This is How You Do a Video Game Movie

Half-Life: Origins will be the best two minutes of your day. Maybe your whole week. It makes Hollywood’s big-budget movie adaptations of video games look like pretentious nonsense. (That’s right, Prince of Persia, I’m looking at you…)

Technically, Half-Life: Origins is a short film, but it plays like the trailer to a movie adaptation of Valve’s seminal video game. Gamers remember their journey with Gordon Freeman into the bowels of the Black Mesa facility at the start of Half-Life with great fondness. It’s not an overstatement to say that that scene has become one of the most defining moments in gaming history.

This short film recreates that scene with modern sensibilities; it perfectly captures the spirit of Gordon’s trip to work, while bringing it into the 21st Century. What impresses me the most is that it manages to rekindle the awe — the indefinable cool factor — that I felt the first time I fired up Half-Life and interacted with that opening scene. The creator should seriously put this on Kickstarter and raise the money to make a full-length movie. I bet it’d be funded in no time.

Hollywood, you’re about to get schooled. Watch carefully and take notes.