Sprite

Appearing to be a flying ball of light, the Sprite is a harmless entity that can be seen floating through the Black Mesa Research Facility during the later stages of the Black Mesa Incident. Given the resemblance to many "Displacement field" and portal events, their appearance is nothing more than a piece of a broken portal, somehow brought to life by Race X, and so have a mind of their own, able to steer themselves through space at will. The evidence for this fact is shown below.



In the scene where a Gargantua is tied to the Sector G Hydro-dam from the original game, G-man stands on a defunct control tower holding a cell phone while sprites fly into a Lambda core-like portal behind him, after which he steps through and vanishes. They eventually all led to the portal that brought the Gene Worm through, evidently acting as energy conduits to construct and charge the portal to the world of the Race X aliens. Shephard first saw them on Xen where they kept coming through a purple portal and leaving through the one leading back to Earth. It is possible that this was the "gateway" between Earth and the Race X homeworld. It is unknown if these sprites are biological aliens or technological creations of Race X.



In Half-Life: Opposing Force, sprites act as guides to show the direction to the next objective when the path ahead might otherwise be unclear. It is interesting to note that during the resonance cascade in Half-Life, sprites fly toward and away from the anti-mass spectrometer. Two other sprite appearances include a faint glimpse of them being sucked towards the portal at the tip of the Lambda core reactor when it is fully open, and another appearance in Blue Shift if the player refuses to enter the Displacement Field, shown by Sprites dissipating from its portal, and Dr. Rosenburg shouting, "You fool, you've taken too long!"

In the "Hazard Course" level of Half-Life and Blue Shift, Sprites appear on occasion to light up objects that the holo trainer addresses and thus are rather gameplay indications and not the Race X entity.

List of appearances

 * Half-Life: Day One
 * Half-Life
 * Half-Life: Opposing Force