Half-Life (1998)

Sad as it is, I bet many young people think Citizen Kane is just some overrated old movie about an asshole who misses his sled. Despite having so much to offer as merely a straightforward story, the age-old line about Kane is that out of all the great Hollywood pictures, it is the one that requires the keenest eye toward technical and structural innovations. No matter how invested you are in the tragic tale of Charles Foster Kane, it’s undeniable that the movie is at its jaw-dropping best when plot works in tandem with the viewer’s awe of Welles’ deep-focus shots and oddball narrative framework. To be unaware of these novelties is to miss an entire motif of the film. I am not saying that Half-Life is “the Citizen Kane video games” (partly just because I believe that label is absurd); if it were a movie, its story and themes could barely support mid-tier John Carpenter, much less one of cinema’s undisputed masterworks. But like Kane, an integral part of understanding Half-Life is not only recognizing what Valve did differently, but how those changes created a deeper, more emotionally satisfying product.

Portal (2007)

I told myself I wouldn’t, but screw it: This was a triumph.

What are video games if not the ultimate expression of technology for its own sake? If NASA first got to the moon with the processing ability of an iPhone, how ludicrous is it that we spend so much time and computing power rendering ever-higher-defintion space marines and dragonslayers so we can play make-believe for an afternoon? This is an industry where “new” is often shown off in place of actual content, and sometimes the benefits that innovation will bring to the medium seem like a mystery to even those developing them. Look at the dismal software line-up rushed out for potentially interesting hardware like the Wii U, or go back to past console failures like the Virtual Boy: game creators have an obsession with being first, even when they don’t fully understand what “being first” entails.

The folks at Aperture Science could certainly relate to this problem; it probably even crossed a few of their minds as a killer AI flooded their facility with deadly neurotoxin. (At least when Nintendo falters, they only have to worry about sales dips and snarky blog write-ups.)