Like Doc Brown, I once hit my head and saw the future. I didn’t come round in the bathroom having the idea for the Flux Capacitor, but I did bonk my noggin pretty hard in the office games room and sit back, dazed but delighted with what had just happened.
I was playing the Budget Cuts demo on Valve’s room-scale VR. Budget Cuts is a game about infiltrating an office that’s patrolled with deadly robots. Because of the room-scale VR, you’re really there: your actual body is your in-game body. This means that the robots are the same size as you – which is terrifying – and it also means that when you have to duck your head through a missing panel in the floor to look into the room below, you really have to do it. Except that while the game floor might be missing a panel, the real floor isn’t. Bonk. I did it. Chris Bratt, who had also played the demo, had done it. A day later, so moved by what I’d played I brought in a friend to try it out. They did it too. We all hit our heads and we all saw the future.
More than just the future of video games, I really felt like I had seen the future of one series in particular. I still think this. I still think that Budget Cuts is essentially the closest I’ve ever gotten to playing Half-Life 3. It’s not set in the Half-Life universe, although its mixture of horrific technology and the banal and bureaucratic is not a million miles away. It wasn’t made by a Valve team, although I gather the people who made it did end up working on the final game at Valve as incubees. Instead, it channels that magical thing that Half-Life has always done.
Half-Life, right, has always moved things forwards in terms of immersion. You can illustrate this pretty simply by looking at the introductions to the first Half-Life and the second. That tram ride in the original Half-Life was mind blowing. Here was a first-person shooter, but you weren’t doing any shooting! Instead you were riding into work, getting into character, learning about the strange, frightening, promising place that the game would have you explore. It was world-building! First-person tram-riding world-building. And it meant that when the shooting did start, the game felt like more than a shooting gallery. It still felt like a place that was in the middle of something pretty awful happening. Half-Life’s gift was to show that a game could build a world around you that seemed like a world that might exist.
Budget Cuts Official Trailer (Oculus Rift) Watch on YouTube
Half-Life 2 starts on a tram of sorts, but then you’re offloaded at some railway station, one amongst a sad handful of muttering refugees. You’re being processed, and the cops seem pretty awful. One of them makes you pick up a drinks can and put it in the bin.