Imagine, a normal day working as a scientist at the Black Mesa Research Facility, in New Mexico. You kiss your kids goodbye and go to work saying you’ll be back to celebrate your oldest’s birthday. You expect a normal, hum-drum day of doing science for the benefit of mankind (and also trying to make Black Mesa look better than Aperture Science in Michigan) as you take the tram into the facility, heading for Sector E. Leaving the tram in Sector E, you meet your colleagues who are talking about equations and all of those other things science.
You’re hungry, and head to the Central Transit Hall to get a bite to eat. As you prepare to step out of the tram, suddenly the lights flicker and klaxon alarms start going off alerting “Warning, high energy detonation detected in Materials Lab”. The ground shakes, and strange creatures begin teleporting in, and start killing your colleagues (or turning them into zombies).
You try to run, being helped by security guards. The alarms continue mentioning about ‘unauthorized biological forms’ being detected throughout the facility. Most of the elevators are out, even though you’re told to get topside.
You get to an area with no way out, and you see the strange creatures approaching you. You managed to grab a pipe to defend yourself…only for your head to be latched onto by a sneaky headcrab from behind. You struggle as hard as you can to pull the parasite off your head, only for it to knock you out, where your corpse slowly begins to turn into a zombie.
This is the horror that happened, on that ill-fated day starting in the Anomalous Materials Lab in Sector C. And Youtuber ‘OWRING’ has a video going (what they feel) is the entire timeline from the start of Half-Life: Blue Shift, though Opposing Force(the two non-canon games), and ending with Half-Life 1(of Gordon being in Zen, which isn’t shown).
Here is that video. It shows the exact time that Gordon pushed the sample into the analysis port, and when all hell broke loose in the facility as the ‘unauthorized biological forms’ from Zen began emerging into our world.
Now, a lot of people have stated Opposing Force started much earlier in the timeline, and I personally agree with this. Though however, one theorizes that the scene of the player coming out of the pipe in Surface Tension, and seeing the two jets screaming past, these were sent in to help the V-TOLs (like the one Shepard was in) which were brought down.
Anyway, this is really cool and I wanted to share it with you guys. It shows the casualty count of scientists and security guards killed, and saved in all three games.
A lot of people lost their lives on that day, and it’s only going to get worse.