If you've never played Half-Life, you were deprived in life.
1. Birth
2. Birth of a child
3. First time playing Half-Life
Forget about Doom, forget Quake and Wolfenstein. Half-Life is the quintessential FPS game. Every 3d fps game from 1998 to now owes a great debt to the team at Valve, because in Half-Life, a new era of FPS games was spawned, games that told stories and had more meaning than just shooting stuff.
You enter the game as Gordan Freeman, a MIT educated scientist (theoretical physics) working at a top secret underground test facility called Black Mesa. Durring a routine test, somthing goes wrong, and a wormhole to a far away galaxy is opened. Black Mesa becomes the staging point for an alien invasion on earth, and as Gordon you race to undo what damage you can before all hope is lost.
Graphically, Half-Life was easily 3 years ahead of its time, assuming your 3dfx Geforce2 card was able to handle it :)
But even to this day, Half-Life boasts some of the most solid gameplay and mechanics on the market. The AI is intelligent, the firefights are exciting, and the controls/movement set the bar for seemless motion. And oh yes... there were gibs...
A modders dream, the Half-Life engine became the framework for some of the most popular 3d online shooters of all time, including games like Team Fortress, and the #1 online shooter of all time: Counter-Strike.
So to all thoes who consider themselves gamers, know that there is a good chance that this game is the reason.