Half-Life and Half-Life 2's storylines led gamers into a rich believable world in
the not too distant future. If you've only played the games for action then you
have missed out on a great deal. Read through our mythology pages and catch up on
the antics of Gordon Freeman and let us help you fill in some blanks you might not
have found.
It was another normal day in the lab for Gordon Freeman - as normal as work in the government-funded Black Mesa Research Facility might ever get. And he was already half an hour late. Normally he liked the long train ride through the facility, but today was different. It wasn't, in fact, an entirely normal day. It was an important day. That day was the day of the big experiment; Gordon never asked where they got the samples from, and they would never tell him anyway. All he knew was that it took a huge anti-mass spectrometer to analyse them, and a multi-million dollar HEV suit to protect him from the radiation. The HEV only came in orange, but it did at least keep him alive when it all went to hell.
For the past few weeks, there had been this weird guy in a business suit walking around. Rumour had it that he was government; but nobody was quite sure. Gordon was a simple physicist; educated at Innsbruck, privileged to be part of the US government's best-kept secret. But that day was the day it all changed. That day, something went wrong. The senior scientists said it was a 'resonance cascade', whatever that was. All he knew was that he pressed the buttons and suddenly, everything was wrong, and everything was breaking down or collapsing or exploding, and just about everyone in the entire base was killed in those first few minutes.
When it was over, there were monsters everywhere. No other word for them - monsters, things from another dimension. There were a few scientists left alive when Gordon got out of the ruined test chamber, and they were all of one accord. The only hope was to reach surface level, and somehow warn the military of the disaster. Gordon with his HEV would try and make it out of the base, while his colleagues waited to be rescued.
So began the trek upwards and outwards, through the ruined labs, the destroyed concrete passages, the darkened and monster-infested underground corridors. It was a labyrinth, and there was hardly a human left alive. Closer to the surface, there were more survivors, and good news: that the military were coming, and it would all be all right soon.
Gordon was never a man for physical activity; he was an outright nerd. He never thought he had it in him to pick up a shotgun, let alone fight his way through a horde of aliens. But fight he did, thinking that once the military arrive, he could leave it to the professionals. But when the helicopters circled overhead and the soldiers came down on black ropes, the lenses of their gas masks glinting, it became apparent that rescue wasn't on the agenda. The soldiers had come to contain the situation. That meant killing every single person who had witnessed the accident - and chief among them, target number one, the man supposedly responsible for this whole mess - Gordon Freeman.
That was the first time Gordon ever killed a man. It certainly wasn't the last. Forced to fight against both the alien monsters and his very own species, Gordon fled back underground. The only place now, it would seem, was the Lambda complex - the dark heart of the facility, on the other side of the base. A scientist let him through and sealed the way behind him. To get to Lambda, Gordon would have to make use of the ancient and long-abandoned railway system that dated back to the 1950s.
It was a long time before he saw daylight again, and it was a long way to the Lambda complex, through the parts of the base that had long since been forgotten. The cold war missile silos, fifties computer rooms and the twisting innards of the old railways were crawling with government troops and aliens, all fighting amongst each other.
All the time there was this man in a suit, watching him. Sometimes he would catch a glimpse out of the corner of his eye; a monochrome stick-figure high up on some distant balcony, holding a briefcase, gone as soon as they eye could focus. But here was there; he was watching.
Gordon had nearly reached the surface once again when he came up against deadly Black Ops assassins, sent to hunt down specific targets - including him. He survived the encounter, but was captured soon after, his weapons stripped, left for dead in a trash compactor. He only just made it out alive - scrambling into an air vent just before the walls closed in. But he had no weapons, and he was forced to make his arduous way through the enormous processing areas of Black Mesa before he finally reached the main laboratories and administration hub of the base.
Here, it seemed that these aliens, whatever strange dimension they had come from, were nothing new: the scientists at these labs had been experimenting on them for years. The US government had long known about the existence of aliens, and of their dimension. Gordon eventually escaped with the help of some resident scientists, but escaped to where? To get to the Lambda complex he would have to somehow get across miles of burning desert, disused industrial complexes and old roadways.
It quickly became apparent that it was open war on the surface: army helicopters and tanks duelling with strange, organic alien gunships and squads of armoured creatures. This wasn't some lab accident anymore; not just animals, instinctively attacking, but a full-scale invasion. And it wasn't going well for the humans. By the time Gordon got to Lambda, the marines were about to pull their forces out and begin the airstrikes. He got under shelter just as the first bombs hit.
The way down to Lambda was treacherous - the tunnels were collapsing under the bombardment and the aliens were desperately trying to breach the complex. When Gordon rode the eerily lonely elevator down to the heart of the facility, he found that the scientists already knew of his coming. They held lots to see who would be left behind, the man said, and he had got the short straw. He told Gordon that they, the rest of the science team, had sealed off every entrance to the complex to contain the invasion - except this one. They were waiting for him, down in the central labs.
Gordon made his way downwards, finding and making use of the experimental teleports that the Lambda team had left open for him. There were more scientists waiting, each one left behind to ensure some vital plan. Gordon would have to flood the reactor to get through to Lambda, and there wasn't much time left, the scientist said. Time left till what, Gordon wondered.
Finally, he reached the Lambda core, and the only people there were a single scientist and a security guard, sealed off inside a near-impregnable armoury of experimental weapons and strange contraptions. Gordon thought he might now be able to rest, but it wasn't to be.
Black Mesa had always known about the existence of the aliens and their dimension, which they called Xen, ever since they had developed their very first experimental teleporter. They had sent many research teams through to the other side to collect samples, and later live creatures, for study - until the teams starting being collected themselves. Now, the scientist told him, the accident had ripped a hole between the two worlds; and the aliens had used it to invade.
Somewhere on the other side of the portal there was a being of immense power, controlling the alien armies. Ridiculous as it sounded to Gordon, they wanted him to go through to this alien world and kill whatever was in charge over there. But if he didn't do it, who would? They gave him as many weapons as he had, weird experimental lasers and gluon guns, before charging up their enormous portal. It took a long time to ready, and while they were waiting more and more of the aliens were teleporting in. Gordon and the security guard managed to hold them off for long enough for the portal to be ready. "Go now, Freeman!" was the scientist's frantic advice, and Gordon wasn't inclined to disobey.
The place on the other side was a nightmare dimension, a dark and twisted hive world that didn't seem to obey the normal laws of physics. Gordon fought his way through this hell, through the factory where the aliens grew their warriors on an assembly line, and to the inner sanctum of the Nihilanth, the alien ruler, the big cheese, who, to cut a long story short, he killed.
The Nihilanth's death triggered some kind of explosion, and Gordon found himself suddenly with the man in the suit, the one who had always been watching. Nobody is really sure about the truth, but this is the most likely scenario: the suit was part of some secret part of the US government. Gordon had been so effective in wiping out the alien army that it had allowed the suit's organisation to invade and take control of Xen. Perhaps the accident had never been an accident at all, and had been engineered to start an inter-dimensional war. Gordon was offered a choice - work for the suit and his shadowy 'employers', or die. Considering the events of Half-Life 2, it's likely that Gordon chose to join the suit's organisation. The last thing he heard was the suit's gloating words: "Wisely done, Mr Freeman. I will see you up ahead..."
Gordon Freeman woke in blackness, with the voice of the G-Man babbling cryptically in his ear. When the blackness dissolved, he was on a train pulling into City-17. A near-future Orwellian metropolis, the austere bones of some Eastern European soviet-era city sprouting with strange, alien technology and brutal masked police grinding the populace under their jackboots. With no idea where or when he was - or, indeed, how he had gotten there - Gordon was swiftly apprehended by the Metrocops - sinister gas-masked agents of the state, the so-called 'Combine'. When they took him for interrogation, however, he was rescued by an old friend: Barney the Black Mesa security guard, posing as a metrocop, who was as surprised to see his old friend as Gordon was.
Barney contacted Dr. Kleiner - another Black Mesa veteran - and helped Gordon escape to Kliener's lab. There he met Alyx - daughter of Eli Vance, yet another of Gordon's former colleagues. It seemed that the surviving Black Mesa personnel were part of an underground resistance against the Combine. Apparently, they helped distressed citizens escape the city to secret rebel bases via a hidden 'railroad' among the canals. But today, Alyx explained, they were about to test their first proper teleporter - which will allow them to send citizens to the bases quickly and easily, without risk.
Gordon seemed to be causing quite a fuss among the Combine, so Kleiner helped him into his hazard suit and prepared to send him to the rebel HQ via the new teleporter. Alyx's journey went smoothly - but when Gordon stepped in, there was an accident and he ended up outside Kleiner's lab with the Combine closing in all around him. Supplied a trusty crowbar by Barney, Gordon ran. His only hope would be to get through the city and all the way to the rebel HQ.
Gordon's journey took him through the train yards, the old canals and even the sewer system before he arrived at the edge of the city. From there, he boarded the rebel's ramshackle Airboat - a cannibalised motorbike mounted on a hovercraft chassis and a propeller on the back - racing across the open waters of the countryside with the Combine in hot pursuit.
Eventually, after defeating a helicopter or two, Gordon reached the rebel HQ, Black Mesa East, at sunset. Eli Vance and his colleague Judith Mossman were delighted to see him, as was Alyx. Eli kept a corkboard adorned with various newspaper articles, which pointed to what had likely happened. Since Black Mesa, Earth had been beset by 'portal storms' where alien creatures were teleported to Earth. At some point, the Combine invaded - an intergalactic empire controlled by super intelligent aliens, using their bio-mechanical war machines to invade and control planets. Doctor Breen, the old administrator of Black Mesa, was appointed as the Combine alien's puppet dictator on Earth, using his Metrocops to keep the populace in check.
Gordon got to play with the newly-developed gravity gun and Alyx's pet robot, Dog. All went awry when the Combine attacked the base, forcing Gordon to escape down a secret tunnel that led to the abandoned mining town of Ravenholm. It quickly became apparent why the town was abandoned. It was a rotting sprawl of burnt-out buildings and darkened slums - and it was infested with zombies. Only with the help of eccentric priest Father Grigori and his hand-crafted death-traps did Gordon make it through the night of the living dead intact.
After escaping from the town, with the sun having risen, Gordon met up with some rebels encamped near a remote railway depot. He managed to contact Alyx, who told him the bad news. Eli Vance and Judith Mossman had been captured and taken to the Combine's processing plant, Nova Prospekt. Alyx would meet him there for the rescue mission. To get there, however, he would need to traverse several dozen miles of treacherous beach where Ant-Lions, hive-nesting alien insects, roamed. Luckily, the rebels had a super-fast buggy with mounted laser going spare.
Quite the speed freak, Gordon made it along the abandoned coast in record time, helping out quite a few rebel outposts on the way. It was night-time when he arrived near Nova Prospekt, where a few rebels had made camp among the cliffs and gulleys. A friendly Vortigaunt (aliens who had thrown in their lot with the human rebels) showed him how to use (severed) alien pheromone glands to control his very own private army of Ant-Lions.
With his insectoid chums behind him all the way, Gordon broke into Nova Prospekt and made his way through the converted prison. With the security breached, more and more Ant-Lions began flooding in, and the Combine began to be pushed back into the centre of the complex. Meeting up with Alyx, he discovered the true purpose of the Nova Prospekt facility - to turn ordinary humans into brainwashed, beefed-up Combine soldiers and pitiful worker drones. Together, they managed to rescue Eli and Mossman - the latter of which turned out to have been supplying information to the Combine all along. Keeping the traitorous Mossman at gunpoint, Alyx targeted the Combine's own teleporter at Dr. Kleiner's lab and was about to send him through when Combine troops attacked. In the confusion, Mossman re-targeted the teleporter to an unknown location and disappeared with Eli. Alyx and Gordon managed to hold the troops off long enough to power up the portal once again and escape.
But when they finally emerged from the teleporter in Kleiner's lab, there was something wrong. The lab seemed quiet, abandoned. When they finally found Dr Kleiner, he greeted them with a loaded shotgun, before expressing his surprise and relief that they had managed to get back. After the initial confusion, it turned out that it had been two whole weeks since Alyx and Gordon had infiltrated Nova Prospekt. Somehow, they had jumped forward 7 days, and in the intervening time, spurred on by the fall of Nova Prospekt, the revolution had started. Armed rebels were fighting in the streets, and Barney was leading a push towards the Combine citadel to try and rescue Eli (again).
While Alyx escorted Kleiner to a place of safety, Gordon set out through the city to join Barney on his crusade. City-17 was on fire with the cries of revolution, and everywhere the people were rising up against the Combine. Gordon joined up with assorted resistance fighters and together they managed to turn the tide of the battle, pushing towards the Citadel. After storming an old museum to destroy the Combine's artillery, the rebels set up their temporary base-camp inside. But the evil overloads had one last card to play: the Striders, enormous bio-mechanical tripod walkers equipped with deadly firepower. With Gordon's help, the rebel forces were able to survive the onslaught for long enough to get him inside the Citadel.
Once inside, Gordon was able to infiltrate the inner parts of the Citadel and though his weapons were destroyed, his gravity gun was infused with the Combine's dark energy power source. With this new weapon, Gordon fought his way through the Citadel's security troops, all the while taunted by the sinister Dr. Breen, their leader. But inevitably, he was captured, and brought, along with Alyx and Eli, before Doctor Breen and Dr Mossman. Breen made some cryptic comments about Gordon's 'services' being up for grabs. Before he could elaborate, Judith Mossman had a change of heart and attacked Breen, who took the gravity gun and made a run for it. Set free by Mossman, Gordon and Alyx went after him, to put a stop to him once and for all.
As they caught up, they found him talking to a Combine, a real Combine alien, on a wallscreen. As he ran off, he foolishly left the Super Gravity gun behind. It soon became clear that with the people revolting and his entire regime about to collapse around his ears, he planned to power up the Citadel's portal and escape to the Combine world. While Alyx hacked into the computer systems to try and stop him, Gordon fought his way up to the very top of the reactor, while Doctor Breen gloated at him. Gordon succeeded in destroying the teleport just in time, stopping Breen but triggering a cataclysmic reactor meltdown. The citadel was about to explode and it looked like the end was near for Alyx and Gordon as explosions ripped through the structure around them, rogue energy ripped and crackled, and the fireball erupted - time stopped.
The sinister G-Man whipped Gordon from the heat of the frozen moment and back into pitch black nonspace, awaiting another assignment. He commended Gordon on a job well done, and apologised that he was unable to explain anything, leaving Gordon, once again, in the darkness between the dimensions.
| Part 1 - Half-Life, In The Beginning |
It was another normal day in the lab for Gordon Freeman - as normal as work in the government-funded Black Mesa Research Facility might ever get. And he was already half an hour late. Normally he liked the long train ride through the facility, but today was different. It wasn't, in fact, an entirely normal day. It was an important day. That day was the day of the big experiment; Gordon never asked where they got the samples from, and they would never tell him anyway. All he knew was that it took a huge anti-mass spectrometer to analyse them, and a multi-million dollar HEV suit to protect him from the radiation. The HEV only came in orange, but it did at least keep him alive when it all went to hell.
For the past few weeks, there had been this weird guy in a business suit walking around. Rumour had it that he was government; but nobody was quite sure. Gordon was a simple physicist; educated at Innsbruck, privileged to be part of the US government's best-kept secret. But that day was the day it all changed. That day, something went wrong. The senior scientists said it was a 'resonance cascade', whatever that was. All he knew was that he pressed the buttons and suddenly, everything was wrong, and everything was breaking down or collapsing or exploding, and just about everyone in the entire base was killed in those first few minutes.
When it was over, there were monsters everywhere. No other word for them - monsters, things from another dimension. There were a few scientists left alive when Gordon got out of the ruined test chamber, and they were all of one accord. The only hope was to reach surface level, and somehow warn the military of the disaster. Gordon with his HEV would try and make it out of the base, while his colleagues waited to be rescued.
So began the trek upwards and outwards, through the ruined labs, the destroyed concrete passages, the darkened and monster-infested underground corridors. It was a labyrinth, and there was hardly a human left alive. Closer to the surface, there were more survivors, and good news: that the military were coming, and it would all be all right soon.
Gordon was never a man for physical activity; he was an outright nerd. He never thought he had it in him to pick up a shotgun, let alone fight his way through a horde of aliens. But fight he did, thinking that once the military arrive, he could leave it to the professionals. But when the helicopters circled overhead and the soldiers came down on black ropes, the lenses of their gas masks glinting, it became apparent that rescue wasn't on the agenda. The soldiers had come to contain the situation. That meant killing every single person who had witnessed the accident - and chief among them, target number one, the man supposedly responsible for this whole mess - Gordon Freeman.
That was the first time Gordon ever killed a man. It certainly wasn't the last. Forced to fight against both the alien monsters and his very own species, Gordon fled back underground. The only place now, it would seem, was the Lambda complex - the dark heart of the facility, on the other side of the base. A scientist let him through and sealed the way behind him. To get to Lambda, Gordon would have to make use of the ancient and long-abandoned railway system that dated back to the 1950s.
It was a long time before he saw daylight again, and it was a long way to the Lambda complex, through the parts of the base that had long since been forgotten. The cold war missile silos, fifties computer rooms and the twisting innards of the old railways were crawling with government troops and aliens, all fighting amongst each other.
All the time there was this man in a suit, watching him. Sometimes he would catch a glimpse out of the corner of his eye; a monochrome stick-figure high up on some distant balcony, holding a briefcase, gone as soon as they eye could focus. But here was there; he was watching.
Gordon had nearly reached the surface once again when he came up against deadly Black Ops assassins, sent to hunt down specific targets - including him. He survived the encounter, but was captured soon after, his weapons stripped, left for dead in a trash compactor. He only just made it out alive - scrambling into an air vent just before the walls closed in. But he had no weapons, and he was forced to make his arduous way through the enormous processing areas of Black Mesa before he finally reached the main laboratories and administration hub of the base.
Here, it seemed that these aliens, whatever strange dimension they had come from, were nothing new: the scientists at these labs had been experimenting on them for years. The US government had long known about the existence of aliens, and of their dimension. Gordon eventually escaped with the help of some resident scientists, but escaped to where? To get to the Lambda complex he would have to somehow get across miles of burning desert, disused industrial complexes and old roadways.
It quickly became apparent that it was open war on the surface: army helicopters and tanks duelling with strange, organic alien gunships and squads of armoured creatures. This wasn't some lab accident anymore; not just animals, instinctively attacking, but a full-scale invasion. And it wasn't going well for the humans. By the time Gordon got to Lambda, the marines were about to pull their forces out and begin the airstrikes. He got under shelter just as the first bombs hit.
The way down to Lambda was treacherous - the tunnels were collapsing under the bombardment and the aliens were desperately trying to breach the complex. When Gordon rode the eerily lonely elevator down to the heart of the facility, he found that the scientists already knew of his coming. They held lots to see who would be left behind, the man said, and he had got the short straw. He told Gordon that they, the rest of the science team, had sealed off every entrance to the complex to contain the invasion - except this one. They were waiting for him, down in the central labs.
Gordon made his way downwards, finding and making use of the experimental teleports that the Lambda team had left open for him. There were more scientists waiting, each one left behind to ensure some vital plan. Gordon would have to flood the reactor to get through to Lambda, and there wasn't much time left, the scientist said. Time left till what, Gordon wondered.
Finally, he reached the Lambda core, and the only people there were a single scientist and a security guard, sealed off inside a near-impregnable armoury of experimental weapons and strange contraptions. Gordon thought he might now be able to rest, but it wasn't to be.
Black Mesa had always known about the existence of the aliens and their dimension, which they called Xen, ever since they had developed their very first experimental teleporter. They had sent many research teams through to the other side to collect samples, and later live creatures, for study - until the teams starting being collected themselves. Now, the scientist told him, the accident had ripped a hole between the two worlds; and the aliens had used it to invade.
Somewhere on the other side of the portal there was a being of immense power, controlling the alien armies. Ridiculous as it sounded to Gordon, they wanted him to go through to this alien world and kill whatever was in charge over there. But if he didn't do it, who would? They gave him as many weapons as he had, weird experimental lasers and gluon guns, before charging up their enormous portal. It took a long time to ready, and while they were waiting more and more of the aliens were teleporting in. Gordon and the security guard managed to hold them off for long enough for the portal to be ready. "Go now, Freeman!" was the scientist's frantic advice, and Gordon wasn't inclined to disobey.
The place on the other side was a nightmare dimension, a dark and twisted hive world that didn't seem to obey the normal laws of physics. Gordon fought his way through this hell, through the factory where the aliens grew their warriors on an assembly line, and to the inner sanctum of the Nihilanth, the alien ruler, the big cheese, who, to cut a long story short, he killed.
The Nihilanth's death triggered some kind of explosion, and Gordon found himself suddenly with the man in the suit, the one who had always been watching. Nobody is really sure about the truth, but this is the most likely scenario: the suit was part of some secret part of the US government. Gordon had been so effective in wiping out the alien army that it had allowed the suit's organisation to invade and take control of Xen. Perhaps the accident had never been an accident at all, and had been engineered to start an inter-dimensional war. Gordon was offered a choice - work for the suit and his shadowy 'employers', or die. Considering the events of Half-Life 2, it's likely that Gordon chose to join the suit's organisation. The last thing he heard was the suit's gloating words: "Wisely done, Mr Freeman. I will see you up ahead..."
| Part 2 - Half-Life 2, A New Awakening |
Gordon Freeman woke in blackness, with the voice of the G-Man babbling cryptically in his ear. When the blackness dissolved, he was on a train pulling into City-17. A near-future Orwellian metropolis, the austere bones of some Eastern European soviet-era city sprouting with strange, alien technology and brutal masked police grinding the populace under their jackboots. With no idea where or when he was - or, indeed, how he had gotten there - Gordon was swiftly apprehended by the Metrocops - sinister gas-masked agents of the state, the so-called 'Combine'. When they took him for interrogation, however, he was rescued by an old friend: Barney the Black Mesa security guard, posing as a metrocop, who was as surprised to see his old friend as Gordon was.
Barney contacted Dr. Kleiner - another Black Mesa veteran - and helped Gordon escape to Kliener's lab. There he met Alyx - daughter of Eli Vance, yet another of Gordon's former colleagues. It seemed that the surviving Black Mesa personnel were part of an underground resistance against the Combine. Apparently, they helped distressed citizens escape the city to secret rebel bases via a hidden 'railroad' among the canals. But today, Alyx explained, they were about to test their first proper teleporter - which will allow them to send citizens to the bases quickly and easily, without risk.
Gordon seemed to be causing quite a fuss among the Combine, so Kleiner helped him into his hazard suit and prepared to send him to the rebel HQ via the new teleporter. Alyx's journey went smoothly - but when Gordon stepped in, there was an accident and he ended up outside Kleiner's lab with the Combine closing in all around him. Supplied a trusty crowbar by Barney, Gordon ran. His only hope would be to get through the city and all the way to the rebel HQ.
Gordon's journey took him through the train yards, the old canals and even the sewer system before he arrived at the edge of the city. From there, he boarded the rebel's ramshackle Airboat - a cannibalised motorbike mounted on a hovercraft chassis and a propeller on the back - racing across the open waters of the countryside with the Combine in hot pursuit.
Eventually, after defeating a helicopter or two, Gordon reached the rebel HQ, Black Mesa East, at sunset. Eli Vance and his colleague Judith Mossman were delighted to see him, as was Alyx. Eli kept a corkboard adorned with various newspaper articles, which pointed to what had likely happened. Since Black Mesa, Earth had been beset by 'portal storms' where alien creatures were teleported to Earth. At some point, the Combine invaded - an intergalactic empire controlled by super intelligent aliens, using their bio-mechanical war machines to invade and control planets. Doctor Breen, the old administrator of Black Mesa, was appointed as the Combine alien's puppet dictator on Earth, using his Metrocops to keep the populace in check.
Gordon got to play with the newly-developed gravity gun and Alyx's pet robot, Dog. All went awry when the Combine attacked the base, forcing Gordon to escape down a secret tunnel that led to the abandoned mining town of Ravenholm. It quickly became apparent why the town was abandoned. It was a rotting sprawl of burnt-out buildings and darkened slums - and it was infested with zombies. Only with the help of eccentric priest Father Grigori and his hand-crafted death-traps did Gordon make it through the night of the living dead intact.
After escaping from the town, with the sun having risen, Gordon met up with some rebels encamped near a remote railway depot. He managed to contact Alyx, who told him the bad news. Eli Vance and Judith Mossman had been captured and taken to the Combine's processing plant, Nova Prospekt. Alyx would meet him there for the rescue mission. To get there, however, he would need to traverse several dozen miles of treacherous beach where Ant-Lions, hive-nesting alien insects, roamed. Luckily, the rebels had a super-fast buggy with mounted laser going spare.
Quite the speed freak, Gordon made it along the abandoned coast in record time, helping out quite a few rebel outposts on the way. It was night-time when he arrived near Nova Prospekt, where a few rebels had made camp among the cliffs and gulleys. A friendly Vortigaunt (aliens who had thrown in their lot with the human rebels) showed him how to use (severed) alien pheromone glands to control his very own private army of Ant-Lions.
With his insectoid chums behind him all the way, Gordon broke into Nova Prospekt and made his way through the converted prison. With the security breached, more and more Ant-Lions began flooding in, and the Combine began to be pushed back into the centre of the complex. Meeting up with Alyx, he discovered the true purpose of the Nova Prospekt facility - to turn ordinary humans into brainwashed, beefed-up Combine soldiers and pitiful worker drones. Together, they managed to rescue Eli and Mossman - the latter of which turned out to have been supplying information to the Combine all along. Keeping the traitorous Mossman at gunpoint, Alyx targeted the Combine's own teleporter at Dr. Kleiner's lab and was about to send him through when Combine troops attacked. In the confusion, Mossman re-targeted the teleporter to an unknown location and disappeared with Eli. Alyx and Gordon managed to hold the troops off long enough to power up the portal once again and escape.
But when they finally emerged from the teleporter in Kleiner's lab, there was something wrong. The lab seemed quiet, abandoned. When they finally found Dr Kleiner, he greeted them with a loaded shotgun, before expressing his surprise and relief that they had managed to get back. After the initial confusion, it turned out that it had been two whole weeks since Alyx and Gordon had infiltrated Nova Prospekt. Somehow, they had jumped forward 7 days, and in the intervening time, spurred on by the fall of Nova Prospekt, the revolution had started. Armed rebels were fighting in the streets, and Barney was leading a push towards the Combine citadel to try and rescue Eli (again).
While Alyx escorted Kleiner to a place of safety, Gordon set out through the city to join Barney on his crusade. City-17 was on fire with the cries of revolution, and everywhere the people were rising up against the Combine. Gordon joined up with assorted resistance fighters and together they managed to turn the tide of the battle, pushing towards the Citadel. After storming an old museum to destroy the Combine's artillery, the rebels set up their temporary base-camp inside. But the evil overloads had one last card to play: the Striders, enormous bio-mechanical tripod walkers equipped with deadly firepower. With Gordon's help, the rebel forces were able to survive the onslaught for long enough to get him inside the Citadel.
Once inside, Gordon was able to infiltrate the inner parts of the Citadel and though his weapons were destroyed, his gravity gun was infused with the Combine's dark energy power source. With this new weapon, Gordon fought his way through the Citadel's security troops, all the while taunted by the sinister Dr. Breen, their leader. But inevitably, he was captured, and brought, along with Alyx and Eli, before Doctor Breen and Dr Mossman. Breen made some cryptic comments about Gordon's 'services' being up for grabs. Before he could elaborate, Judith Mossman had a change of heart and attacked Breen, who took the gravity gun and made a run for it. Set free by Mossman, Gordon and Alyx went after him, to put a stop to him once and for all.
As they caught up, they found him talking to a Combine, a real Combine alien, on a wallscreen. As he ran off, he foolishly left the Super Gravity gun behind. It soon became clear that with the people revolting and his entire regime about to collapse around his ears, he planned to power up the Citadel's portal and escape to the Combine world. While Alyx hacked into the computer systems to try and stop him, Gordon fought his way up to the very top of the reactor, while Doctor Breen gloated at him. Gordon succeeded in destroying the teleport just in time, stopping Breen but triggering a cataclysmic reactor meltdown. The citadel was about to explode and it looked like the end was near for Alyx and Gordon as explosions ripped through the structure around them, rogue energy ripped and crackled, and the fireball erupted - time stopped.
The sinister G-Man whipped Gordon from the heat of the frozen moment and back into pitch black nonspace, awaiting another assignment. He commended Gordon on a job well done, and apologised that he was unable to explain anything, leaving Gordon, once again, in the darkness between the dimensions.
