Video Game Harmony

Half Life

Released: November 19 1998

Developer: Valve

Composer: Kelly Bailey

The Soundtrack

On this day in 1998 the company Valve got their start with this groundbreaking shooter game.  Half Life was different than most other games up to that point.  Instead of traditional cutscenes, the game instead is entirely told from your perspective as you play as Gordon Freeman, who works at the Black Mesa Research Facility.  After an accident occurs, the facility is invaded by other-dimensional aliens, and you must try to escape without getting jumped on by the bug things or getting swatted by the creatures with a mouth in their chest.  You start with nothing but a crowbar, but end up with all kinds of weapons to defeat those pesky aliens.  There is so much that happens during this game, and I highly recommend everyone experience it for themselves.  You can easily get it from Steam since Valve owns Steam.

If you look up the soundtrack on Spotify (and I’m sure anywhere that distributes music) the artist is listed as Valve, who is of course the company that made the game.  If you want to get more specific, the composer was Kelly Bailey, who worked for Valve at the time.  Right at the beginning of the game, while we’re still in the opening credits, the track Vague Voices plays.  It is so eerie and kind of relaxing at the same time. I love to dose off to this music.  It sets up that something isn’t right today as we enter the facility.  It’s so cool that we get to hear this while riding the tram and getting to see what the entire place looks like.  Several tracks have a similar feel to this, such as Space Ocean, Cavern Ambience, Hurricane Strings, Sacred Confused Short, and Dimensionless Deepness.

The track Klaxon Beat, however, makes you want to get up and dance.  It’s very 90s techno.  Maybe these days it wouldn’t seem as fitting to fight aliens to, but it’s still fun music for this game.  Military Precision signals that something evil is coming, and this time something other than the aliens. This feels very mechanical, and that’s exactly the right feel to get at this point, since as the name implies, the military’s out to get you.

Drums and Riffs is a good example of some rockin’ music from the game.  The title itself is self-explanatory.  It begins with a sick drumbeat and adds a riffing guitar that brings a metal vibe to this soundtrack.  It gets just as heavy with tracks such as Diabolical Adrenaline Guitar, Nuclear Mission Jam, and Hard Technology Rock.  Drums play a big part in the soundtrack.  There’s an entire track called Jungle Drums and sounds just like what the title implies.  It sounds a lot like 90s metal, but I didn’t feel like it dated the game, and anyone who plays this game has to feel an energy high when hearing these tracks.

During one part when you’re crawling through pipes, you hear music that will sound familiar if you’ve played the Portal games, or probably many Valve games.  This is what would end up being used as the music for Valve’s opening title sequence.  The track on the soundtrack is even called Valve Theme.  While it’s hard to separate it from being the Valve theme during gameplay, within the context of the game it gives a feeling of dread and anticipation for more danger coming up very soon.

When you finish the game and watch the credits roll you get another awesome 90s dance beat!  You may or may not like 90s electronic music, but this was cool to hear at the end of the game.  It was an odd choice in a way.  Without spoiling too much, the game ends on kind of a cliffhanger, and we’re not sure if it was a good ending or not.  This music, however, tells us not to worry about it and to just get up and dance to celebrate that we made it through the game, because it’s been chaotic up to this point!

Kind of like Halo, the music didn’t play a whole lot during the combat, but when we do hear the soundtrack, it makes things feel mysterious or it makes us ready to keep on fighting until we’ve defeated the enemies for good (at least for this game because we know there’s a Half Life 2).  This is an awesome soundtrack for the action while playing as Gordon Freeman and taking out the enemies, but it’s also fun to listen to the soundtrack on its own. I give it 5 out of 5 stars.

★★★★★