything from what the point of the rocket launch was to what the hell the nylon is to whether or not the combine is in half-life 1 obviously they weren't fleshed out or anything back in 98 but is there some force at play that would later become the combine in half-life 2 let's find out who knows we might even figure out what g-man's game is so first off let's go over what we can say for certain black mesa was a government-funded research facility that was exploring teleportation technology they discovered that a mysterious alien dimension zen was in some way linked to teleportation a sort of bridge they could use to cross from one place to the other amongst the extensive research that the discovery of zen prompted were experiments on the aliens themselves gordon freeman worked in the anomalous materials lab at black mesa where he performed an experiment that involved emitting some sort of a beam into a crystal from zen and this caused a resonance cascade which essentially opened the door for life from zinn to be teleported to black mesa causing a major disaster for everyone in the facility after a few hours the military shows up and tries to contain the disaster by well killing everybody who knows anything gordon fights his way through the military following the instructions of various black mesa employees in order to launch a rocket that's supposed to help in the resonance cascade however aliens continue teleporting in eventually becoming a full-blown military invasion by the aliens gordon continues fighting through black mesa until eventually he reaches the lambda laboratory where he prevents a reactor meltdown by flooding it with coolant and eventually is teleported directly into zen in order to kill some sort of powerful being that is apparently holding the portal open in zim gordon discovers that some aliens are being enslaved and that the bulkier more dangerous alien grunts are being manufactured in some sort of factory gordon kills a monster called the nylanth which clearly has some control over teleportation and is swept away by a mysterious humanoid thing which has been watching him this entire time and this thing thanks him for helping his faction to take control of zen and puts him in stasis to fight for him again on some other day so that's pretty much the surface level story this is all the stuff that you're pretty likely to figure out after one or two playthroughs but i've played through this game like at least 30 times and there are still so many questions what is the nylenth why does it decide to invade earth how were these alien factories built why do these guys have handcuffs but the other aliens don't why does this rocket seemingly do nothing what the hell is this thing we talk to at the end of the game well most of these questions require a fair bit of speculation to answer but i think we can find pretty satisfying answers to all of these questions and really start to piece together what exactly valve's intentions were for this story and equally as interesting what they were really trying to say with this game alright so gordon's teleportation experiment caused a resonance cascade which is causing monsters to teleport and seemingly at random got it these monsters are basically wild animals they attack each other they don't use any sort of nuanced tactics beyond pack hunting and occasionally lying in ambush that's all well and good until we hear a banging behind this door the alien slaves for clarity's sake we'll call them vortigaunts these guys are different than the head crabs and the bull squids and the hound eyes first off they aren't naked they've got these green collars around their necks and matching cuffs on their hands we saw them doing something to us at the moment of the resonance cascade they cower in fear when they're wounded they coordinate attacks against gordon and the military these things aren't just wild animals there's something more to them of course by half-life 2 we learn a lot more about the vortigaunts but still what the hell are they supposed to be in this game and if this is some sort of coordinated invasion of earth as their intellect suggests then why are random wild animals teleporting in with them why do some teleportations seem totally random and others seem like coordinated interdimensional flanks at gordon's expense well believe it or not i think the answer goes a bit deeper than it's just for the sake of gameplay and that answer begins with one of the most confusing parts of half-life 1 story an aspect of the story that still seems weird even after having played this game god only knows how many times the rocket launch pretty much all that we learn about this rocket over the course of half-life 1 is what this guard tells us at the end of power up he said something about a lambda team needing the satellite in orbit if they were ever going to clean up this mess okay so the rocket is supposed to help stop the aliens from teleporting in makes sense but well it doesn't do that if anything the alien teleportation is more brutal than ever after the rocket is launched however there's one interesting fact here that i've never seen anyone talking about headcrabs bull squids houndeyes they're all teleporting in basically a random sure houndize and head crabs tend to hunt in packs and we see them grouping up together accordingly but i mean look at this or this there are more examples but i think you get me this isn't some sort of a coordinated invasion at all the vortigaunts however that's a different story anytime we see them teleporting in they're doing it in a way that makes tactical sense look at that footage i just showed again they're teleporting in specifically to flank these two soldiers by the way i'm using the no target console command in a lot of these clips essentially making me invisible to enemies anyways we see the vortigaunts setting up front lines and staging ambushes against gordon and the soldiers they even try that teleport flanking trick on gordon a couple of times these monsters they're just appearing and wreaking havoc the vortigaunts well they're part of a full-fledged invasion of black mesa so why does any of this matter and what does it have to do with this rocket launch well believe it or not the alien teleportation gets a whole whole lot less random after this rocket launch seriously this was just a random thought i had to try and justify the rocket launch and i decided to go through the game specifically trying to pay attention to the teleportation and there's a very real shift in how the aliens teleport in after the rocket launch look at this for instance right as we begin residue processing we see this headcrab teleporting looks pretty random right well this is actually a distraction so that we get attacked by the second head grab the teleport's in right above gordon or this bullsquid a bit later you can't tell me that this wasn't specifically intended to kill gordon hell they may have even been trying to telefrag him the vortigaunts and the grunts get even more malicious with their teleporting too like this one right here who appears just as the catwalk beneath you collapses and you crossed a slippery floor or a bit later we get a serious flank against gordon form some more teleporting vortigaunts or right here when a group of them appears behind you in a room you had previously cleared out after the rocket launch there were only like two more instances of monsters by which i mean everything but grunts and vorts teleporting in from this point on every instance of teleporting we see is clearly deliberate and tactical so why does any of this matter well one detail that i've always loved about the half-life series is how many innocent people gordon inadvertently gets killed i mean you've got this elevator this guy right here most of the security guards and scientists that follow gordon and that's just in the first game plus there's of course the unavoidable fact that gordon played a major hand in the death of well literally everybody that dies in the entire half-life series and that he helped cause the resonance cascade keep that idea of gordon getting people killed in mind it'll be important soon okay so the rocket was supposed to stop the teleportation but they keep on teleporting in as we learn later in the game this is because while the rocket closed the portal on our side the nylon is still holding the portal open on its side in zen well it seems to me like gordon closing the portal on our side is what prompted the nylon to start its full-fledged invasion of earth when it became harder to maintain the portal it realized that its time was limited and that humans could indeed stop its plan if it didn't act fast everything we see here it's a hail mary from the nylon trying to save as many of its species as a can or kill all the humans involved before it loses the opportunity that the resonance cascade gave it so obviously the game doesn't just give you the answers to any of this it doesn't confirm any of this stuff we're just speculating we'll address that but as long as we're speculating we've got two big questions left to answer first what the hell is the nylenth and what are its motives and second what the hell is this thing and what are its motivations so in true half-life fashion it's easier to speculate about the giant flying god of teleportation space baby than it is to speculate about the man in a suit so we'll start with an island so what do we know so far the resonance cascade allowed it to move its various organisms to earth from this weird bridge dimension it has some sort of insane powers of teleportation allowing it to both hold a portal to earth open and teleport gordon at will and it somehow coax these creatures to fight for it there's more here but for now let's go over some relevant facts first this alien armada uses biological life as vehicles sometimes modifying them when necessary such as the mana rays that both mine and zen and airdrop aliens into black mesa or the alien grunts themselves they even have a factory to manufacture these soldiers second the vortigaunts are seemingly mind controlled since the factory workers don't attack gordon unless provoked it's safe to assume that these grunts are also being mind controlled as well or have been bred to have minimal free will and just fight before we go ahead and say that this is all the nylens doing let's go over some more obscure ideas so first off something that i've never heard anyone talking about a detail that's on your screen right now but that you probably haven't noticed a detail so subtle that it wasn't even present in black mesa the nylon's third arm has been grafted onto it the alien controllers which highly resemble the nylon straight down to the splitting head and the energy ball attacks have a natural third arm but not the nylenth not to mention the nylon almost literally says that it's the last of its kind this thing isn't the same species as the alien controllers plus there's the obvious modifications made to its lower half and most damning of all the cuffs in my mind there are two ways of interpreting these handcuffs theory one whatever force is controlling the vortigaunts through these cuffs is also controlling the nylon the nylon has so much agency over the course of this game though that i doubt this one plus it doesn't explain the third arm theory 2 however makes a bit more sense to me the cuffs are what allow the nylon to control the vortigaunts this would totally explain the third arm it's been grafted on the nylon to make it well let's say to make it compatible with the vortigaunts that one makes more sense to me but it raises one big question who the hell grafted this third arm onto the nylon who put the cuffs on it who added all of this stuff to its lower half well everyone i've talked to about this said that it probably just gave itself those enhancements but well listen to this line [Music] yep this thing goes deeper than the nylanth now i'm not going to say the valve had planned out the combine and the advisors and the combine overworld and all of that that'd be ridiculously cool but ridiculous nonetheless all i'm saying is that there is some sort of force at play here even more powerful than the nylon and it's taking control of various alien species going so far as to enslave them and modify them with technology to better suit their needs they manufacture soldiers and they have only a loose control over teleportation needing humans to do some of the work for them these guys are a whole lot like the combine would turn out to be back to the modifications in the case of the nylon this seems to be a creature modified to be able to maintain control over the vortigaunts so whether this all-powerful force that's enslaved the nylon would later become half-life 2's combine or not i'll leave up to you personally i think that's absolutely the case regardless we've still got some more questions the big one is simply whether or not this force is the one invading earth or if the nylon was acting independently we're getting very deep into speculation here and having to keep up with the whole lot of very subtle and impossible to confirm lore here's a fun fact to break the pace when you get the hive hand you'll pretty quickly learn that it's actually able to shoot around corners and it has infinite ammo if you then decide to fired around corners every now and then to safely check for enemies you might find that it actually triggers this sentry gun helping you to avoid its otherwise dangerous sneak attack anyways is this massive force that i'll just call the combine for familiarity's sake the ones invading earth and half-life 1 or is the nylth invading earth on its own well given that we know that the combine are fans of mind control in this game and that the nylon is able to communicate to freeman that it's been enslaved i'm going to say that it's acting independent of the combine however it still has these factories where it manufactures soldiers it still uses mana rays to mine the terrain of zen and transport troops so what the hell well with that last question we've gotten all the background out of the way buckle up because i'm about to lay down my grand interpretation of all of this lore and give you my take on the entirety of half-life one story all in one go at some point in the past the combine conquered the nylon species and killed off all but one of them they kept this last nylon around in order to modify it grafting a third arm onto it so that they could use its mind control powers to gain control over their vortigaunts some other species from some other planet that it had conquered they used these vortigaunts as light infantry and as slaves to create more subjects or to do anything else that they may have needed biological labor for at some point the nylenth used its teleportation powers to transport as many of the combined slaves as possible to zen a bridge dimension between points in space that the combine is unable to get to on its own once in zen the nylanth used its control over the vortigaunts to build factories in which to manufacture soldiers appointing an allied species the alien controllers to watch over these factories and play foreman using these factories it slowly started building up its army so that it would be ready for anything the nylth was just hiding from the combine growing up enough power to eventually take them on or run away to where they couldn't follow at some point a bit later on earth scientists at black mesa discovered a way to travel into zen and started collecting samples they started doing experiments on the alien life and on zen crystals both of which could be found all over the place in zen one day young mit graduate gordon freeman was a part of one of these experiments and this one went wrong it caused a resonance cascade scenario which opened up a portal between earth and the crystal's home dimension zen this caused alien species to teleport in at random and wreak havoc on black mesa the nylenth with its great control over teleportation sent some of its vortigaunts in to probe this new place but by the time it had confirmed that the combine wasn't here gordon had already taken measures to close the portal and end the resonance cascade he fired a rocket into space which allowed the lambda team to close the portal on our side this stopped the random teleportation of aliens but it forced the nylon to maintain the portal entirely on its own it couldn't keep this up forever and it knew that gordon or some other human would continue trying to close the portal so it began a full-fledged military invasion of black mesa to try and stop the humans from ruining this opportunity to get as far away from the combine as possible gordon was one of the few survivors of the nylens invasion of black mesa and he eventually made it to the teleportation chamber in black mesa and traveled to zen where he fought his way through the soldier manufacturies and eventually to the nylons chamber where he killed it thus destroying any chance that the aliens we fought over the course of the game had of starting anew and living a life that wasn't dominated by the combine then gordon gets abducted by a space god the g-man scene in half-life 1 reminds me of something that i haven't really touched on yet in this video half-life 1 has never been a game about inter-dimensional politics or an alien underground railroad or manufactured alien soldiers battling against human soldiers or any of that half-life 1 as a whole is about one thing humans trying to conquer forces that are beyond their comprehension and then doing their best to clean it up when that inevitably backfires it's a classic icarus story mankind's hubris turned out to be its downfall as much as i'd love to conclude this video by pinpointing exactly where gman sits in the lore discussing his history and motivations that just plain isn't possible or if it is it's well beyond me i just spent about 18 minutes dissecting every single intricate detail of this game's story and i don't have the slightest clue what g-man's angle is we know that he and his employers wanted control of zen which probably means that they wanted the nylon dead we know that he was in black mesa before the resonance cascade probably meaning that he either caused it or knew ahead of time that it was going to happen but that's about all i got at least in terms of what half-life 1 tells us just about everything i've said over the course of this video was pure speculation that's half the fun of half-life it's the reason videos like this are still cropping up 23 years after the game's launch we're all just well trying to speculate on affairs that are beyond our comprehension we're no different than the humans in the game we're just trying to understand ideas that we couldn't possibly understand the most important word in the entirety of half-life 1 is spoken by g-man in the final minutes of the game i have recommended your services to my employers employers that's what this is all about this teleportation master organism it's not the bottom of the iceberg it's running scared from some all-powerful alien conglomerate that all-powerful alien conglomerate isn't the bottom of the iceberg either we can pinpoint a lot of key facts about it just in this first game then you've got g-man this god-like thing that we really don't know anything about we don't know if it's a friend to humanity or an enemy we have no idea what it actually looks like we have no idea if it caused the resonance cascade or if it's just some black mesa employee who was subject to about a million scientific breakthroughs or if it's an alien or what we are absolutely clueless about this thing and yet in this final spine chilling moment we learned that even this thing has employers and you know what i'll bet that this thing's employers are just subcontractors to some even bigger space conglomerates and that even they have forces that they bow to and so on and so on and so on humanity might have been able to invent teleportation but we're single-celled organisms compared to the questions out there in the universe we will never know what is truly going on behind the scenes and the world of half-life because the world of half-life is one in which humanity opened the door to questions that absolutely no human could ever answer [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] before i close out this week's video and get to work on figuring out what i'm going to do next i'd like to go ahead and verbally thank my patrons especially those who are donating 10 or more monthly such as aydah avery almost dead again anatoly vollmov andrew melnick antoine deguette benny big time jim bobby blitz cj keane chompy oo-woo christopher piner colin gaijic cosmo borski darius fazzier david kaiser dennis vashakumar sorry for my german dominic johann duncan bristow fralem guiles backers idubbbz ijk jack eisenberg jano kale graybill crit laffy mellow mixer rules neurofilter raptor robert scotty from marketing celo tan man vivian cox vladimir's nordholm william t keen vo yemen she zoe nish and zyrobly if you're on the discord or my twitter you might have caught wind of this but i think i'm going to be switching to doing these proper video essays every two weeks to fill the newly vacated air i'm going to be trying something a little bit different where i just do five or six minute recommendations on games i like no poetic analysis stuff or anything like that no spoilers just me saying hey you should really play this game i've just found myself a little bit drained right now with all of the things going on in my life and i'm just not very good at focusing on multiple big things at once and there have been a lot of big things lately so anyways thank you for your patience and have a great week

Channel: Leadhead

Views: 596,225

Keywords: analysis, explained, essay, review, half, life, lore, ending, gman, nihilanth, baby, teleporting, resonance, cascade, gordon, freeman, vortigaunt, combine, xen, story, narrative, meaning

Id: tpp0Jh5514g

Length: 23min 41sec (1421 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 30 2021