Unremarkable and odd places in Half Life (1998)
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- Опубліковано 27 вер 2024
- #liminalspace #sourceengine #weird #halflife #valve
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The Black Mesa Research Facility in Half-Life is set within a decommissioned Cold War-era subterranean missile base, so the office complex is meant to elicit feelings of dated and old fashioned furniture and architecture. The flooded chambers are the long abandoned missile silos, hence the deep and cavernous pits, which this room probably was before they stuck water in it. The other factor to consider is that all the levels were hacked up and hastily slapped together when the game was rebuilt in the year leading up to its release, rendering many of the original layouts which were specifically meant to be believable spaces into abstract and labyrinthine areas.
I was thinking about your videos while watching this. You are a legend man.
Hey it's The Half-Life Man himself.
Ayyy it's the one and only Marphy B!
Marpheus Blackmesaeus
Are you saying i've been surviving inside an old cold war base all this time
I love the surface areas in Half Life, they feel especially bizarre. It's like being in a little army men diorama, super closed in, little bits of rubble and craters placed here and there, like you're inside and outside at the same time. You pass through them so quickly, and before you know it you're back underground.
you put into words a feeling I've been mystified by for quite a while.
Yeah. Once the action dies down I almost instinctively just stop and take a look around. The surprising lack of ambient noise coupled with the knowledge of what comes after the Black Mesa incident is really haunting and eerie.
I think the real magic of the moving barrel room is that someone had to intentionally problem solve that. In a modern game, it probably would have been some objects that unloaded and reloaded. But here, to save memory/processing power, someone had to intentionally design an route for these barrels to take a perfect loop while maintaining the illusion that they’re all unique. What a neat find.
I was looking for this comment; he talks about it being a 'better way', when in reality it's how they were able to achieve the effect they wanted with the tools they had.
Similar to when Doom 1 teleports a bunch of monsters to the player, those monsters exist on the map, in an inaccessible closet, with a portal... waiting for the player to let them out!
Quake 2 had moving crates on conveyor long ago (and Quake 1 also had moving platforms), however those were func_train, I am not sure but I think in half-life they are func_pushable, but the idea is the same
It's not really a limitation of processing power or memory but rather a limitation of the engine design itself. I believe the barrels are a func_pushable entity propelled along by a trigger_push entity which creates current within the water. They have to physically move the brush-based entity back to the beginning somehow because they can't just spawn/despawn that world geometry (brushes) at will in the same way that some engines can- it has to be rendered somewhere in the world first. They could have used a func_train entities too (which can teleport) but they'd have lost the physics. Actually the way they did it is probably the most resource-intensive way they could have solved the problem, but it's also the coolest.
@@DeusTex-Mex I know, used to make custom maps for all of those, I was 11 thou and quality of those maps was lacking at best, but anyway of all official HL 1 stuff Blue Shift had best levels.
@@TURBOSLAYERPWNZlol teaching yourself the half life editor, I did the same as a kid. Pretty complicated shit for a level editor.
I can't think of a better game to fit this series than Half Life
faxxxx
Everything in then environment is totally silent and still. It's definitely benefiting in this regard from the era of design it was born in as much as from its particular "back-roomsy" aesthetic
F.E.A.R. has a similar vibe with its environments
EXACTLY what i thought when i saw this pop up
Dark Souls
Half-Life has a special place in my heart. I worked for a company that got early "gold" copies of the game so we could make deathmatch levels that would be available on launch day. As I wasn't on the design team (I was mostly writing documentation and testing the deathmatch levels with co-workers), I got a lot of time to explore the game while the arenas were being designed. I was really taken by the atmosphere and "odd places" in the game. :)
Wow, that sounds like a pretty sweet gig! Well, at least play-testing the DM levels coworkers at least.
Oh yes, “the weird corporate brick maze”, just like in every building.
Honestly though, the YMCA always seems to have a few of these… But maybe those are weird recreational brick mazes…
Yeah, most Ys were built in that same era of social spending Austin mentioned. Too bad Ronald Reagan duped people using the Red Scare into thinking such government welfare should only exist for corporations.
Fun fact about Ronald Reagan: The only scientific problem with pissing on his grave is that, eventually, you will run out of piss
That little carpeted “living room” is such a realistic detail to add to a cold, soulless industrial office building
15:00 this goofy little post credit blooper actually gave me a ton of confidence to view my own irrational anxieties more objectively. just wanted to thank you for the surprisingly wholesome candid moment
The barrel carousel is actually a super common way of moving objects that repeat even in modern video games, but it's a rare treat to actually be able to follow that process as a player without even having to use cheats or fancy tricks.
Glad to see the impossibly deep ichthyosaur room here because holy hell that made me feel very uneasy my first time playing the game! Especially when you end up down there while the giant monster fish is still lurking somewhere above you. The dam area has a similar depth but, at least it feels normal because it's a big ol' dam so of course it's huge. Black Mesa is full of these good vibes because it's all ostensibly functional and industrial, but also has the older FPS vibe of still not making quite perfect sense as an environment. Plus all the rampant health and safety violations of course
As time has gone on, I've started to try and look at games how you do, admiring the inconsequential details of the illusion being presented. The bit about the calendar made me realize I still have a long way to go. That was a slice of comedy
Also, I'm glad you made Gordon give us this tour in poor health. I'm sure he appreciated that
I think what Austin is getting at with the barrel thing is the core vibe of Half-Life: there is something more than what the player can see in front of them. More is going on, and you may never, ever see it. But it's kind of weirdly comforting to know that someone else might.
Yep I still remember as a kid on the train ride at the start of the game seeing these scientists having a conversation behind a window, a security guard going through a door and closing it, never to be seen again, a helicopter landing outside, a giant walking spider robot cleaning up a spillage of toxic waste... All these cool places and little stories unfolding and you never get to return there to explore. Just trapped in the little train peering out the window. When you finally get out of the train my first instinct was to turn around and try to go back to all those cool places. I would try to jump down onto the train tracks or find another way around but no dice. Such a cool trick though, even knowing I could turn on no clip and just fly through those walls to the other side, the illusion is still kinda there for me
I love the liminal spaces you explore for this series, and also the full on hair clip decoration. Something about the professional/serious vibe with the hair full of clips is just so great.
this series is awesome man. we really take for granted these 3d worlds generated by the electric box under the desk. half life might have been the first game to get me just staring at these cozy spots. no other game before it was as "contextualized", i.e in doom or quake or duke3d you can't really call anything earthly. half life on the other hand really satisfied my gremlin desire to stand on top of the table at the back of the bank i could see because someone left the door open a bit.
remarkable videos brother
As someone with the nearly uncontrollable desire to climb onto objects I shouldn't, I agree wholeheartedly
Deus Ex had some good stuff going as well.
Quake2 as well
Unreal had much more beautiful places and sceneries to behold
And better ambience and more interesting for this series of videos
I love how Austin always courteously asks for our permission at the beginning of these videos before proceeding
Half-Life was the perfect game for this. I had the PS2 version and used to play the multiplayer with only one other player. Those maps are so weird and lonely and I think you've captured that really well.
An Unremarkable and Odd Places video for the Metal Gear Solid games would be pretty interesting, since those games are packed with details to make them feel like real places, the first one in particular probably has more than a few unremarkable spots
I was thinking I’d love to see him talk about Half Life Decay! That game is a fever dream.
Taking out your PS2 which hasn't been touched for ten years then playing a game on it which lots of people don't even know is on PS2 then walking around alone in a multiplayer map in a gamemode that is exclusive to the console release thinking am I the only one in the world doing this right now and how many people have even done this at all while absorbing the obscure map you're in which if you were seriously playing you wouldn't pay much attention to the details. Thinking about the fact this game is as old as you and the map is around the same age. Who made that exact map? Who made the textures? Where are they in life now? What kind of life did they live?
It's a feeling similar to nostalgia. I often depress myself with these thoughts.
Half-Life's general feeling will never get old to me. Even mods - I'd even say especially mods - that aren't necessarily set in the Half-Life world but just have that Gold Source atmosphere is a really comfortable kind of surreal nostalgia.
i literally love this stuff i cant explain it at all but it makes my brain tickle, I love level design and world building graaah. I love how utterly nonsense most of the layouts are when you stop and look at them, where the utilitarian gameplay centric layouts clash with the sensible layout that would make a room feel like it has a purpose or reason to exist. You end up with this bizarre mush of uncanny architecture and i LOVE it
I honestly love just falling asleep at night to this series. That weird familiarity but uneasiness feeling in these places kind of puts me at peace. But also your narration is more calm here than your other videos and it’s relaxing. Can’t wait for more half life or perhaps the gmod maps.
I absolutely LOVED the bonus content. There's something about the way you talk, your mind works diffently but in a good and calming and honest soothing way. Would love to see you in a podcast or something. Just rambling about.
I'm so happy to see so many people catch onto HLs weird vibes. I've been a very big fan in the last decade and felt like a lunatic for obsessing about them, as something like this is hard to explain to outsiders
My dad used to work at the BBC Television Center back in the 90s, so I used to hang around there on my own till late at night, while my dad was working and most of the building was empty. Still remember them being some of the weirdest, eerie and fascinating offices, corridors and rooms I've ever experienced. Thanks for reminding me of those memories!
I remember spending way too much time in that rocket launch room. I would even tried to surf up that ramp at the back until the rocks and sky were drawing over the void.
Austin I am taking advantage of my earliness to say that you should do a Shadow of the Colossus video and/or an Earthbound video
Earthbound definitely
Guess what? This was really cool! I'm playing half life 2 right now and I'll be keeping my fingers crossed for your sequel. But wow this first game really did you justice. I truly felt whimsical in all of the environment's odd and unremarkable glory. Those stairs at the end were so cursed 😰
That tiny room feels weird to me because sitting at the desk, your back would be to the door and you would be facing nothing but a bare wall. Sitting like that would make me very uncomfortable.
EDIT: Miller High Life is my favorite beer! Good taste.
the part about the barrels traveling in a loop genuinely made me so excited to learn about hahaha i remember being 5 years old and my dad would play half life with me and my brother watching and helping him choose where to go, needless to say my imagination was blown wide open by seeing this game and these areas so young! as boring as xen is now in hindsight, the mystique and vibe of making it there when i was really little sent me spiraling into trying to imagine vast realms beyond, cool video!
I didn't love playing Half-Life because I'm not super great at shooters to begin with, but you're absolutely right that the vibes are just incredible all throughout, and this was a great selection of them to reflect on! Awesome vid, keep it up!
Dude the silo silence and the dark sky is such a vibe. Like the night payload race maps on TF2. Late middle school nights on pipeline and nightfall
“These places are unremarkable,” he remarked.
Only caught a tiny glance of the can next to Austin and sincerely thought it was an opened container of "Grey Poupon" (brand of Dijon Mustard) with a spoon in it instead of beer, and I thought "Yeah, that seems on brand."
Some games I recently replayed were Thief 1 and 2 and Arx Fatalis. I felt they had cool atmospheres and locations. Not 100% sure if any locations hit the vibe for this series but I definitely thought of your videos when playing through the games. Love these videos!
Thief 1 is a VIBE. I think it would fit pretty well in this series.
I always got this vibe in san andreas. there's so many areas in that game that are just there, like the forests and mountains where you're far away from everything and there's not really anything to do but wander around, but by virtue of it being an open world it had to exist.
Regarding the Radioactive Barrel Loop, part of it is because on 1998 computers it'd be an unnecessary strain on CPU and RAM to be arbitrarily spawning and deleting entities ad-infinitum while the player is on that map - Just having the same objects cycling around the map maintains a static memory-footprint for the looping items instead of constantly allocating and deallocating memory for what is solely "flavor". Though, most other examples I'm aware of just Teleport the looping objects back to their starting coordinate instead of literally having a proper loop like this.
the barrels circling round and round at 5:50 is a very good example of resource pooling in games!
Spawning / destoying things at runtime is costly for performance (in both 1998 and 2024) so we'll often assign [x] number of pre-exisitng things to a system and it just uses whichever of those resources is "free" at any given time. Here they never even turn the barrels off or teleport them around, they hide them circling back in the level geometry
Definitely my favorite unremarkable and odd place is the studio, There's a Bonsai-lookin tree and a Miller High Life... a window behind a window, which you wouldn't look at if you didn't stop to appreciate the studio. Which is difficult because I'm usually too busy appreciating the Hair clips
Unremarkable and Odd Places is my favorite show of yours, followed up by Skybox Appreciation, but it's all gold, thank you.
The room with the deep dark water pit and the fish trying to kill you was horrifyingly difficult as a kid. I didn't even realize the pit was that deep, that's even spookier.
Man, Austin. Your channel must be blowing up if you got The Excellent Man from Minneapolis to host this episode.
Dude, you’re so close to 100,000 subscribers! Congratulations :) You’re the best
It's more that half-life office spaces are recognizable, but doesn't really make sense and isn't properly utilized as it would be in real life
The out of place green carpet office government beraucratic rooms reminds me of my old college- also, be louder and prouder in your apartment. You're a good lookin' young man with a stye in your eye with a cutie collab and your goin' places god damnit.
Can I just say. This channel has been slowly growing for so long. I think it’s about to explode. And I’ll remember you all up in og sub heaven
Working every day in those offices with no natural light to be seen would drive me nuts.
You know what *isn't* odd and unremarkable? My love of these videos. It is both normal and remarkable in its strength.
Damn that water filled chamber in apprehension surely invokes a hefty chunk of thalassophobia
Bonus content is awesome. I love all your videos.
As someone who played Half-Life in 1998 i can tell you it was incredible. A new era of video gaming began.
I especially appreciated all the little details like switches and mechanisms that made the Half-Life world more credible. And I always tried to gather as many scientists and security guards around me as possible because beeing alone there was so eerie.
part 2 and part 3 are pretty much a given? Also IIRC and I'm sure you know there were 2 other "Half Life" games made with this engine. Blue Shift (Barney's story) and Opposing Force (you play as as solider). Lots of weird places to explore. Thanks for your dedication dude.
the best way to watch an austin video is to stare longingly at the screen listening to the vibe while your vision kinda blurs. keep going 👍
I'd like to thank you for your curiosity and I'm really grateful that you are sharing it freely. This is really inspiring, that gives me more strength and ideas to put into a personal project.
Next video: Black Mesa has a 0% unemployment rate
I love these little digressions to delve into the odd spaces in games.
Please make more of these! Your FPS videos and Unremarkable Places are my faves.
Watching this made me realize just how accurately Abiotic Factor nailed the environment feel of Half Life 1
Timesplitters 3 has great odd places and sky boxes.
the can of miller high life in the background makes you that much more likeable
The layout of Black Mesa is absolutely bizarre and full of seemingly purposeless and practically inaccessible rooms. My favorite is the enormous steel-plated room that seems to only exist so they can hang crates above a bottomless pit, with the only way out being to hop along said crates. The entire facility is like a money laundering scheme.
i played through half life again last september and if you try to wrap your mind around how people were supposed to actually navigate this facility, like if you were working here or whatever, it falls apart so quickly. nothing really makes any kind of sense, either architecturally or logistically.
not to say it's not a good game but the space it takes place in makes me feel weird
The functioning light switch completely dumbfounded me. Kinda makes it more eerie.
I used to be fascinated by all the little office rooms and the little side areas off "on a rail" when I was younger.
omg I love the second room!! i linger in there for a long time every playthrough, it's relaxing to just sit and watch the barrels pass by
This video was really chill and I like the absence of background music during the gameplay moments. Consider making skybox appreciation video for half life, I really like the skybox "Cliff" it (and the map it's used in) is a place I'd love to be in real life, idk what it is about it
In Freeman’s Mind, Gordon attributed the silence outside to the launch of the missile. Funny how Ross noticed the same thing and thought it was noticeable enough to come up with an in-story reason for it.
Nice video! You seriously have a lot of potential my friend! I wish you great amounts of happiness and success! :)
You mentioned Half-Life Alyx, which I can confirm is a really neat game to explore in this way, but what’s really interesting to mess around with in VR are games that are compatible with VR but weren’t intentionally designed for it. It made me view Resident Evil 4, a game I’ve completed more times than I can count in the 20 years since release, with a whole new perspective. The Talos Principle and Skyrim were cool too but neither one had the effect on me that Resident Evil did. Like I’ve completed the game on Professional mode, no exaggeration, probably 100 times. I thought I knew every square inch of every map but VR felt like a whole new experience.
The weirdest thing about that office area with the vortigaunts is that it's 90% hallways that don't really connect anything.
More people need to appreciate the room in this game where you can get the magnum revolver early if you save that security guard from getting killed by the zombie on the other side of the fence. That room has such a weird vibe, with all these pipes and stuff that you can see through some windows(?) but can't get to. There's just something about these abstract rooms in 90s 3D games that have a way of penetrating into my subconscious.
1:38 has something very odd and perhaps slightly remarkable: The calendar shows December with 30 days.
December has (at least in our world) 31 days.
Edit: Oh, you also noticed that
Some levels, there are so many odd rooms. They don't make sense, like a small room with a pallet jack that has no way of being removed from that room.
Another interesting thing about that water pit with the pipes is that the bottom texture is just solid black. This is clearly intentional, because if you're swimming down and looking that direction it appears to be an infinite pit. You normally would probably never find out it's just a black texture before you drowned.
I would argue that EVERY area in half life is unremarkable and odd. What a gold mine
the seam in the skybox, and the fact that it's only two colors, makes it look like a painted ceiling. Whole thing feels like a sound stage / movie set because of it. Aperture tag did something similar, though far more intentionally
Man, whoever put together that calendar wasn't trying even a little bit lol. It's like they had no idea what a calendar actually was but they'd seen one before, once, a couple weeks ago.
That light switch really shows the level of polish Valve is known for.
You forgot to put the song in! Must've been distracted by the neighbors coming home lol
*enters room covered in alien blood*
"I don't know its just got kind of a weird vibe"
Knocked it out off the park on this one! Can't wait for part two, I believe there should be some console commands that could clean up all that yucky blood btw
loved this video. the barrels doing a loop is so surreal and adds so much
this game has gotta be one of the best for this video!
half life and metroid prime have got very similar eerily quiet and weird indoor spaces
There were so many surprising moments here, I love that pipe room
Asking for Shenmue because its such a weirdly detailed little open world town, with like fully rendered shops with unique voices that you can pass by and never need to interact with.
You have GOT to play Infra. It's a source engine puzzle game that revolves entirely around this. It's like 30 hours of just THIS. It's amazing.
11:39 Oh, it was incredible. As a kid, probably too young to actually play games like this (but I did anyway), I realized 'This isn't like a movie... This plays like a book' - which, I liked books more than movies because you got to enjoy the story longer, and you could just imagine stuff to fill in the details. Half-Life, and Super Metroid, informed my creative direction so, so so so much.
This video articulates better than any other commentary I've seen what I love about Half-Life, this was great! The example with the barrels is especially representative, I think-basically all of the game's cutscenes, set pieces, background decorations and so on are physics objects that can be interacted with. I think once the player realizes this (at least, once I did), there's this feeling of incredible freedom that most other games can't replicate. Like, you can just interact with the game's world exactly how you expect to be able to; it has no invisible walls. Well, it does actually... but it has no invisible walls in spirit. It's great. I've compared it to the original Legend of Zelda in this regard before, which is a very different game but is similarly free of invisible walls. I don't know, I just think it's cool.
Oh, by the way, once you mentioned your neighbors coming home, I suddenly looked at the space you were in and parsed it as a *physical place* for the first time, instead of just the background for a talking head. The area outside your window there is odd and unremarkable.
Great vid, but I would also add a strange crawl space from "On A Rail" chapter, it is dark, has a dead marine inside and you can see both marines and vortigaunts running around killing each other from under the floor grates. I remember first time getting there and listening to grunt chatter and vourtigauns noices weirdly echoed by the gold src sound engine. Even in my late teens this place evoked some eerie childish wonder I felt when I played videogames at very young age, thinking they are bigger than they actually are.
I've watched this video in the past, didn't watch the rest, a month later, i remembered of this video but couldn't remember the name, i asked others' help, and this morning i found it lying in my youtube history, great video austin!
Ive felt this way about valve games in particular. The first portal game even being made later, has a similar vibe and design. Everything seems to be there naturally for a specific purpose and the game works around that. Its odd. And it has the vast empty, lack of human life, liminal space vibe to it. Amplified by the fact you are the only human amongst a facility ran by robots.
Also the half life world and portal world intersect in some way i believe.
Particularly the area leading up to Gladoss is huge and just fucking creepy
Love the Miller High Life in the background, the flavor to price ratio on those things is unbeatable imo
Scariest video game level for me is the sewer section of the penultimate level in Shadows of the Empire on the N64. Moving around those pipes knowing there are dianogas in the darkness under foot was genuinely frightening.
I was waiting for this one! Now all I need is you to look at the Halo bulletin board and this series is perfect! Great job thank you
Deus Ex: The Conspiracy really had those empty vibes once you cleared a level and needed to back track. Alternately, some areas like the night club didn’t feel that way.
I would like to see the black mesa remake version of this vid and see all the creative differences bewteen whats actually in hl1 and what the remake wanted to portray
I did enjoy this video. Please make more haha. I got inspiration from your videos and made low quality version of odd things in Titanfall2 on my channel and told my viewer to check out your content and music!
I feel the same way with the Death Star in Star Wars IV & VI. There's that one little platform next to the superlaser with the two technicians and no railing.
Like, surely they could be behind protective glass or a room, but instead they are unusually close to the super laser, possibly being bombarded with radiation or intense energy and not even a railing for minimum protection or safety.
I know railing doesn't really exist in Star Wars except for Cloud City, but it's such a strange feeling to see.
The barrels in toxic waste are so cool! I always thought it was weird that there seemed to be a constant supply of barrels. Now it makes sense :O
I guess this was already mentioned here but the fact that they didn't spawn the barrels (6:00) is probably because it is just "cheaper" from a performance standpoint to spawn them one time and let them persist as if you would constantly spawn and destroy entities.
Great video btw 🙂👍
This is one of your best vids for me because of the impact that HL's spaces had on me as a teenager back in the day. I was hooked on exploring seemingly pointless spaces in games as soon as they went 3D and this game set the standard. Using /noclip allowed you to see so much stuff that was completely hidden from a normal playthrough's vantage point.
dad is here with another release
I played Half-Life 2 recently and I cannot stop thinking about that bridge you climb under.
Barrels are actually trains on a circular waypoint route, that's a tiny secret.. Other options would be: make them doors, but doors can't follow complex routes; or a new flying enemy type: barrel, with an ai that only follows a route, but it means they'll have HP, damage, sounds, etc and you'll need a way to spawn/despawn them with some complex logic. Thus - it's just a simple func_train blocks. For a moving object that can be controlled by the player (such as the train in On A Rail), see func_tracktrain