The Half-Life Saga Story Guide is an informative fansite dedicated to providing a simplified explanation of the events of the Half-Life and Portal series in chronological order.
The project was created by interface designer Chan Karunamuni (who currently works for Apple Inc.) between 2003 and 2007 with help from readers and contributors from other community sites such as the Steam Users’ Forums.
The saga guide features an extensive and visually engaging timeline of the events from Xen before Half-Life, going right up to the ending of Half-Life 2: Episode 2. It also includes some of the events from Portal.
The Half-Life Saga Story Guide was created in order to provide a concise, accurate, user-friendly overview of the events dealing directly with the events of the Half-Life Saga, and allowing users to easily get a better understanding of the story behind the games.
– Chan Karunamuni
Chan deliberately chose not to include Half-Life Opposing Force, Blue Shift and Decay due to his feeling that they are not critical to the telling of the saga overall. The guide also lacks any mentioning of Portal 2 at the moment but hopefully he will update it once (or if) a certain sequel containing 3 is ever released.
The Half-Life Saga Story Guide
The guide was created out of Chan’s passion for the games but also his frustration that there was a lot of confusion in the Half-Life community in general about the ordering of the games storyline, especially when you consider that even Combine Overwiki was not around until 2006.
This site was created simply because I found that there were far too many people confused with the saga. It’s being told in a method far different from the way normal stories and games are told, in a very passive nature. It’s up to you, the player, to piece together the information and make conclusions on it. Inherent in these games is the fact that Gordon Freeman simply isn’t supposed to know what’s going on all the time; he’s being kept in the dark for a reason. If you’re diligent enough however, it’s easy to put together a pretty accurate account of what exactly is going on around the game, and what events preceded them. I’ve tried to do this and document it here.
– Chan Karunamuni
In addition to the main timeline, the site also features an “Extended Information” page which explains and discusses the relationship of The Combine Empire and The Gman with the Half-Life’s plot.
Check it out for yourself: members.shaw.ca/halflifestory/index.htm
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A lot of the content on there is speculative in nature. I wouldn’t set much store by it.