You play Gordon Freeman, a mild-mannered nuclear physicist at the Black Mesa Research Facility who gets caught up in a teleportation experiment gone horribly awry. Instead of just dropping the player into monster-filled levels, Half-Life slowly introduced its situations with in-engine cutscenes, expository dialogue, and deliberate-yet-relentless pacing. Half-Life brought a new level of storytelling panache to the still-young FPS genre.
