Half-Life narrates the adventures of Gordon Freeman, a theoretical scientist at the Anomalous Materials Laboratory of the Black Mesa Research Center, a huge subway and top-secret scientific complex installed in a disused military base located in the New Mexico desert. This place has many similarities to Los Alamos National Laboratory and Area 51. The original game was inspired by video games such as Doom, Quake, Resident Evil, Stephen King's novel The Fog and an episode of The Outer Limits called The Borderland. It was later developed by writer and author Marc Laidlaw, who wrote the books Dad's Nuke and The 37th Mandala.