Half-Life 1 and Doom 3: They have the same plot

Have you ever noticed that Half-Life 1 and Doom 3 are the same game? Come with me on this and tell me what game I am describing here:

You take the role of a silent protagonist on his first day at a top-secret research facility in the middle of nowhere. Within this facility is a lab conducting secret (even to the rest of the facility) research into teleporter technology. You, the player, are assigned to some more mundane line of work within one of the lower security areas. On your way to your first assignment you notice that most of the other employees seem to be put on edge by recent occurrences and several areas of the facility are experiencing technical problems and malfunctions. Just as you are completing your first boring assignment the teleporter experiments go horribly wrong tearing open a rift between the facility and an unknown alien dimension. This sends a shockwave across the whole facility damaging most of the major systems, and what’s worse is that alien creatures are being teleported in from their dimension and begin wreaking havoc across the entire base. The most disturbing of these alien creatures are the ones that can possess anyone in the facility turning them into mindless zombies, a fate which most of the facilities personnel suffer within the first few minutes after the disaster.

Reporting back to your superiors, you are given the instructions to make your way through the damaged facility and call for help from the outside world. The chaos of the disaster prevents you from calling for any help, but you are quickly given new instructions to make your way towards the secret teleportation labs where the catastrophe broke out. Along the way to these labs you make the discovery of several alien specimens under contained study, revealing the shocking truth that the top levels of secrecy within the facility had already known of the cacophony of alien beings long before the disaster began. They knew about the alien world and had been studying the native creatures for an unknown period of time.

Finally arriving at the teleportation labs, you prepare to make your way to the alien dimension. Just before you leave however, some of the highest ranking and dangerous alien beings teleport in to the labs to stop you, but they are no match to you and you make your way to the alien world. You discover that the aliens’ world is a strange dimension; a deep endless void of strange shapes and colours. Scattered throughout are the floating islands where the aliens originate from, often with strange architecture and the evidence of previous human survey teams who had teleported in to collect samples of the alien life forms only to run afoul of this strange dimension.

Fighting through this strange dimension let’s you see the creatures in their natural environment and the strange facilities they’ve constructed. You even have to fight an enormous monster in this dimension in order to proceed. Eventually you’ll get to the main portal where the aliens are teleporting in en masse, and finding it guarded by an even bigger creature than before. You fight the creature in this great circular chamber, eventually destroying this cybernetically enhanced guard. You succeed in sealing the portal to the alien dimension and are transported away.

So what game was that, Half-Life 1 or Doom 3? The answer is: both of them, because they have the same plot.

Well, okay, there are some major differences between the two games that I cleverly avoided mentioning. Half-life has your own government send in a team of soldiers to kill everything in the base including the surviving personnel, which doesn’t happen in Doom 3. Doom 3 let’s you return to the base after the trip to the Hell, with the final confrontation regarding a large portal actually takes place in the facility; whilst Half-Life sends you to Xen and then you stay there until the end of the game.

The two different settings for the secret bases I wouldn’t consider to be major differences, even when they take place on different planets, because at the end of the day, they are both huge sprawling bases the size of a small city, located in the middle of nowhere in a deserty environment.

One of the biggest differences is of course the tone and certain nuances in the gameplay style. They are both first-person shooters (obviously), but Doom 3 takes a much more horror-based System Shock 2 style of approach with its sound design, lighting, slow creepy pacing, and it’s jump scares, while Half-Life was more akin to the 90’s shooters of its time, albeit with more of a direct narrative than the likes of Duke Nukem 3D, Quake, and (of course) Doom 1 and 2.

The main reason I had for writing this article is because the similarities between the two games in terms of their plot are so blindingly obvious to me that I would have thought it would be talked about a lot more often, but I’ve never heard anyone else ever draw the comparison which really baffles me... so I decided to do it myself. Hope it was worth it.