#probably not Counter Strike though Gordon is probably tired of first person shooting

[elbiotipo]

There is something just so nostalgic about computers in Half-Life. They are your classical late 90s-early 2000s computers (the Black Mesa incident is supposed to take place somewhere in the 2000s), which were kind of top-notch at the time but now feel like a bit of recursive nostalgia, you see the same computers you would have played Half-Life with IN Half-Life (or Black Mesa or spinoffs).

Meanwhile Half-Life 2 is set somewhere in the 2020s (two decades after Half-Life 1, doesn't it make you feel old?) but the computers you find are about the same. It's justified in setting that it's been two decades of worldwide catastrophes, alien invasions and dystopian Combine dictatorship of course, but the fact that you find the same kind of chunky beige computers I could find at my own cybercafé (my family had a little cybercafé of 4 or 5 computers during the 2000s in a spare room) everywhere makes me so nostalgic.

It's likely that in-universe technology must have advanced but only as far as combating the portal storms and alien invasions (and then completely wrecked by the Combine invasion) with consumer electronics staying frozen in the early 2000s. So no smartphones, no widespread laptops, no LED monitors. That's why it's such a recursive nostalgia. Half-Life is stuck in the era of Half-Life.

I like to imagine that once Gordon and Alyx get a little time to breathe, they would throw an Age of Empires II LAN party.