I started playing Half Life years ago but never finished. Now I have the Orange Box and I’m playing Half Life 2. I remember being Dr Freeman and that things started to show up in the lab and eat people. What happened? Half Life 2 drops you in the middle of Big Brotherland and does not give any background.
Please don’t spoil the plot of Half Life 2.
And while you’re at it, someone link me that company that’s doing the Half Life One mod to Half Life Two. I have to go hassle them to finish it up because I’m almost done with Half Life Two and like the OP, I never finished Half Life One and don’t remember the plot.
The beginning of that game is a bit of a mystery even for those who finished Half Life 1. The game is big on mystery and atmosphere, but not explanation. Basically after the alien-invading and scientist-devouring incident at the beginning of HL1, Gordon killed a big alien thing and was whisked away to some kind of storage dimension by the Gman, who basically kept him there til he was useful again. That’s…basically all the info you have at the beginning of HL2. You kind of have to work out or infer what’s going on from your surroundings and the dialogue.
Of course, you could always go to Wikipedia, which as always has a thorough summary of things like this.
Short version of Half-Life, as I understand it:
On his first day at work in Area 51/Los Alamos/Disneyland, Freeman shoves some stuff into a high-energy doodad of some sort. This (either coincidentally or conspiratorially) triggers the formation of a dimensional rift, through which unpleasant things begin to appear. Hungry, mind-controlling, rift-keeping-open things which make life uncomfortable for Freeman (and death uncomfortable for just about everyone else).
The Marines in Black show up to kill everyone (locals and interdimensional invaders alike) as part of the inevitable coverup. Freeman turns out to be a mix of Garrett and Duke, and manages to evade/escape/kill all the various people and things that are out to make his day slightly worse. A fellow generally referred to as “the G-man” watches him do it.
With the invaders ahead on points, Freeman makes an attempt or two at closing the rift. Once he fails, the survivors decide that something on the other side is keeping it open. Freeman is volunteered to go ask it nicely to knock it off, which he does. Unfortunately, Freeman doesn’t know the local language, so he has to resort to a pidgin of lead, explosives, and exotic particles. Then he takes a little nap.
When he wakes up, the G-Man takes him on a montage–er, a tour, and makes him an offer he can’t refuse. Well, he can refuse, but refusing gets him abandoned in front of lots of nasty critters with no way out. Accepting the offer gets him a room in a nice, cozy void where he can wait for the sequel.
It’s already been answered, but I was going to respond and say that one of the big points of Half-Life 2, as far as I know, is that you’re dropped in the middle of what’s going on with no explanation. Everybody expects you (as Gordon Freeman) to know exactly what’s going on but in reality you have no idea since you’ve been in some sort of “sleep” for a while thanks to the G-Man.
A few extra details left out by Balance:
Gordon has a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from M.I.T, something that is mentioned again in the second chapter of HL2.
The Marines aren’t the ones in black. The Marine special forces were getting their asses handed to them by the Xen aliens (who put up a much fiercer resistance than the lab-coated unarmed scientists), so someone called in the ninja-like female Black Ops. It is never established in HL1 who the Black Ops work for, but just as the marines were sent in to kill all survivors, alien and human, their failure results in the Black Ops being sent in to kill everybody, including the marines.
The vortigaunts were slaves to whoever was controlling the aliens. All slave aliens have metal wristbands that seem to act as some sort of shackle. The final boss of Half-life also had similar wristbands, implying that although he was keeping the portal open, he was doing so at the behest of someone else. In HL2, Gordon’s defeat of the alien bosses from HL1 allowed the vortigaunts to escape the bonds of slavery, and they joined the human resistance against the combine invasion.
Dr. Breen, who was only referred to as “the administrator” in HL1 (a title originally attributed to the G-Man up until HL2 indicated otherwise), struck a deal with the combine before the events of HL2 but after the events of HL1 to turn Earth over to them. This avoided a war, but essentially made humanity slaves to the combine. The obvious connection here is that it was quite possibly the combine responsible for the conquering of Xen and some of its aliens being enslaved.
The G-Man seems to be working against the combine, which is why he pulls Gordon out of stasis, but there’s nothing to indicate he has Gordon’s or Humanity’s best interests in mind. His “employers”, as he calls them in HL1, seem to be calling the shots with Gordon, but who they are is undetermined.
HL2, while having an interesting premise, answers hardly any mysteries from HL1, and creates a whole bunch more. From what I understand, the Episodes (which I’ve yet to play) resolve a decent amount. I haven’t heard if HL2: Episode 3 is going to wind everything up, or if HL3 is supposed to do that.
Yeah, but you can’t shoehorn “ninja-like female Black Ops” into a tongue-in-cheek Men in Black reference. 
(Of course, the Marines were filling a typical MiB role–eliminating aliens and witnesses to cover up the event–so they’re MiBs in spirit even if they’re not actually wearing black.)
You can buy Half-Life on steam for $9.95.
All you need to keep in mind is that the cake is a lie. Everything else derives from that first premise.
This site has a pretty good synopsis of the entire storyline with extrapolations from what is known to fill in the missing gaps. It seems to be fairly accurate.
Does that have the storyline including HL2? If so I’ll stay away for now. But thanks everyone, I got a good idea of what is going on now. As much as possible anyway.
Yeah, that site’s got storyline for all the games, and doesn’t have it particularly isolated by game, so stay away.
Incredibly short summary that’ll get you what you need:
You worked at Black Mesa. Something very very bad happened involving monsters. You fought them, Marines, & Spec Ops for a while, assisted by scientists, one of whom was black, another of whom was bald and wore glasses. There was also a security guard named Barney who you met up with from time to time, who offered to buy you a beer. You occasionally caught glimpses of some guy in a suit with a briefcase who showed up in odd locations. At the end, you got transported to dimension called Xen, killed some really big monsters, and then the guy in the suit offered you a job.