In the past years, if there’s anything that has improved about video games beyond graphics, I would say that at least some game makers are trying to get firearms details more accurate — although concessions to keep gamers happy, not to mention corporate lawyers, mean we still see a lot of silliness.
But we’ve still come a long way from the past, though, when some of the most popular shoot-’em-up games had almost zero concessions to reality, leaving you wondering if the game designers had ever encountered a firearm outside of scanning a Gun Digest catalog so they could draw models. And one of the worst of those games was Half-Life and its sequels Opposing Force and Blue Shift. I misspent a lot of my youth on these games, and it was all fun, but the games got a lot of details wrong. It always bugged me, even before I really was a shooter myself.
Bits and bytes and blasters @ TFB:
The basic details of Half-Life
The storyline of Half-Life started as a day in the life of Gordon Freeman, a scientist at the Black Mesa research lab, where government employees worked on all sorts of black-budget hanky-panky, including space travel and extraterrestrial contact. Freeman’s day went seriously sideways when an experiment went wrong and the facility was invaded by aliens, and he was forced to acquire weapons to shoot his way out.
At first, those weapons come from security personnel; then, military death squads enter the base to exterminate all witnesses, and Freeman gets weapons from them, too. In the second game, Opposing Force, you play as one of those soldiers and can arm yourself with a slightly different variety of weapons. In the third game, Blue Shift, you play as a Black Mesa security guard, with a more limited range of weapons.
In theory, all the firearms in the game are government-issued to the lab’s security guards or to the Marine death squads.
These games are nearly 30 years old now; Half-Life came out in 1998, and the other two followed in 1999 and 2001. While they didn’t exactly do anything new for first-person shooters when they came out, what they did do, they did very well. They won a ton of awards and different versions of the titles were eventually available on PC, Mac, Linux and consoles. They spawned a series of follow-up games, the Half-Life 2 series, and other related titles. In the original series and in the later games, the protagonists can also get weapons from the interplanetary visitors, but we won’t bother with those.
Where the games go wrong
In the original game, and in Blue Shift, the very first gun you get your hands on is a plain-Jane 9x19mm pistol that looks like a Glock. Personally, if it was the 1990s and I was making a game with federal shooters, I would have chosen an M9, and later versions of Half-Life did use a Beretta 92FS model. But the Glock is not a terrible choice, and the game makers gave it a 17-round magazine. So far, so good (although the Beretta should have had a 15-round mag capacity; that’s a minor detail).
Things fall apart quickly from there. The second game, Opposing Force, starts you off with … a Desert Eagle with a laser sight, presumably in .357 Magnum. Uh, what? No U.S. government agency that I’m aware of has ever issued a Deagle. It’s definitely a cool handgun, but it was 100 percent chosen because it was a popular weapon from movies, not because the USMC would carry it in the late 1990s.
In all three games, the next weapon you get is a shotgun, as used by the Black Mesa security team and by the Marine death squads. Sounds good, until you see the shotgun is a Franchi SPAS-12 with top-folding stock. Some in-game art depicts it as an Ithaca 37 with a pistol grip, but the actual model is a SPAS-12. Again, no self-respecting U.S. federal agency would issue a SPAS-12 when there were domestic options to choose from. To make things even worse, the shotgun had two firing modes; the primary fire was your standard shotgun round, but the secondary fire saw the shotgun firing two barrels at the same time. No pump-action shotgun of the 1990s could do this, of course, because none of them had double barrels and it made the game designers look stupid. Even today, the only shotgun I know that can do this is the Standard Manufacturing SSR, and those aren’t exactly government-issue either.
Things don’t get better from here. Wandering around the alien-filled halls of Black Mesa, you start to find security guards’ offices with Colt Pythons lying around, in .357 Magnum. Again, not even remotely close to government-issue in the 1990s. And then, when the Marine death squads get to work, they’re armed with MP5s — maybe a solid choice for a team focused on indoor work in the late ‘90s, except these MP5s have under-barrel grenade launchers. Sigh.
It could be worse; the idea can be made to work, as Garand Thumb proved:
And in later updates to the games’ graphics in the High-Definition Pack, they changed the MP5 model to an AR-based model. Is it a Colt 633 DOE, as used by the U.S. Department of Energy’s tactical teams to protect nuclear materials in transit and power plants? That would make sense, right, because the Colt 633 DOE was chambered in 9x19mm?
Wrong — the in-game models look like a Colt Model 727 and eject 5.56 casings out the side, despite it sharing ammo commonality with the 9x19mm pistol (which changes to a Beretta in the High-Definition version, as mentioned earlier).
Then there’s the M249 SAW, which is only in Opposing Force. Perhaps the best all-around gun in the series for single-player, you have ammo limited to 50-round belts, far less than the real-world SAW’s 100-round or 200-round setup.
You have to wonder, were the game makers even trying? It’s a good thing the Half-Life series was fun to play (the original game alone sold nearly 10 million copies in its first 10 years). And even though the gun models were goofy, I would bet this series has launched many a shooting enthusiast’s career into the real world of firearms.
