Half-Life: Opposing Force
developed by Gearbox Software (Plano, TX)
first published November 19, 1999 by Sierra Studios, as an add-on to Half-Life (1998), $39.95 [original site]
~270 MB (+ 40 MB of Half-Life)

Played to completion in 8.5 hours, 12/30/14 — 12/31/14.

[Here’s a video of a complete 3-hour playthrough in two parts.]
[More feasibly for the casual reader: here’s the 1 minute official trailer.]

This is the second item in the “Half Life 1 Anthology” purchase from 1/1/11: an “expansion” for Half-Life, released exactly a year later. I have never known what to think of expansion packs and add-ons and the like. In fact I don’t know what to make of spin-offs, tie-ins, and secondary merchandise generally. Such products always have that air of cynicism, greed, insincerity about them. It’s probably because one can so effortlessly imagine the cigar-chomping business calculations from which they spawn, whereas original works tend to have mistier, less easily imagined origins. But of course all those images are equally unfounded; earnest artists are just as prone as greedy executives to return over and over to the same well. And there’s really nothing wrong with cigar-chomping anyway. Good art can come out of cold greed. There just needs to be an inspired artist somewhere in between, to do a conscientious conversion of the one into the other.

Expansion packs for computer games say “Hey customer: you want new milk from your old cow? Coincidentally we do too! Let’s see if we can reach an agreement: you pay us a nominal fee and we give you nominal content. We can’t promise you much, but at the very least it will be enough to give you Christmas Morning Feeling™: you’ll get to open a box and reenact your brand loyalty. Sound good? Requires Old Cow!”

(This is actually less offensive than Hollywood sequelism, which is the same deal but far less candid about the terms. e.g. “THIS OCTOBER: THE EPIC CONCLUSION TO THE EPIC HEPTAKAIDECALOGY! THE HOBBIT CHRONICLES 17: IT ALL. COMES. DOWN. TO. THIS.”)

(Who’d ever have known was a “kai” in “heptakaideca-“? Wikipedia is who.)

In the case of Opposing Force, the fee was not in fact nominal — 80% of the price of the original game — because the content is not nominal. This is basically a whole game unto itself, at least in form, quantity and level of care. On the other hand it is deliberately derivative, bearing a kind of Back to the Future Part 2-style relation to the original, overtly spying on it and imitating it.

This is extension-by-abstraction, where the sequel generates newness not by marching forward carrying the same torch but by stepping back and knowing what has gone before. That knowing (naming, referring, owning, rationalizing) is necessarily new, because a thing-itself is never yet knowledge of itself. It’s also the timid way forward. But timidity is obligatory if you want to maintain “respect” for the original — that kind of respect is based on giving it authority over you. Like that guy on the Harry Potter reference site said that I quoted here a long time ago: “How can it be canon if I’m the source?” That’s right, it can’t be. Because that’s the essential meaning of “canon”: something that is good because it came from a higher authority than you.

Opposing Force is an extension farmed out to a different developer, who have here done absolutely everything they could — new characters, new weapons, new monsters, new locations, new puzzle ideas, new music, new story — without ever challenging the utter authority of the original to determine absolutely everything important about the experience. I have to respect that — really, how could they do otherwise? — but it ends up feeling like all that considerable creative energy and skill was needlessly constrained. It’s fanfic that’s as good as fanfic can be, which can only leave one bemoaning the fact that it had to be fanfic at all.

Fanfic and franchise work is always defined by that knowing that is its only edge over the original. It has a better rational grasp on the matter at hand, a worse irrational grasp. That means that things get ever more streamlined and ingenious, and the dream on offer gets less and less right, less resonant. So too the audience must adjust its interests toward the rational, and more and more appreciate the work rather than the experience. Opposing Force was so impressively well done. That’s very different from being valuable.

A “brand” is exactly the rationalization of the unrationalizable. This is why talk of “brands,” and their deliberate manipulation, always seems so suspect: the thing they’re claiming to know all about and have well in hand is not properly knowable or graspable. But this suspicion, again, usually ends up being unfair to cigar-chompers. It’s not that the effort to grasp the ungraspable must be a front for malice and oppression; it’s usually quite sincere and, in the abstract, benevolent: “let’s get better and more efficient at giving people what they want and need.” It’s just that it’s futile. Only the heart can feel what heart is.

This game probably had harder and more interesting combat, for those who are interested in such things. It is more condensed and thus faster-paced than the original, for those who are interested in such things.

The in-game credits imitate the Half-Life credits exactly and don’t give anyone’s roles, but they appear in the manual. The most important few figures seem to be:

Randy Pitchford (Production/Direction/Level Design/Writing)
Rob Heironomous (Lead Level Designer/Writing/Sound Effects)
David Mertz (Level Design/Writing)
Brian Martel (Art Direction)
Stephen Bahl (Music/Sound Effects/Art)

Plus about 10 others.