Time Extend
A forgotten expansion to Valve’s masterpiece was two decades ahead of its time
A forgotten expansion to Valve’s masterpiece, Half Life: Decay was decades ahead of its time
Alyx Vance isn’t Half-Life’s first female protagonist. Nor is she its second. In fact, the VR heroine follows in the hazmat boots of Gina Cross and Colette Green. Like Gordon Freeman, both are Black Mesa scientists who discover a sudden and vital talent for shotgunning aliens. It was Cross who developed the HEV suit that Freeman wears, and trained him in its use; it’s her detached voice that intones “major lacerations detected” when the rakelike claw of a zombie connects with Freeman’s shoulder.
Don’t judge yourself too harshly for not knowing their names: gaming’s most famous pair of doctors remain Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk, the co-founders of Bioware. Cross and Green, by contrast, have faded over time, like radioactive isotopes. They were casualties of a market which, at the turn of the millennium, was still a long way from multiplatform parity. Having developed
Half-Life exclusively for PC, Valve handed the game over to young Gearbox Software, which set about porting the shooter to new platforms. As a way of sweetening the deal for console players, Gearbox developed two expansion campaigns: one for Dreamcast, named Blue Shift, and another for PlayStation 2, named Decay. While the Dreamcast port never came out, Blue Shift managed to find its way back to the PC, and has been routinely bundled with the original game ever since. Decay, however, wasn’t granted the same longevity through Steam: when PS2 lost its spot beneath TVs, Cross and Green went with it.
Only the most dedicated Half-Life fans are even aware a third expansion for the game exists; it’s thanks to them this Time Extend does too. In 2005, a team of Ukrainian fans began work on an unofficial PC port of Decay, and, with the support of amateur devs elsewhere in Europe, finished it. Downloading and installing Decay is now a cinch, and servers seem to run perpetually. They’re an indication of Decay’s uniqueness as a Half-Life title: this game’s campaign is the only one designed to be played cooperatively with a friend. Where Valve’s take on the Black Mesa disaster was imbued with a powerful loneliness – Freeman’s contact with scientists and security guards both fleeting and doomed – Decay is the story of two women working together to survive the same events.
You can view Decay as Gearbox’s first foray into the sphere that would eventually make the studio millions through Borderlands, but its team was still almost a decade away from folding the character classes and cooldown abilities of Diablo into firstperson. In Decay, combat synergy simply means pointing both of your Magnums at the same alien bulwark until it falls over. The truly cooperative element comes from Decay’s many puzzles. Cross has to temporarily disable the security systems while Green runs a gauntlet of dozing machine gun turrets; Green must turn off the fans so that Cross can splash through a flooded ventilation shaft unimpeded; Cross sends a coal cart trundling down its tracks so that it can transport Green safely across a river of toxic waste.
At the time, reviewers complained that the puzzle focus rendered Decay too quiet, absent the many firefights that dotted the main campaign. But it’s a paradigm that suits Half-Life, which was always more keen on hazards than sentient threats anyway. At times Decay comes off like a school safety video made interactive, designed to scare children away from pylons and train tracks. Which other game teaches you about the dangers of the electrified third rail? The unfortunate trajectory of a headcrab’s jump sees the creature roasted on contact with live metal, providing a helpful reminder to stand well back from the platform edge on future journeys.
Short of digging out a PS2 and a disc copy of the game, however, there’s no way for players to experience Decay in its intended splitscreen form. What they can do is flick back and forth between its two protagonists in singleplayer, advancing each character manually down Black Mesa’s corridors. That might sound tedious, and in places it is – a matter of ushering one doctor through an area the other has already cleared of challenge. But more often the process turns Decay into a puzzle game with two perspectives, comparable to postpoint-and-click adventures such as Broken
Age and Thimbleweed Park. The act of hopping between bodies positions you less as a person and more as an abstract troubleshooter, locating the problems which prevent progress through the map.
That said, it’s impossible to ignore who your player characters are. Not only do you see each doctor through the eyes of their partner, but their gender is reflected back in the awkward come-ons of the security guards in the opening chapter, who compliment you on the fit of your HEV suit or ask if you fancy catching a film later, unaware that a resonance cascade is about to make movie night an impossibility. Not every player will thank Gearbox for recreating the lowlevel misogyny of everyday life in an escapist FPS, but the studio certainly paints a convincing picture of working life for two women in a ’90s research facility.
THE ACT OF HOPPING BETWEEN BODIES POSITIONS YOU LESS AS A PERSON AND MORE AN ABSTRACT TROUBLESHOOTER
On the morning of the cataclysmic quantum event that kicks off the Half-Life series, Cross and Green are working directly below Gordon Freeman, assisting in the same disastrous experiment. The game positions two of their superiors, Dr Rosenberg and Dr Keller, as the angel and devil of the scientific community; when Rosenberg warns of equipment being pushed beyond its designed parameters, Keller reminds him of the lab’s hierarchy and the wishes of Black Mesa’s administrator. Though never named in Decay, series fans know that administrator to be Dr Breen, the future dictator who sells humanity out to the Combine in Half-Life 2.
There’s a Chernobyl-like sense of dread engendered by ear-pricking phrases like “probably not a problem” and “well within acceptable bounds”, and once the interdimensional portal inevitably opens, Gearbox continues to roll with the dramatic irony. It’s Rosenberg who pushes in good faith to inform the military, assuming the soldiers will help bring the base back under control and save lives. Half-Life veterans are all too aware, however, that the clean-up crew you’re fighting to contact will soon set about executing anyone connected to the disaster. When you leave Rosenberg on the surface to greet the Marines in person, it’s tantamount to a death sentence.
Keller, meanwhile, becomes a figure of institutional impotence. At first, his steadfast fury in the face of chaos is reassuring, an anchor in the storm. “I promise you,” he intones, “when this is over, heads will roll.” Ultimately, though, it’s clear he’s simply slow to adjust, and can’t see that this event has dwarfed his power.
Decay is also a reminder of Black Mesa’s power as a setting. Less a place than a concept, its cavernous depths are home to whatever federal government conspiracy you can dream up, and capable of holding any number of parallel campaigns. While Gearbox takes care to weave its way into canon, it’s also free to expand in new directions, since there’s no limit to the potential for strange labs and tram tracks
descending deep beneath the earth. That’s one reason, besides the accessibility of its engine, why Half-Life has lent itself to so much modding. Its setting is teeming with possibilities, and the gaps between its stories beg to be filled.
There are, of course, limits to Decay as a singleplayer proposition. While the doctor you’re not controlling knows enough to shoot at the enemy when it warps into being, they don’t strafe the way a player would, nor prioritise targets. Once the campaign starts asking one player to turn a valve, while the other defends them from hordes of Xen monsters, the arrangement starts to become untenable. It’s a shame, given that Gearbox was elsewhere developing squad AI – first with the Marines of HalfLife’s first expansion, Opposing Force, and then in the Brothers In Arms games, where players could issue commands to suppress, flank and charge. Had the studio managed to spare a little of that code for Decay, it might have suited a larger audience.
Even so, Decay is more than a curio. It’s still playable for those who find Black Mesa’s well of state secrets and deadly hazards irresistible. And it’s testament to the fact that, three expansions deep, Gearbox and Valve were still inclined to experiment with a game about an experiment that goes terribly wrong. Half-Life: Decay planted the seed for Gearbox to become a pioneer in the co-op space, and for Alyx to take over from Gordon. There’s a certain crowd that argues a push for diversity has robbed them of their gruff male protagonists – if so, it’s a push that started at least 19 years ago.
For Half-Life 2, Valve plucked Blue Shift protagonist Barney from his peripheral role and made him a central figure in the series, granting him a surname, a newly expressive face, and a full-fledged personality. Perhaps there’s an alternate dimension in which they chose to do the same for Gina Cross and Colette Green, allowing the pair to become fan favourites, as Barney has. Instead, they occupy a forgotten corner of the Half-Life universe, crawling through a wing of Black Mesa most will never see, mostly mute throughout their own adventure. Though maybe there’s hope: Half-Life: Alyx, after all, went out of its way to play cat’s cradle with old story threads, after all, and whetted Valve’s appetite for more singleplayer games after a decade dedicated to live service. If not, at least Half-Life: Decay endures.