 According to designer Harry Teasley, id Software's 1993 first-person shooter Doom was a major influence, and the team wanted Half-Life to "scare you like Doom did". Newell said that "Half-Life in many ways was a reactionary response to the trivialization of the experience of the first-person genre. Many of us had fallen in love with videogames because of the phenomenological possibilities of the field, and felt like the industry was reducing the experiences to least common denominators rather than exploring those possibilities. Our hope was that building worlds and characters would be more compelling than building shooting galleries."
