2. Abrams/Valve Will Leave You Wanting More
Valve has credited Stephen King's
The Mist and The X-Files as inspirations for Half-Life's story. The Mist's influence is the most overt: it's a story about scientists at a military base who (probably) tear through the fabric of reality, and get a whole bunch of freaky-deaky monsters for their trouble. And it's hard not to see the Smoking Man in Half-Life's G-Man, and the rather disturbing notion that, behind closed doors, the rich and powerful are working with otherworldly forces like it's just another corporate merger (that idea still gives me the willies). The Mist's greatest contribution to Half-Life is this: neither story leaves the point-of-view of the protagonist. We only see the world through their eyes. We only know what they know. Both stories keep their secrets - and that's a good deal of their charm. Gordon Freeman is more instrumental to the monsters arrival and their (possible) destruction than the characters in The Mist, but even at the end of Half-LIfe 2: Episode Two, Gordon Freeman still has very little idea of what's actually going on and who he's actually fighting. There's one truly disturbing notion throughout the Half-Life games. It's not just that we, through Gordon Freeman, don't understand what's going on, it's that we couldn't even begin to comprehend the aliens and their world. That's a rather scary notion. A notion that I think J.J. Abrams would hold on to.