Dr. Gordon Freeman arrives late for work at 8:47 am in the Black Mesa Research Facility, using the advanced Black Mesa tram system that leads through the facility. He arrives at the Anomalous Materials Lab, his work place, and he is informed by the security officer that the scientists have a special experiment today, so he goes to the locker room and puts on the hazard suit. He goes to the lab's lower levels, and arrives at the Anti-Mass Chamber, where he is instructed that the specimen to be used that day is the rarest and also the most unstable specimen. He is tasked with pushing the specimen into the scanning beam of the Anti-Mass Spectrometer for analysis. However as soon as he pushes it, it explodes, and creates a sudden catastrophe called a "resonance cascade", opening a portal between Earth and a dimension called Xen. Freeman is apparently teleported to an alien planet and catches glimpses of various alien lifeforms, including a circle of Vortigaunts, shortly before blacking out.
Half-Life is a first-person shooter that requires the player to perform combat tasks and puzzle solving to advance through the game. Unlike its peers at the time, Half-Life used scripted sequences, such as a Bullsquid ramming down a door, to advance major plot points. Compared to most first-person shooters of the time, which relied on cut-scene intermissions to detail their plotlines, Half-Life's story is told entirely by means of scripted sequences, keeping the player in control of the first-person viewpoint. In line with this, the game has no cut-scenes, and the player rarely loses the ability to control Gordon, who never speaks and is never actually seen in the game; the player sees "through his eyes" for the entire length of the game. Half-Life has no "levels"; it instead divides the game by chapters, whose titles flash on the screen as the player moves through the game. Progress through the world is continuous, except for breaks for loading.
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