Its not so much mystery or vagueness. Its how deep into the hobby/community of something you have to be in order to learn this stuff. Tip of the iceberg being stuff most ppl know and bottom being stuff only hardcore fans would really know about.
@@Hachiko-888 yea idk why, this joke lost its funny a long time ago, but people still type it out and it sucks because when i point it out, the person who typed it out gets trigged
I like to think the baby picture in freeman locker is a stock photo that came with the frame and he's just been telling people he has a family because he is a nerd and hasn't been on a date in years.
25:34 The way the Gman says "Personal Holocaust" sounds like he's on the verge of laughter. Like even he couldn't deliver the line with a straight face.
I remember when i was playing half life 1 years ago, I had left my 'learn spanish' dvd in my disk drive by accident. So anytime a certain sound file (usually occurring near barnacles) would fire off, it would start playing a several hour long spanish education cd instead. It was funny the first couple times.
"Hallucination stuff" could be reffering to the water the Combine gives to the citizens, one citizen states this in the beginning chapter of the game, when you're entering City 17. "Don't drink the water. They put something in it, to make you forget. I don't even remember how I got here."
I feel like Black Mesa doesn't necessarily care about Aperture, Aperture does however because they think they are important. Aperture and Cave Johnson have this weird, delusional sense of self importance.
Fun fact: you can "save" laszlo if you perfectly time a grenade throw to kill the antlions that come out to kill him, however since his death is scripted to happen, he will suddenly just die and the scene ensues.
I swear there's a movie or something like that where they keep going back in time to save someone's life but the person is destined to die no matter what 😂
30:20 Well yeah, that's the point. Half-Life 2 literally ends with "Rather than give you the illusion of free choice, I will take the liberty of choosing for you"
@@starpaladinnelaj while im on the same boat we cant just say he's evil, he inadvertantly gave earth a fighting chance to be free from the combine well somewhat
that brings up some questions: 1 - why would the combine keep humanity alive if they are so powerful ? 2 - what was the form of the first combines on the seven hour war ? 3 - if they are so powerful why enslave humanity to build their empire, since it seems like they can take on a planet in less than 24h. 4 - what is "Permanent off-world relocation" ?
@@olucaspc 1: The Combine relies on mutating other species into their own, so Earth was a way to get more troops. Also, Earth has the Portal Gun, which the Combine really want. 2: Probably the beta Combine models. 3: Same as 1. 4: Being transported to the Combine homeworld.
They werent cool with the guy that leaked their content tho, dude got in actual legal trouble over a game, and I mean I understand why Valve did it but I probably wouldn't have pressed anything on someone that was able to do something as impressive as that, hell I'd probably give them a free copy of my game and then obviously upgrade the security so it doesn't happen again, I wouldn't be petty enough to send him to jail over taking a couple hundred lines of code, it isn't like he broke into Valve HQ and stole the files he just found a way to access them via their website which if anything is on Valve for not having stronger protection, but yea man idk I think that was a little petty on Valve, unless he was trying to sell the stolen code in which case he deserves it, imagine stealing half life 2 and then not releasing it for free, literally evil. Though like I said I have no idea what happened so hopefully Valve are the ones in the wrong
Half Life 4: Gordon activates a portal which accidently removes the crystal from Half Life 1 causing a paradox, The game then turns into a dating sim with Your friend Barney who is a bartender.
@@leo_the_v.3847 Judging by the fact that Cleiner and Barney were experimenting with teleporters I'd say the poor animal probably morphed into another object. Basically, let's say it got teleported right in a potted plant and it became a part of it. We also don't know if the car itself was ok and not mutated or alien. Now imagine a potted plant that's morphed with an alien cat and especially the sounds it would make. This was probably the only time Barney would kill with no hesitation whatsoever
@@fenrisvermundr2516 that's not that bad actually Most monsters from Xen were much more scarier that this. Barney probably felt bad doing this to a regular cat. It didn't do anything wrong technically
@@NiCoNiCoNiCola It would make sense though. With the creatures on Xen, he can rationalize that this is just what they look like. Whereas with a cat he knows what they're supposed to look like and seeing one inside-out is extremely rare to say the least. Human fear is often tied to the unknown. It's why as children we're often afraid of the dark. To him he's never seen a cat like this. He's seen them as cuddly balls of fluff with claws.
Fun fact. When you’re talking about that theoretical energy catcher that encompasses a star or planet, The Dyson Sphere. Dyson’s first name was Freeman 😀
I think the best explanation for the timeline shit is that, there is no alternate timeline. The Gman needed Eli to die in order to go back in time and create a scenario to convince Alyx to agree to work for him. After all, in episode 2, why would Gman tell Eli "prepare for unforeseen consequences" through brainwashing Alyx if Eli was only going to die a few hours later in the hangar? That message wasn't for his death; *it was for Alyx being taken away from him again*
Considering how the Gman never actually forces someone into a situation without giving an alternate option, its posible that he created this specific scenario where Eli dies so thst he can make Alyx into a willing indentured servant
I’m very new to half life. My grandson recommended me to play half life last year. I just recently finished 2 along with the episodes. I hardly knew any of this. Even at the top of the iceberg. It was a real hoot. 🦉
Fun fact: The guy from the valve intro "open your eye" is the guy who wrote the soundtrack for Half Life 1 and 2, even the intro's music was made by him, his name is Kelly Bailey. This intro was replaced with the intro "open your mind" when the orange box was released, and Kelly Bailey has quit Valve. You might already know that
⚠️ ATTENTION ALL HALF LIFE GAMERS⚠️ Father Grigori is in great danger and needs your help to wipe out all of the headcrabs in ravenholm! To do this, he needs a shotgun and a gravity gun. To help him, all he needs is your parents credit card number and the three wacky numbers on the back, and the expiration date. But you gotta be quick so Father Grigori can achieve the epic victory Royale!!!!
To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand the Half-life series. The story is extremely subtle, and without a solid grasp of theoretical physics most key plot points will go over a typical player’s head. There’s also Dr. Breen’s philosophical outlook, which is deftly woven into his characterization his personal philosophy draws heavily from Narodnaya Volya literature, for instance. The fans understand this stuff; they have the intellectual capacity to truly appreciate the depths of the story, to realise that they’re not just emotional- they say something deep about LIFE.
25:25 It legitemately sounds like Gman is mocking Gordon like a child, especially when he says "personal holocaust", wich he says in a tone way to goofy for the Gman.
Something about the G-MAN, At the start of Half-Life 1 and Half-Life 2, You start on a train which is going on the rail things, this is represents the G-man's control over Gorden. At the start of Half Life's 2 Episodes, you don't start on trains meaning the G-man's control over Gorden has been fully destroyed. At the start of Half-Life Episode 2, You start on a broken train meaning that the gman has lost full control over Gorden, That sounded way better in my Head. Edit: I think the this talked about somewhere in the video but i dont know, this comment section is probably dead.
You're right. But that does not explain if Gman is good or bad, all we know, is that Eli doesn't like Gman and propose I guess in HL3 we'll have to side with Eli (destroy Borealis) or Gman (don't destroy it) however i don't know if Gman even has an interest in Borealis and we do not know what Gman wants at all... imo if i was Gordon I'd side with Gman because Eli isn't convincing to me. I never liked such simple sounding people. Gman also seems to take care of you from the sounds of his HL2 and EP2 scenes.
Also i feel like Half-Life 2 is also a prediction of the future in real life.. if you delve into different conspiracies you will realize there's a lot of untruths the common people believe in, and they will never change their view on the matter and call you crazy. They're already doing this mask thing and the lgbtq nonsense so maybe the goal for this thing is to produce nogender humans with masks who serve the government, just like the Combine. Sounds crazy now but give it 200 years, trust me.
Just realized that the cat they teleported is most likely referencing schrödinger's cat as quantum mechanics does involve teleportation of particles in quantum tunneling
this could possibly mean that the G-man has got quantum capabilities, considering that he lets alyx choose to not kill her father, and thus a different time line would be made
Quick thing, if anyone is wondering about why freeman in epistle 3 kinda gives up after seeing a Dyson sphere; the requirements to design, build, and maintain such a device is unbelievely high. The theory of the Dyson sphere stats that any civilization capable of developing such a device, would not need it. Its Gordon realizing just how advance the combine really are and how impossible it is for the rebelling forces to actually do anything at all against that kind of force.
Yep, the main reason the Combine (probably) hasn't enslaved or killed humanity is because we know how to teleport from point A to B and B to A the Combine could only figure out A to B as evidenced by a voice line I believe in Eli's Lab.
@@thetrashmann8140 If I recall correctly, the Combine can teleport between universes but not within them. Their teleportation technology, such as the portal at the end of HL2, is also extremely bulky and power-expensive compared to what is seen in Kleiner's/Eli's lab and Nova Prospect.
The whole thing was meant to imply that earth really isn’t even that important to the Combine and that the reason the resistance has even experienced any success is because they haven’t actually done anything that would even cause the Combine to give a second glance. The Combine are beyond a Tier 3 civilisation. It’d be like if someone smashed a window somewhere in rural Maine. The President wouldn’t hear about it or care in the least if he did. He’d actually be confused as to why it was worth his notice.
This. This is exactly my argument to people who believe that technologically-advanced aliens exist in the form of little green men who fly around in UFOs. Like, if they're so advanced then why would they even be flying in traditional aircraft and visiting Earth?
Half-Life 2 is one of my all time favorite games, Valve has truly made a a timeless classic, the story is so deep, even after all these years still new things to be found, hidden details that add to the lore, the world building is on another level, being immersed in the world, it truly feels like you are in it, The G-Man such a deep, mysterious character, we don’t know who how is, his motives, the fight against the Combine, the gameplay is top notch, the use of the Gravity Gun, environmental physics, just a masterpiece game, Valve are among the best developers in the industry, really hope they make a part 3 some day 👏👏👏
I can confirm the CD reading one, it's a funny story: First of all, sorry if my English is broken. I was 11yo, and I used to have the Non-Steam old version of the game (you know, the WON menu screen), but with no soundtrack on it. One day mother forgets a CD with music only, all music from Chayanne. It was a surprise form me when "Torero" start playing on the first chapter"Inbound". Yes, this is real.
You cant hear the woman in half life Alyx. So its before she was taken. The radio heard in half life 2 could be Alyx calling out from stasis. After she was taken
Something I see people overlooking is that the advisors aren't necessarily the leaders of the combine, and the fact they're called "advisors" implies they're servants to some greater force.
Fun fact: in that one large valve leak from I think recently, there was a untextured model found with its lower torso replaced with the lower torso of a stalker
@@wasd____ Not exactly. The Half-Life universe is dark as hell, but the games themselves are far from being horror games. But yeah, the HL2 beta is really creepy.
"Hallucination Stuff" probably refers to objects with "_hallucination" in their name. These objects were found within Episode 3 leaks from the Source engine development branch. The effect, when applied to an object, makes it disappear shortly after looking at it. It's likely this was to be used on the Borealis, to simulate the ship being in multiple points in space at once.
even in HL2 with my even poorest english 15 years ago with only know few words i always was know its not rage but some screaming/crying for help (othere story was fast zombies) and i was always think its non reversed but rather some deformation of speaking realate organs that was make by some voice actor put noodle to his the mouth in a similar position when you gargle :P
I'd like to add, that that couple in half life 2, (later found in half life 2 episode 2) can also be found before entering White Forest. Before entering, they will run out through some trees to a cliff, when they will over look the forest below, and they will comment on how peaceful it is. Obviously a nod to how life without the combine was peaceful, but also how close the resistance is to winning against the combine, or at least shows that there is hope.
there is so many great theory's, theres one where the G-man is the same race as the Nihilanth and like the one from the first game his end goal is to just enslave everything but to do so he needs to play a giant game of chess with the half life universe. there is also voice lines the Nihilanth says that points to the gman not being a man. its a great theory that has been around since the first game.
The G-Man can't be a "secret" hero because he caused lots of people's deaths INTENTIONALLY. He was the one who gave Black Mesa the unstable Xenium crystal, he was also (probably) the one who tampered with the BMRF's technology, he was also the one who reactivated the nuke in OpFor, he was also the one who arranged for Alyx to get nearly killed just to reunite with Gordon, he was also the one who kidnapped Alyx for the sake of "recruitment" despite having Adrian at his disposal. The list goes on, TBH, I feel like he's probably a secret villain or something.
@@safs4929 the closest to a secret hero he can be is one of those for the greater good villains that as a player you have to make a final end all deal with the gman to save humanity. In the next game I think the main villain will be the g-man with a sort of final battle end of an era thing. I don't think he will be a boss battle but gordan/ alyx is definitely going to make it hard for him to come back to earth.
I'm pretty sure hes neither. He has his own motives for everything and who knows what those are, so I guess at the end of the rabbit hole you could DECIDE SUBJECTIVELY if hes good or evil. I think overall hes neither, hes doing what hes doing to benefit himself. It's kind of up to you if you think how hes going about doing what hes doing means hes bad or good. I feel like breaking his things hes done down hes trying to help but his intentions and methods are never pure. Hes more than willing to see the deaths of countless to get the outcome he wants.
To be honest, it fits the Half-Life. To Combine - the only reason why resistance is still alive is because they are so small and insignificant that they aren't even considering actions against them. The only reason why Resistance even has a shot at taking them down is because the main Combine Army has left, leaving the tiniest fraction of their forces on Earth. Resistance doesn't have a hope of winning. They only have a nope of not being noticed.
@@NatureChannelEnclave Theory time: What if HL2 beta cut units (mostly the synth units and machines seen in the game fight you) is somewhat a fraction or an example of how their actual millitary force would be. And in HL2 THEY are given a big fat chance to get the combine off the earth before the worst happens thankfully due to breen's negotiation skills and tactics after the 7 hour war. And when freeman came *UNBELIVABLE THEORY ALERT* The universal union would've sent the HL2 beta sytnth enemies and actual arny and force to stop their advancements to the borealis or to reclaim lost cities from xen or rebels as earth is slowly loosing the combine influence they currently have thus leading to a slow yet painful demise of the lambada resistance either they win this or fail and suffer a horrible fate worse than death but with gordon's help. It seems that they have a chnce through this.
The claim of the Citadel screams being from a failed space launch isn't entirely incorrect. In the beta for HL2 there were unique Citadel screams that were actually pieces of audio from recordings made by the Judica-Cordiglia brothers . They claimed to have secretly recorded multiple cosmonaut missions on the radio, and the one in the HL2 beta was from a recording that supposedly has a female cosmonaut burning up during re-entry. Many people have claimed the recordings as fake, and they probably are, but it's still eerie nonetheless. The audio file in the beta is called "trans6".
Just to confirm about the recordings. While the brothers could technically receive signals from very long distances with their equipment it didn’t cover that vast of a radius (it was directional). They would need an impossible level of accuracy in order to to continuously receive the signal for the amount of time that they claimed. It’s been a few years and I don’t remember where I found it but there was an article that detailed the equipment they used. I’ll send it if I find it again.
I think it was actually proven for the "astronaut crashing into earth and her final words being recorded" to be false. It's simply just created by valve
@Im Certified Oh yea I wasn't saying it was true. Just going into detail about why the brother's were believed in the first place before being debunked. Also the sounds weren't created by valve as the original unaltered audio clip can be found online where you can hear whoever recorded it saying phrases like "Мне жарко" (I'm hot or it's getting hot in this context) which is used for Trans9 as well as other parts used for Trans 6. Worth looking up.
Freeman's last name is ironic since he is a pawn and Shepard's last name is ironic too (though in the opposite sense from Freeman's) since he's not leading anybody, especially not in stasis.
@@geno.bIf his last name means “Warrior” then the irony aspect could mean - Barney started as an early and short support character and didn’t do much. - Barney had his show in Blue Shift as a playable character and went on his journey - In Half Life 2 he’s shortened to a support character again for Gordon. - (idk what he did in Alyx) I didn’t play Half Life and only watched clips of Half Life but i assume the irony in Calhoun is that he was a warrior and playable character in Blue Shift to a support in later games
I think the "Half Life 1 reads your cd drive" refers to the fact that certain servers had a "troll" script in-game that could open your CD drive. It commonly happened on a Sven Coop server of the popular Afraid of Monsters mod, where an admin would spawn as the main character of the mod with god mode and startled the players, sometime executing scripts that killed them, teleported them or opened their cd drive at random. These scripts can only be possible if the game itself has access to the cd drive.
Nah man, the retail Steam copies of Half Life will read your CD drive if anything is in there. The game files will still try to play the soundtrack off of whatever is in your CD drive since the original game was supposed to be run by disk. This happened to me when I tried to play Opposing Force and every chapter started off with a Joe Satriani song
Half Life 2’s original story was leaked so they fixed up a new one. Half Life 2 Episode 3’s story was created and everyone considered that this was the story, then Valve fixed up a new one.
@@Nytro-kw5ds It would only be mechanical in the sense that it is composed of matter like everything else - the more proper word for which would be "physical". Use of the term "mechanical" in that form is an archaic philosophical usage, but not out of the question. Personally, I interpreted "non-mechanical" to mean "not reflecting the actual movements". This could be anything from a very specific drug to VR porn to a direct neuralink stimulation of a part of the brain. Interpreting the term "mechanical" in the philosophical sense begs many more questions than it would imply the answer to, such as "how would they interact at all with any extant entity in a non-physical way".
The two hidden lines "God is not with us" and "You don't exist" are there just to make the last tier more spooky. Nothing else. ✅ English Subtitles are now available! ✅ Be sure to let me know if I made any errors! Maybe I can do a follow up video?
I’m kinda disappointed that mr. deleted just started making things up near the end, you really don’t need to do that with how creepy the series already is. If you do a follow up there’s still quite a bit you could mention, like how the zombies in hla are calling for help constantly and not in reverse, also you can tell that their chest cavity still is a mouth like in half life 1 as you can see it open and close in some of its idle animations, if you want more clarity on Gman I would highly recommend max derrat’s videos on the advisor theory as it is much more fleshed out. In the hl2 beta Barney mentions in a cut line that he had to “turn it right side out to make sure it was a cat”. You could cover the fact that most combine technology is alive, even most of if not all of the citadel (if you look closely at the translucent yellow tubes inside of the citadel you can see veins) even the computers use living “memory tanks” as they are called in the hla model files. throughout half life 2 there are several burned bodies littered around the canals and you can find a cremator head in a jar in Eli’s lab, showing that they still exist in hl2s world, but like bullsquids (Laidlaw said that’s how Eli lost his leg) freeman just didn’t encounter them in hl2. Finally if you want something really disturbing just look at some of the cut enemies, like mr.friendly the alien that rapes the player to death, the vaginal tripod that pins down the player and leaks fluid on them, not all of them are like this, but some of them could make HR Geiger blush. There’s probably dozens of other things I’m forgetting as half life is an absolute rabbit hole when you get into it, just make sure that you’re careful to separate some of the facts from “theories”, half life can be a bit vague at times so there’s a lot of people who misunderstand things and state those as fact. Also as I’m writing this I just remembered that there was originally going to be a dead child stuffed under a bed in Ravenholm.
@@nfwrambo wow this is a lot of info! yeah, i wish i had found the max derrat video before i made that gman segment. i will definitely cover more cut enemies and be more thorough in finding facts. i will definitely most of these into a follow up!
10:05 I didn't think Headcrabs did anything to the victim's brain. From what I've seen, it appears they envelop the head & sever the spine at the neck with their "beak", & then hijack the nervous system & pilot the victim like a puppet. If you look at the models of both headcrab & zombie you can all but confirm it. Considering the existential horror that Half-Life is portraying I would consider this 100 health territory... ...But then I watched 23:10. Wierd. Haven't played Alyx yet. Maybe they grow tentacles into the victim's brain like roots & poke around till they take complete control? Or maybe the crab has it's own way of seeing? Either way, the zombie shouldn't be able to see, as their eyes are covered by the crab...
There's a change in their physiology between the first and second game. In HL1, the crabs have a much more complex underside and their hosts (which seem to be implanted so tight that their skulls are visible) seem to have been completely assimilated, resulting in their robotic movement and completely inhuman sounds. In HL2, the hosts seem to be a little more conscious, resulting in less coordinated movement and their clear ability to still feel pain as well as making it possible to the host to die without killing the crab. I guess that because HL2 introduces several crab variants that are implied to be the result of Combine experimentation, you can chalk up the general inconsistency up to that too.
Something I noticed when looking at the gruesome image of all the zombies, every single one has a broken jaw. My theory is that the beak breaks into the skull, envelopes the head, snaps the neck (which is why they tilt back, most likely kept alive by the headcrab's modification to the body), and like you suggest, possibly use tentacles that spread from the brain throughout the entire nervous system to control them. Fast zombies are more sophisticated, and quite literally trim the fat of their vessel. I think the fast headcrabs outright kill and ""revive"" the human vessel, hence the growling and more feral sounds it makes.
"God is not with us". Took me a while to pause on that frame. Interesting video. Learned some new things despite having watched a lot of content on HL. Thanks 😊
That subtle underlying depressed tone as you read off the script makes this video so much better. It probably wasn't even intentional, but if so, you're a genius. Please keep making videos about topics like this because the atmosphere in this video is just absolutely great. I've re-watched this video several times and it still gives me goosebumps.
26:25 The way I think what the "It's all a simulation" section might actually be referring to. Instead of it being a joke or something, I think could be related to when the Gman hired Gordon at the end of HL1, meaning that the events of HL2 could be the "simulation" it was taking about. As in, the Gman placed Gordon in a Hypothetical scenario after putting him in stasis, as if he was training Gordon for something much worse that the Combine has to offer.
If there's a threat out there greater than the Combine then what hope is there? I've always wanted to see more aspects of the multiverse and alternate timelines explored in the HL franchise, I'm glad they're finally dipping their toes in that pool. So much potential.
@@Sorta8 Well perhaps the situation we see is indeed a hypothetical and has not entirely happened yet. Alex is a part of it and to her it is reality but to anybody looking in it's a bizzare state of affairs. Perhaps that's why G-man's employers did not care for Alyx whereas G-man, who is more of a 'boots on the ground' type, saw her potential. To them Alyx is another hypothetical who will never amount to as much as Gordon, but to G-man, she's just as interesting as characters like Shepard.
@@alephkasai9384 welp ,she saved Gordon a LOT of times. That would explain things , but G-Man was trapped in "thing" during actions of Alyx , but it also can be count as simulation , simulation idea leaves lots of unanswered questions and GIANT place for theories . Dunno but I personally prefer to not count this as the thing .-.
27:11 The piano sounds seem to be organic instead of just a soundtrack, as they are coming from certain parts of the map. It's either probably a radio playing it or gman having a fucking blast
Considering the whole weirdness of this place, I assume that piano song is just trapped in time and space with the building, and just playing on repeat endlessly.
For the last entry, I'm of the opinion that the resistance *can* win, and thats part of why Alyx is so valuable. She can hack combine technology, and use it for herself. This might mean that over time the resistance can develop technology as strong as the technology the combine have, by reverse engineering it or something along those lines, allowing them to defeat the combine
At 27:33 the, “Am I missing something here,” text flashes red for less than a split second and says, “God is not with us.” Interesting... Also it does it again at 28:05 and says, “You don’t exist.”
The audio that plays when Gordon is around that small playground in half life 2 is probably a memory he had when he was a kid or just the fact that he remembers that the earth was once a better place
I swear to god, I dont know who rubbed off on who, but Gabe and Kojima meeting in person had to have influenced one or the other because real time moss growing is a feature for its own sake kind of idea that only someone like Kojima would put in their game regardless if anybody noticed it.
I mean like why not using an upgraded version of half life like i mean half life is a good game but like i rather use black mesa because of the half life 2 engine
"God is not with us." 27:33 "You don't exist." 28:05 Such a good ice berg video my man idk why but I fucking love half life plot and its world. Also idk why but these "scary" gaming type stuff make me really creeped out for some reason
21:57 Prospero still lived on in the original Half Life, the soundtrack that opens the train ride is called Prospero01, other tracks from this cancelled project are there as well, the files are Prospero01 through 05
You can actually find the consoling couple at the end of episode 2, just before the final mission when you get to the resistance base. Right as the gate opens, sprint parallel to the gate, and you'll see a couple sprinting from left to right. Follow them and you'll end up at a cliff, with one of them expressing their relief at finally obtaining freedom.
@@Sapphiregamer8605 Yes it is, I found them on my recent playthrough without having known they were still alive, and was surprised to see them at White Forest. I have played Valve's games for years and still find new things to discover many years later.
The craziest AND most likely theory I’ve heard is that GMan represents Valve / Gabe Newell. Gordon “Freeman” is you, the player who is “free”, not bound to the half life universe. When playing as Gordon you are living a half-life... you control a character in a game, but his fate is predetermined. So much of the lore centers around the notion of control, and free will. The game puts into question what is free will. Are these NPCs alive themselves, totally ignorant to the layer of reality above them in our physical existence?
Personally My "gman is valve" Theory I've Been Having Is Just That GMan Works For Valve Or Something Not That They Are Valve Itself Or Gaben; Just That They Work For Valve
@@indeepjable So basically a sort of video game DM? They orchestrate the plot to go forward (Gman giving the crystal for example), give us the illusion of free choice (Mathew Mercer's technique of each town being the same is a good example) and check that things don't go/actually go haywire (Him detonating the bomb in opposing force) and when helped he gives us our wish at the cost of another "Employment" (HL Alyx's ending)
I like to think that "personal holocaust" is referencing all the times the player has died as freeman. A rare ludonarrative point made in games like nier: automata, super meat boy and of course the dark souls series.
23:38 Hallucinations were a mechanic from a leaked development map at valve, it allowed you to see strange things from the corner of your eye every now and then.
What? I thought the hallucinations stuff was about the beta gman map with weird colorful pictures coming towards you. Please tell me more of this cause I've never seen that before.
Not gonna lie im watching this at 1 in the morning, and the way Gman said "personal holocaust" scared the shit out of me. This is my first time hearing this cut dialouge.
I've always had a weird feeling that not everything in the half life lore is made up. Something about it gives me a gut feeling that somehow this shit is true.
@@misanthropicservitorofmars2116 I think there's a very good case to be made for G-Man being a Shu'Lathoi based on some of Marc Laidlaw's work, or more specifically a "fully-hatched" one- creatures capable of both great intellectual and psychic feats- and it is very much apparent he is not human. Max Derrat put out a pair of videos that explained the theory very well. ruclips.net/video/G24kDQdkwlM/видео.html ruclips.net/video/W1eQSN6_AMk/видео.html
Before the patch it was the most confusing point of the entire timeline. I personally interpret the story-line as a single timeline that G-Man manipulates, as opposed to believing that there are multiple timelines. When I first played the game and was trying to piece together what happened, it appeared to me as though there was a separate timeline that began at some point between seeing Eli at Black Mesa East and seeing him with the diamond sweater in ep2. Of course, after the patch revealed that it was unintentional I wrote off the entire separate timeline theory as being fans not accepting that Valve can retcon their own story.
Fun fact: all of the Half-Life games take place when Lamarr is alive, which is why there’s no Half-Life 3/Half-Life 2: Episode Three, because, Lamarr died in the rocket that got launched in Half-Life 2: Episode Two. Which means all the Half-Life games revolve around Lamarr. But hey, that’s just a theory!
Kinda surprised that with the "Citadel screams" one you didn't go on to mention the beta sound files of actual screaming and wailing in pain over what sounds like a radio or otherwise as a distant echo and how one of the screams, known as trans6, is said to be heavily sampled from sounds recorded by the Judica-Cordiglia brothers in 1963 of the "first female Soviet cosmonaut" who supposedly died while reentering the Earth's atmosphere and having her craft burn apart. Even further than that is the theory that the Citadel itself is one giant bio-mechanical living being with these sounds just being the normal sounds it makes.
That was always my theory about the citadel, how it was kind of like a parasitic entity that was weaving its way into the earth and creating a sort of twisted symbiosis.
@@homeygfunkoffacherryfruitl4971 I mean I don't think it's like a truly LIVING being that has freewill, consciousness, and so on. But more that it's a creature who's very life force appears to be built around the creation of Synths biological parts since as far as we know there is no way of completely creating the bio mass behind them and that the energy drawn from the Citadel's "living body" is what's used to power stuff like the universal teleporter at the top of the structure. And also doing something like that is just such a Combine thing to do, especially considering they harvest the energy of vortigaunts as a means of powering their own structures asway means kaiju sized being made into a building is extremely fitting.
@@homeygfunkoffacherryfruitl4971 Also I can't forget how in the earliest concept arts of the Citadel by Viktor Antonev that the Citadel used to have a highly bio-mechanical design rather than just completely mechanical.
You should mention that the "first female Soviet cosmonaut" who "died while reentering the Earth's atmosphere" is fake. You can see it by at least translating the speech, its simply has a bad grammar.
This is what I get from the timeline stuff: There's a total of two timelines that we know: one where Eli lives and the other one where Eli dies. Eli had to die so that Alyx could save him with the help of the G-man. This moment is where the single timeline we know divides in two, each timeline defined by the status of Eli after the happenings of Episode 2. If I were tell you witch timeline is the real one, I think is the one were Eli lives, since that's the timeline Valve wants to explore in the next Half Life.
Yeah, I think Valve just did a clever retcon. I doubt they're ever gonna actually go back to the one where he dies, and instead use this new retcon to change the story in Half-Life 3 and have it go a different direction.
I think its really just a retcon yeah but I can see them doing some switcheroo at the end of HL3 where you save Alyx from Gman and then Eli vanishes from existence or something like that.
Glad someone brought up the theory that G-Man is Valve. I actually thought about it long time ago. Like at the end of HL1 G-Man offers the player a choice of continuing along the path of the game plot or refuse and let go. I take it developers themselves are asking you at the end of the game "Did you like our game. Whould you like to see what's next? Subscribe if you have to!". Jokes aside, i guess i can call G-Man as Gabe's Man, yeah... The fact that this G-Man appears everywhere watching Gordon going places.... it's like developers is watching you play their game in real time. Probably like watching beta-testers playing the game, while standing behind their back. And if you ask me - i think Vorts are actuall devs themselves. I remember Gabe once said in an interview that he decided to leave the development cycle to the dev team alone for some time to observe how things change from the consumer POV. And what we saw in EP1? Vorts blocking G-Man from controlling Gordon overall
The "It's all a simulation" could be a reference to this bit extracted from one of the Half Life 2 trailers called "Psyche"; a really trippy one with a lot of images appearing on-screen. One of said images resembles some sort of medical diagnosis with the following text; under observation. Galvanic activation with seve ... cidence of seizure and muscular catatonia, reco ... litration of 30 ml sample, sustained alpha activity ... Freeman, Gordon; increased activity in neural iso ... no response. Subject to availability and urgency ... unknown vector at this time. Requirements of ... beyond current threshold for amgydalic suppressi ... dark energy remnants in the simulation until basal ... f evaluation despite objections of caretakers give... This image was used as evidence for the typical theory of "All the adventure happens in the mind of the protagonist", with Gordon being in the hospital in catatonic state or in direct coma. The reason of this state would be the beam that hit Gordon at the beginning of the Resonance Cascade. However, there could be something more, as the text mentions a simulation, caretakers refusing something and the presence of dark energy, the very thing that powers the Combine war machine. There's also the thing with the name of the game; Half Life, as it could reference the real state of Gordon, being between life and death, aside of the atomic concept that everybody knows. This is all I personally know, I tried to find more information about this theory, but all I found was a guy posting something like this in Reddit and then getting ridiculed for how over-exploited and generic this types of theories are. On a side note... Damn! Epistle 3 is 3 years old already? Shit, how time slides between our fingers :(
I'm pretty sure you're kinda right about the "life and death" part, but I would interpret the title "Half-Life" to be as Gordon is in a chaotic situation that he doesn't know wether he'll get out alive or not.
There was actually a HUGE HUGE thread about it on Facepunch forums back in the day, it's a shame Garry closed it down. It was quite well thought-out and people were even trying to figure out what metaphors the characters represent in said dream, it was an interesting read to say the least. Glad somebody mentioned it.
You could argue that everyone has "free WiFi". It;s the internet service that you pay for, not "WiFi". You can have WiFi, without internet... I'll show myself out.
"the Cat" is also a reference to Cronenberg's the Fly movie, in which a failed teleportation of a cat ends up creating a sentient and agonizing blob of flesh and exposed nerves.
I heard that the "hallucination stuff" is because of the start of the game, when the experiment in Black Mesa goes wrong, you get hit by a lightning... This induces Gordon into a "catatonic state" making all that he sees in Half Life a hallucination.
That's correct. Also, the title of the series may also allude to not only the term applied to the study of Physics, Chemistry, etc - which would make sense in context to the surface-level story of the game - but to the following theory as well, referring to Gordon being "half alive" after the Black Mesa incident. Kind of makes you think they already had a basic idea of what the story or outcome was going to be from the very beginning of its development which makes sense - albeit, they might've discarded the idea because of possible backlash.
It could also be a few of the beta maps for half-life 2 that show Gordon hallucinating in what seems like half-life 1's hazard course. You loop through it a few times, every time being a bit different, and he zooms down a hallway to gman.
@@somefries3101 you're right. The theory really implies he's under a catatonic state after the incident. There are a lot of tidbits and details throughout all of the games that support this theory - or were supposed to, at the very least.
Man, I still can't shake the feeling that the G-Man is somehow Freeman, making sure he goes where he is needed. Like a future version of himself forcing the present version of himself to do as he did before. Of course, that'd be a paradox, but the lore/gameworld is crazy enough to warrant it.
3:29 Funny conclusion you came to regarding the dead scientists in HEV suits, plus having 100% confidence in that conclusion. I always figured the other men in HEV suits were those who perished while pursuing the very mission Freeman was sent on. Did I miss something in the storyline that explained why those scientists were there?
No because the where already aware of xen and that's how there already a Portal built also why there were aliens that had been captured from xen in some of the complex there plenty areas where they been kept showing the player that they knew about this place for a very good while now
Yes that's in the first chapter of the game. Although my thinking was that it was for a cat that you can actually see in starting area if you look down to a lower balcony. Who knows maybe its the same one that's referenced in hl2.
To me, the radio sounds like it's saying "Dead. Everyone's dead Gordon. Dead." Creepier than "Gordon, can you hear me? Gordon, can you hear me?" or "G-man can you hear me? G-man can you hear me?"
@@accessiblefunky I can clearly remember something about A HL3 Leak related to "Hallucinations". It was a clip of a player looking at a point, then looking behind and seeing one of those "Error" things. It was aparrently gonna be used on that 2014 HL3 Prototype thing, but my memorie may he faulty here.
I would argue that "Freeman's Limitless Potential" refers to the fact that Freeman is the Player Character, and as such, can save/reload an infinite number of times to overcome any obstacle or perfect any part of the story. This further solidifies the possibility that G-Man is indeed Valve, talking to the PC directly, with the prescience that the player exists outside of the game and can always determine specific outcomes. Simultaneously, G-Man knows what the outcome will be, since Freeman can only stay within the confines of the games rails - hence G-Man is Valve because Valve designed the game, and the player, no matter how many times or different ways they try something, the game will always end the same way.
I have my own Half-Life Iceberg theory: Gman is evil. (or, at least, not on the human's side) Everyone keeps trying to say that he's on the human's side, but every action he does is against humanity and nobody brings it up. His meddling in Black Mesa caused the portal storms decimating the Earth and then causing the Combine to invade, and then at the end of Half-Life 2, if Gman had had his way, Gordon would have been whisked off, the Citadel would have been destroyed, causing a portal storm allowing the full Combine forces to invade, and humans would have been fucked. It was only through the help of the Vortigaunts that Freeman was able to stay and help eventually close the Citadel portal.
I used to think Gman was just a freelance "problem solver" for forces beyond our comprehension but the games clearly hint at him having his own personal agenda which is at odds with that of his current "employers." I believe Gman was initially working for the Combine during HL1 but over the course of events he was gathering his own little personal hit squad of different Black Mesa survivors to use for his own purposes later on. By the events of HL2 he's working for new employers that are at odds with the Combine but no one realizes that Gman has been playing the long game by inserting his plants like Alyx into significant positions that will greatly influence things in his favor down the line. This was all thrown out of whack by the vortigaunts in Episode 1 freeing Freeman from Gman's control, which forced him to improvise and focus on using Alyx as his new pawn, though indirectly rather than how he did it through Freeman. What his motives are we still don't know but goddammit if Valve don't know how to craft a compelling mystery that keeps us hooked.
G-Man’s alignment is neither good nor evil, and that’s probably the scariest part about him. He doesn’t singularly assist the humans or the Combine, he is working for a group that is more powerful than himself, and he possesses more power than the Combine, making this group ungodly and terrifyingly powerful. They have an end that they kicked off with the delivery of the sample and the Black Mesa Incident, and we cannot predict what it will be, because their aim is beyond our comprehension. G-Man’s employers are so powerful that they don’t need him to play mind games with the Combine to take over the Earth so they can have it; they’d take it if they wanted it. There is no way to predict what he’s trying to achieve.
a bit of a correction: the ending of episode 2 was not retconned. those events still happened, but the timeline was changed through events that occurred in half life alyx. retconned implies that events were changed outside of the media itself and not as a result of events within the media, like you wouldn't call what happens in back to the future a retcon.
@@accessiblefunky I'm in the camp that believes HL:A Alyx and HL:2 Alyx are the same entity. That Gman merely made Alyx a sleeper agent, suppressing all her memories of The Vault, conveniently placing her out of harm's way. He then wakes Gordon up from stasis for the events of HL2, and makes it his current goal to use up the rest of Gordon's potential, to cast him aside when he's useless. Notice how often Alyx is with Gordon throughout the three games, and proving herself just as powerful (if not moreso.) Once the Advisor comes through, that's when G-Man "activates" HL:A's ending, where Alyx kills the Advisor, and he takes her as Gordon's replacement. This way, there's less time travel involved, and really the only "retcon" is the final moments of Ep2. Instead of Eli dying and Alyx mourning, Gman shows up, wakes up the Sleeper in Alyx, we'd see her blast the advisor, and then fade away.
Surface: distorted instrumentation over implications of gman. Child labor. Wide terror
Depths: gabe wanted moss
lol, have a like
The moss doesn’t grow in real-time. Immersion shattered.
Gabe got Moss but didnt use it
@Joseph Pasumbal the video lol
I’m pretty sure it’s based off obscurity in most icebergs, not how dark they are
The reason for Half Life 3 taking so long is because they can't figure out how to add real-time moss.
true
thats what i was gonna say lmao
Actually that would be really cool
They should just call the Skyrim mod community them…
They are waiting for the real time moss to grow on the textures
"Now we are passing the point of no return. The Bottom."
First one: "Fast headcrabs are normal headcrabs"
bruh
Its less about creepyness but more about vagueness/mystery. Hard to explain.
@@chybaignacy5368 yeah I was thinking about the rankings of these things
Its not so much mystery or vagueness. Its how deep into the hobby/community of something you have to be in order to learn this stuff. Tip of the iceberg being stuff most ppl know and bottom being stuff only hardcore fans would really know about.
@@TheKaratejesus damn straight.
@James D, writer of Fahrenheit 1984 It's because the fast headcrab model was originally used for original headcrabs in early beta builds.
Gordon doesn’t need to hear all this, he’s a highly trained professional.
Best comment
@@TeaserTravleinNo. It's just some line from half life 1 that everyone is typing in the comments for no reason
@@Hachiko-888 yea idk why, this joke lost its funny a long time ago, but people still type it out and it sucks because when i point it out, the person who typed it out gets trigged
I'm your 600th liker here & bye.
I kinda do
I like to think the baby picture in freeman locker is a stock photo that came with the frame and he's just been telling people he has a family because he is a nerd and hasn't been on a date in years.
Cannot disagree
The baby is actually G Man
Hlvrai cast commentary 1, i remember!
I agree
Read this as soon as I saw it in the game also yeah
25:34 The way the Gman says "Personal Holocaust" sounds like he's on the verge of laughter. Like even he couldn't deliver the line with a straight face.
He sounds like a robot from a 90's horror movie or some shit
Its like someone putting CAPSLOCK in a ARGUMENT.
_I saw the security quicksave of Gordon... killing Xenlings._
That's how G-man usually talks
He sounds pretty active there
When he speak is quite passive but still creepy
I remember when i was playing half life 1 years ago, I had left my 'learn spanish' dvd in my disk drive by accident.
So anytime a certain sound file (usually occurring near barnacles) would fire off, it would start playing a several hour long spanish education cd instead.
It was funny the first couple times.
Lol
Oh hey! A barnacl---
Hola, esta es una guí-- *CRUNCH CRUNCH CRUNCH*
On the steam version?
@@PIKL_Creep I think it was the steam version of Half Life Source.
@George Glass Lmao you're so funny :/
"Hallucination stuff" could be reffering to the water the Combine gives to the citizens, one citizen states this in the beginning chapter of the game, when you're entering City 17.
"Don't drink the water. They put something in it, to make you forget. I don't even remember how I got here."
Yeah, I dunno why the are so attractive to that water
Also, keep looking at the screen and you will see gman
@@timbulimbu3684 what?
Hallucination stuff could also refer to Gordon's sleep deprivation and being injected by his suit a hundred times in the span of a less than a week.
@@ggKorvusthat actually makes sense
I feel like Black Mesa doesn't necessarily care about Aperture, Aperture does however because they think they are important. Aperture and Cave Johnson have this weird, delusional sense of self importance.
@1up w was my sense too.
@@zenithquasar9623 Did you play Portal or just watch it ? If you didnt play you can't tell which one is better.
i mean if i invented teleportation id have a giant sense of self importance too
@@smegmuhfondue3021 and figured out how to pour people into computers
"Black mesa can kiss my bankrupt a..." -Cave Johnson
Fun fact: you can "save" laszlo if you perfectly time a grenade throw to kill the antlions that come out to kill him, however since his death is scripted to happen, he will suddenly just die and the scene ensues.
Poor laszlo.
I swear there's a movie or something like that where they keep going back in time to save someone's life but the person is destined to die no matter what 😂
Yeah I always felt super sad for the npcs that died by antlion and head crab. I always restarted the mission multiple times to try save him.
@@paddyboylan2523 the finest mind of his generation...come to such an end
@@AldenDoble the movie is the time machine
I love how this game is over 2 decades old and theres still dozens of questions we havent even noticed
half life 1 probably still had many easter eggs that we still dont know of
It probably in your house
*over 2 decades old*
Man I'm old...
@@Fidozo15 i hope im still alive when they make half life 3
The Half Life series is a masterpiece.
30:20 Well yeah, that's the point. Half-Life 2 literally ends with "Rather than give you the illusion of free choice, I will take the liberty of choosing for you"
"Valve tolerated the leaks as long as they were used in free products"
Meanwhile nintendo just shuts it down quickly
unfortunately true
Chad Valve vs Virgin Nintendo
@@pancakes8816 at least Nintendo doesn't stay silent for a decade
@@tims.1615 it is better to stay silent than delivering mediocre games like Pokemon lmao
@Heroin Bob I completely agree
actually the radio song reversed message can also be interpreted as "Gordon, everyone is dead"
It's not actual words, it's just a sample of a woman mumbling incoherently.
The radio sound is a combination of stock music, so I think it just sounds like that
@@butterdogestarwars6709 wow hi you just watched the video
@@VEE0034
I just saw that part of the video nvm
I think it's Alyx being in stasis trying to communicate with Gordon
im in agreement with the fact breen did save humanity, he managed to convince an extremely powerful galactic empire to keep his species alive
Death is better then enslavement
@@starpaladinnelaj while im on the same boat we cant just say he's evil, he inadvertantly gave earth a fighting chance to be free from the combine well somewhat
Same
But he’s still an a$$hole
that brings up some questions:
1 - why would the combine keep humanity alive if they are so powerful ?
2 - what was the form of the first combines on the seven hour war ?
3 - if they are so powerful why enslave humanity to build their empire, since it seems like they can take on a planet in less than 24h.
4 - what is "Permanent off-world relocation" ?
@@olucaspc 1: The Combine relies on mutating other species into their own, so Earth was a way to get more troops. Also, Earth has the Portal Gun, which the Combine really want.
2: Probably the beta Combine models.
3: Same as 1.
4: Being transported to the Combine homeworld.
Gotta appreciate how valve was cool with people using their leaked content, yet rockstar sues someone who makes a map for rdr2.
As long as no one sells it as a bootleg they’re okay with it
They werent cool with the guy that leaked their content tho, dude got in actual legal trouble over a game, and I mean I understand why Valve did it but I probably wouldn't have pressed anything on someone that was able to do something as impressive as that, hell I'd probably give them a free copy of my game and then obviously upgrade the security so it doesn't happen again, I wouldn't be petty enough to send him to jail over taking a couple hundred lines of code, it isn't like he broke into Valve HQ and stole the files he just found a way to access them via their website which if anything is on Valve for not having stronger protection, but yea man idk I think that was a little petty on Valve, unless he was trying to sell the stolen code in which case he deserves it, imagine stealing half life 2 and then not releasing it for free, literally evil. Though like I said I have no idea what happened so hopefully Valve are the ones in the wrong
@@theleonpasta7336 then once again he could have not released it to the public, and just told valve about their security flaw.
But that's different
@@bossandrew3695ur gay
Half Life 4: Gordon activates a portal which accidently removes the crystal from Half Life 1 causing a paradox, The game then turns into a dating sim with Your friend Barney who is a bartender.
"About that beer I owed ya"
With real time growing moss
Of course this comment is made by a weeb
What is wrong with being a weeb?
@@trollege9488 bad things
Okay, so you're telling me that some cat traumatized Barney and everything he went through in Blue Shift didn't?
That means it had to be something unspeakably horrifying...
@@leo_the_v.3847 Judging by the fact that Cleiner and Barney were experimenting with teleporters I'd say the poor animal probably morphed into another object. Basically, let's say it got teleported right in a potted plant and it became a part of it. We also don't know if the car itself was ok and not mutated or alien.
Now imagine a potted plant that's morphed with an alien cat and especially the sounds it would make. This was probably the only time Barney would kill with no hesitation whatsoever
I heard the cat re-appeared inside-out.
@@fenrisvermundr2516 that's not that bad actually
Most monsters from Xen were much more scarier that this. Barney probably felt bad doing this to a regular cat. It didn't do anything wrong technically
@@NiCoNiCoNiCola It would make sense though. With the creatures on Xen, he can rationalize that this is just what they look like.
Whereas with a cat he knows what they're supposed to look like and seeing one inside-out is extremely rare to say the least.
Human fear is often tied to the unknown. It's why as children we're often afraid of the dark. To him he's never seen a cat like this. He's seen them as cuddly balls of fluff with claws.
G-man had his passport, that’s why nobody questioned him.
You should have brought your passport gordon!
@@chloe_gospinny “Boooooooooohhhhhhh”
But if he can teleport, why does he need a passp-HELLO GORDON!
gordon feetman
@@brothel_exe HE-
Fun fact. When you’re talking about that theoretical energy catcher that encompasses a star or planet, The Dyson Sphere. Dyson’s first name was Freeman 😀
I think the best explanation for the timeline shit is that, there is no alternate timeline. The Gman needed Eli to die in order to go back in time and create a scenario to convince Alyx to agree to work for him. After all, in episode 2, why would Gman tell Eli "prepare for unforeseen consequences" through brainwashing Alyx if Eli was only going to die a few hours later in the hangar? That message wasn't for his death; *it was for Alyx being taken away from him again*
Retcon bros
Considering how the Gman never actually forces someone into a situation without giving an alternate option, its posible that he created this specific scenario where Eli dies so thst he can make Alyx into a willing indentured servant
@@carintus908 thats what im saying
The time travel cliche ALWAYS makes plot holes and makes things cheap. But if thats the thing to make hl3... I dont know anymore
@@carintus908 mans really did all that mental gymnastics just so Gman could pipe Alyx
I’m very new to half life. My grandson recommended me to play half life last year. I just recently finished 2 along with the episodes. I hardly knew any of this. Even at the top of the iceberg. It was a real hoot. 🦉
Good for u
now this guy... has good tastes....
@@vinslungur maybe 70 to 87
@@paxreal not that much, maybe 50 or 60
17 May 2002?
"Watching the moss grow" seems simultaneously as a Peter Molyneux lie/pr scam, a Gabe Newell joke, and a Hideo Kojima art vision
You say that its a Gabe joke, but he also programmed the cars in HL2 to be pooped on over time by birds.
Watching paint dry is obviously infinitely better.
And a Todd Howard kind of promise.
This will be the first moss type game
Came here hoping someone would mention Peter Molyneux, was not disappointed
Fun fact:
The guy from the valve intro "open your eye" is the guy who wrote the soundtrack for Half Life 1 and 2, even the intro's music was made by him, his name is Kelly Bailey.
This intro was replaced with the intro "open your mind" when the orange box was released, and Kelly Bailey has quit Valve. You might already know that
and he looks like gordon
@@FlorinBuda I think Gordon's face was modeled after him
The theory of the citadel screams being from the astronaut screaming just gave me chills, all that aside good job!
it's one of my favorite entries because of how creepy it is!
@@accessiblefunky it’s fits so well because of the silent hill music in the background!
@@grimmer1 the music is actually the radio song from half-life 2! i made it lower pitched and reversed to make it extra creepy
@@accessiblefunky Oh!...well they’re using both samples so, to hell with it 🤣
@@Oppen1945 I know it’s fake, but just knowing that someone came up with that concept just gives me the chills.
⚠️ ATTENTION ALL HALF LIFE GAMERS⚠️ Father Grigori is in great danger and needs your help to wipe out all of the headcrabs in ravenholm! To do this, he needs a shotgun and a gravity gun. To help him, all he needs is your parents credit card number and the three wacky numbers on the back, and the expiration date. But you gotta be quick so Father Grigori can achieve the epic victory Royale!!!!
To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand the Half-life series. The story is extremely subtle, and without a solid grasp of theoretical physics most key plot points will go over a typical player’s head. There’s also Dr. Breen’s philosophical outlook, which is deftly woven into his characterization his personal philosophy draws heavily from Narodnaya Volya literature, for instance. The fans understand this stuff; they have the intellectual capacity to truly appreciate the depths of the story, to realise that they’re not just emotional- they say something deep about LIFE.
Go stream League again nerd 🖕🖕👎👎👎
@@CARVEDSPINES that’s pretty rude.
@@CARVEDSPINES toxic
@@CARVEDSPINES ugly scp toxic tato
25:25 It legitemately sounds like Gman is mocking Gordon like a child, especially when he says "personal holocaust", wich he says in a tone way to goofy for the Gman.
yeah kinda glad that they didn't use this voice line in the hl1 ending
it sounds so edited that i dont think the va actually said it so valve just edited it like a YTP
I've thought of a wonderful present for you, Gordon...
Shall I give you despair?
İt sounds terrifying to me for some reason
Something about the G-MAN, At the start of Half-Life 1 and Half-Life 2, You start on a train which is going on the rail things, this is represents the G-man's control over Gorden. At the start of Half Life's 2 Episodes, you don't start on trains meaning the G-man's control over Gorden has been fully destroyed. At the start of Half-Life Episode 2, You start on a broken train meaning that the gman has lost full control over Gorden, That sounded way better in my Head. Edit: I think the this talked about somewhere in the video but i dont know, this comment section is probably dead.
i never actually thought about that b4 woa
You're right. But that does not explain if Gman is good or bad, all we know, is that Eli doesn't like Gman and propose I guess in HL3 we'll have to side with Eli (destroy Borealis) or Gman (don't destroy it) however i don't know if Gman even has an interest in Borealis and we do not know what Gman wants at all... imo if i was Gordon I'd side with Gman because Eli isn't convincing to me. I never liked such simple sounding people. Gman also seems to take care of you from the sounds of his HL2 and EP2 scenes.
Also i feel like Half-Life 2 is also a prediction of the future in real life.. if you delve into different conspiracies you will realize there's a lot of untruths the common people believe in, and they will never change their view on the matter and call you crazy. They're already doing this mask thing and the lgbtq nonsense so maybe the goal for this thing is to produce nogender humans with masks who serve the government, just like the Combine. Sounds crazy now but give it 200 years, trust me.
“That was only the surface now we enter the waters”
*Free TVs*
"Now we're only getting deeper, and deeper, and deeper. We're entering the Deep Waters."
*Moss*
@@kablammo123 well technically moss would be in the deep waters
Just realized that the cat they teleported is most likely referencing schrödinger's cat as quantum mechanics does involve teleportation of particles in quantum tunneling
And not teleported
this could possibly mean that the G-man has got quantum capabilities, considering that he lets alyx choose to not kill her father, and thus a different time line would be made
Or it could be a reference to the original 1950s "The Fly" movie in which the teleportation of a cat goes wrong.
@Maka Bálint dang never noticed that
@@sillyfella2009 Bro, can you stop using my internet adress.
Quick thing, if anyone is wondering about why freeman in epistle 3 kinda gives up after seeing a Dyson sphere; the requirements to design, build, and maintain such a device is unbelievely high. The theory of the Dyson sphere stats that any civilization capable of developing such a device, would not need it. Its Gordon realizing just how advance the combine really are and how impossible it is for the rebelling forces to actually do anything at all against that kind of force.
Yep, the main reason the Combine (probably) hasn't enslaved or killed humanity is because we know how to teleport from point A to B and B to A the Combine could only figure out A to B as evidenced by a voice line I believe in Eli's Lab.
@@thetrashmann8140 If I recall correctly, the Combine can teleport between universes but not within them. Their teleportation technology, such as the portal at the end of HL2, is also extremely bulky and power-expensive compared to what is seen in Kleiner's/Eli's lab and Nova Prospect.
The whole thing was meant to imply that earth really isn’t even that important to the Combine and that the reason the resistance has even experienced any success is because they haven’t actually done anything that would even cause the Combine to give a second glance. The Combine are beyond a Tier 3 civilisation.
It’d be like if someone smashed a window somewhere in rural Maine. The President wouldn’t hear about it or care in the least if he did. He’d actually be confused as to why it was worth his notice.
I heard that it theoretically would take 120 trillion years to get through just the first step of building the mega structure.
This. This is exactly my argument to people who believe that technologically-advanced aliens exist in the form of little green men who fly around in UFOs. Like, if they're so advanced then why would they even be flying in traditional aircraft and visiting Earth?
Half-Life 2 is one of my all time favorite games, Valve has truly made a a timeless classic, the story is so deep, even after all these years still new things to be found, hidden details that add to the lore, the world building is on another level, being immersed in the world, it truly feels like you are in it, The G-Man such a deep, mysterious character, we don’t know who how is, his motives, the fight against the Combine, the gameplay is top notch, the use of the Gravity Gun, environmental physics, just a masterpiece game, Valve are among the best developers in the industry, really hope they make a part 3 some day 👏👏👏
Sadly Gabe still didn't figure out what comes after 2...😔
Nobody going to talk about the "god isn't with us" and the "you don't exist" 1 frames?
Thats what they were i couldnt get it to stop or drag there
he's a genius
Where?
@@truetry
27:31
28:04
I have put 1 second earlier so you will find more easily (change to x0.25).
@@alex940127 tyyy
I can confirm the CD reading one, it's a funny story:
First of all, sorry if my English is broken.
I was 11yo, and I used to have the Non-Steam old version of the game (you know, the WON menu screen), but with no soundtrack on it.
One day mother forgets a CD with music only, all music from Chayanne.
It was a surprise form me when "Torero" start playing on the first chapter"Inbound".
Yes, this is real.
I would pay for a half life: Chayanne edition by valve lmao
That is the only way to play half life from now on
Someone should make a mod based on that
CHAYANNE HALF LIFE
CHAYANNE HALF LIFE
Oh man that cracked me up, I can picture Gordon running through Black Mesa with Chayanne blasting in his headphones
wait what if the person on the radio saying "Gordan can you hear me" is Alyx after being taken by the G-man.
You cant hear the woman in half life Alyx. So its before she was taken.
The radio heard in half life 2 could be Alyx calling out from stasis. After she was taken
@@johannesnylund8985 pretty sure that is what the original comment is saying bud
Why would she say that over the radio tho?
@@iW4FFL3Z ya basically
@@MKMadness i feel it's like a ghost situation where they place radios to see if they could hear something through the static.
Something I see people overlooking is that the advisors aren't necessarily the leaders of the combine, and the fact they're called "advisors" implies they're servants to some greater force.
Jesus Christ I can't fathom a force stronger than the combine
The cat was turned inside out, Barney states this in the Beta version of Half Life 2.
Ouch
Zoinks!
🤮
Fun fact: in that one large valve leak from I think recently, there was a untextured model found with its lower torso replaced with the lower torso of a stalker
@@missingindy that was in the video
Why is every sound in this game sound like something straight out of a horror film
Considering how scary Half-Life’s universe is, I’d say it’s appropriate
Shit reminds me off the cave update in Minecraft
Kelly Bailey has a genius talent for audio design.
They sound straight out of a horror story because Half Life _is_ a horror story.
@@wasd____ Not exactly.
The Half-Life universe is dark as hell, but the games themselves are far from being horror games.
But yeah, the HL2 beta is really creepy.
"Hallucination Stuff" probably refers to objects with "_hallucination" in their name. These objects were found within Episode 3 leaks from the Source engine development branch. The effect, when applied to an object, makes it disappear shortly after looking at it. It's likely this was to be used on the Borealis, to simulate the ship being in multiple points in space at once.
Correctamundo
The silence from the copyright removed soundtrack at 13:00 scared the shit out of me
Finally, I was looking everywhere from a comment that talked about the ery silence, like it legitimately scared the bajesus outta me D:
Is it just me, or does Half-Life have one of the most interesting icebergs out of all of them?
Also, glad I know where that ‘radio song’ is from now.
The radio song is from the film 28 days later.
I see your profile is Charlie from scooby doo
@@Yoshter97 You are a wise one.
Thanks just my knowledge on good old scooby doo I loved this episode foul play in fun land
When you said "Child labor in the half 2 beta" , I though you meant IRL, at Valve
lol
XDDDDDDDDDDDD
@@trancharjortxd6790 ok XD spammer
then the new laws got put in place and there's no more children to make half life 3!
@@YenPham-lg5qx it do be funni
The zombie sounds in Half-Life Alyx don't even need to be reversed. You can clearly hear them screaming "Help me, oh God!".
even in HL2 with my even poorest english 15 years ago with only know few words i always was know its not rage but some screaming/crying for help (othere story was fast zombies) and i was always think its non reversed but rather some deformation of speaking realate organs that was make by some voice actor put noodle to his the mouth in a similar position when you gargle :P
I realized it was screaming for help in Half Life 2, Chapter 6 I had to put him out of his misery.
I always was afraid of zombie screams in HL2 they sound so real that it makes me think for a second ,that its real recording of real agony…
no they dont say those quotes
@@poggers9654 you're right I just noticed that, got mixed up with the HLA and HL2 voicelines for Zombies.
I'd like to add, that that couple in half life 2, (later found in half life 2 episode 2) can also be found before entering White Forest. Before entering, they will run out through some trees to a cliff, when they will over look the forest below, and they will comment on how peaceful it is. Obviously a nod to how life without the combine was peaceful, but also how close the resistance is to winning against the combine, or at least shows that there is hope.
I just wanna know if G-Man is a villain or he’s secret hero like Professor Snape.
There's an old theory which says that the g-man is future Gordon and I'm surprised it wasn't in this video
there is so many great theory's, theres one where the G-man is the same race as the Nihilanth and like the one from the first game his end goal is to just enslave everything but to do so he needs to play a giant game of chess with the half life universe. there is also voice lines the Nihilanth says that points to the gman not being a man. its a great theory that has been around since the first game.
The G-Man can't be a "secret" hero because he caused lots of people's deaths INTENTIONALLY.
He was the one who gave Black Mesa the unstable Xenium crystal,
he was also (probably) the one who tampered with the BMRF's technology,
he was also the one who reactivated the nuke in OpFor,
he was also the one who arranged for Alyx to get nearly killed just to reunite with Gordon,
he was also the one who kidnapped Alyx for the sake of "recruitment" despite having Adrian at his disposal.
The list goes on, TBH, I feel like he's probably a secret villain or something.
@@safs4929 the closest to a secret hero he can be is one of those for the greater good villains that as a player you have to make a final end all deal with the gman to save humanity.
In the next game I think the main villain will be the g-man with a sort of final battle end of an era thing. I don't think he will be a boss battle but gordan/ alyx is definitely going to make it hard for him to come back to earth.
I'm pretty sure hes neither. He has his own motives for everything and who knows what those are, so I guess at the end of the rabbit hole you could DECIDE SUBJECTIVELY if hes good or evil. I think overall hes neither, hes doing what hes doing to benefit himself. It's kind of up to you if you think how hes going about doing what hes doing means hes bad or good.
I feel like breaking his things hes done down hes trying to help but his intentions and methods are never pure. Hes more than willing to see the deaths of countless to get the outcome he wants.
Im personally glad that Epistole 3 isnt cannon because i think it's such a bleak ending.
I think it's intentionally bleak because Laidlaw wanted to give the new writers a blank canvas for the next games
@@accessiblefunky Plus, not every story needs a happy ending or a solution to the existing conflict
To be honest, it fits the Half-Life. To Combine - the only reason why resistance is still alive is because they are so small and insignificant that they aren't even considering actions against them. The only reason why Resistance even has a shot at taking them down is because the main Combine Army has left, leaving the tiniest fraction of their forces on Earth. Resistance doesn't have a hope of winning. They only have a nope of not being noticed.
@@NatureChannelEnclave Theory time:
What if HL2 beta cut units (mostly the synth units and machines seen in the game fight you) is somewhat a fraction or an example of how their actual millitary force would be.
And in HL2 THEY are given a big fat chance to get the combine off the earth before the worst happens thankfully due to breen's negotiation skills and tactics after the 7 hour war.
And when freeman came
*UNBELIVABLE THEORY ALERT*
The universal union would've sent the HL2 beta sytnth enemies and actual arny and force to stop their advancements to the borealis or to reclaim lost cities from xen or rebels as earth is slowly loosing the combine influence they currently have thus leading to a slow yet painful demise of the lambada resistance either they win this or fail and suffer a horrible fate worse than death but with gordon's help. It seems that they have a chnce through this.
I consider Marc's canon as he created the series and I also consider Valve/Erik's canon with each one simply happening on a different timeline.
The claim of the Citadel screams being from a failed space launch isn't entirely incorrect. In the beta for HL2 there were unique Citadel screams that were actually pieces of audio from recordings made by the Judica-Cordiglia brothers
. They claimed to have secretly recorded multiple cosmonaut missions on the radio, and the one in the HL2 beta was from a recording that supposedly has a female cosmonaut burning up during re-entry. Many people have claimed the recordings as fake, and they probably are, but it's still eerie nonetheless. The audio file in the beta is called "trans6".
Just to confirm about the recordings. While the brothers could technically receive signals from very long distances with their equipment it didn’t cover that vast of a radius (it was directional). They would need an impossible level of accuracy in order to to continuously receive the signal for the amount of time that they claimed.
It’s been a few years and I don’t remember where I found it but there was an article that detailed the equipment they used. I’ll send it if I find it again.
I think it was actually proven for the "astronaut crashing into earth and her final words being recorded" to be false. It's simply just created by valve
@Im Certified Oh yea I wasn't saying it was true. Just going into detail about why the brother's were believed in the first place before being debunked.
Also the sounds weren't created by valve as the original unaltered audio clip can be found online where you can hear whoever recorded it saying phrases like "Мне жарко" (I'm hot or it's getting hot in this context) which is used for Trans9 as well as other parts used for Trans 6. Worth looking up.
@@ImCertified Did you even read my comment? Or did you just want to sound smart?
@@mrwheatthins2413 Yes? And you just say that it may or may not be false, and I gave the answer
Freeman's last name is ironic since he is a pawn and Shepard's last name is ironic too (though in the opposite sense from Freeman's) since he's not leading anybody, especially not in stasis.
Barney’s last name (Calhoun) means warrior in Old English, I’m not sure thats ironic though
thank you @@geno.b very cool
@@geno.bIf his last name means “Warrior” then the irony aspect could mean
- Barney started as an early and short support character and didn’t do much.
- Barney had his show in Blue Shift as a playable character and went on his journey
- In Half Life 2 he’s shortened to a support character again for Gordon.
- (idk what he did in Alyx)
I didn’t play Half Life and only watched clips of Half Life but i assume the irony in Calhoun is that he was a warrior and playable character in Blue Shift to a support in later games
Its scary seeing gman everywhere in the games, as he knows where gordon is and is making gordon sure that he is still keeping an eye ln him.
Gman has also become a meme
I guess?
@@allanmasanegra9523 what are you talking about
He does that to make sure gordon is safe
G man is valve
I think the "Half Life 1 reads your cd drive" refers to the fact that certain servers had a "troll" script in-game that could open your CD drive. It commonly happened on a Sven Coop server of the popular Afraid of Monsters mod, where an admin would spawn as the main character of the mod with god mode and startled the players, sometime executing scripts that killed them, teleported them or opened their cd drive at random. These scripts can only be possible if the game itself has access to the cd drive.
Nah man, the retail Steam copies of Half Life will read your CD drive if anything is in there. The game files will still try to play the soundtrack off of whatever is in your CD drive since the original game was supposed to be run by disk. This happened to me when I tried to play Opposing Force and every chapter started off with a Joe Satriani song
@@turbosaxophonic6210 counter strike 1.6 has a title melody for me because of this. it's etched into my brain
@@xddstudiosbywr3cked845 only pirated ones had
@@johnnya1717 it happened to me on a legitimately obtained steam version tho
@@johnnya1717 @Turbo Saxophonic it just happened again a minute ago in Day of defeat
Half Life 2’s original story was leaked so they fixed up a new one.
Half Life 2 Episode 3’s story was created and everyone considered that this was the story, then Valve fixed up a new one.
the best part, is that technically project borealis is still canon, so they managed to create a new story, without destroyng the fangames
@Fully Dead the beta
By the time HL2 got leaked the story was already changed to the one seen in the final release.
2:07 I think this could be something Gordon experienced as a child, as the file is marked memory.
I always imagined the non mechanical reproduction simulation was just vr porn
it's possible that it could be that
@@Nytro-kw5ds oh shit you're right
Same
@@Nytro-kw5ds It would only be mechanical in the sense that it is composed of matter like everything else - the more proper word for which would be "physical". Use of the term "mechanical" in that form is an archaic philosophical usage, but not out of the question. Personally, I interpreted "non-mechanical" to mean "not reflecting the actual movements". This could be anything from a very specific drug to VR porn to a direct neuralink stimulation of a part of the brain. Interpreting the term "mechanical" in the philosophical sense begs many more questions than it would imply the answer to, such as "how would they interact at all with any extant entity in a non-physical way".
@@Nytro-kw5ds Not if there isn't any moving parts.
The two hidden lines "God is not with us" and "You don't exist" are there just to make the last tier more spooky. Nothing else.
✅ English Subtitles are now available! ✅
Be sure to let me know if I made any errors! Maybe I can do a follow up video?
I would do a follow up video on Issac Kleiner and Eli Vance's sexual tension.
im glad i got recommended your video! your vid is amazing
I’m kinda disappointed that mr. deleted just started making things up near the end, you really don’t need to do that with how creepy the series already is.
If you do a follow up there’s still quite a bit you could mention, like how the zombies in hla are calling for help constantly and not in reverse, also you can tell that their chest cavity still is a mouth like in half life 1 as you can see it open and close in some of its idle animations, if you want more clarity on Gman I would highly recommend max derrat’s videos on the advisor theory as it is much more fleshed out. In the hl2 beta Barney mentions in a cut line that he had to “turn it right side out to make sure it was a cat”. You could cover the fact that most combine technology is alive, even most of if not all of the citadel (if you look closely at the translucent yellow tubes inside of the citadel you can see veins) even the computers use living “memory tanks” as they are called in the hla model files. throughout half life 2 there are several burned bodies littered around the canals and you can find a cremator head in a jar in Eli’s lab, showing that they still exist in hl2s world, but like bullsquids (Laidlaw said that’s how Eli lost his leg) freeman just didn’t encounter them in hl2. Finally if you want something really disturbing just look at some of the cut enemies, like mr.friendly the alien that rapes the player to death, the vaginal tripod that pins down the player and leaks fluid on them, not all of them are like this, but some of them could make HR Geiger blush. There’s probably dozens of other things I’m forgetting as half life is an absolute rabbit hole when you get into it, just make sure that you’re careful to separate some of the facts from “theories”, half life can be a bit vague at times so there’s a lot of people who misunderstand things and state those as fact. Also as I’m writing this I just remembered that there was originally going to be a dead child stuffed under a bed in Ravenholm.
@@merkquavious2 thank you!
@@nfwrambo wow this is a lot of info! yeah, i wish i had found the max derrat video before i made that gman segment. i will definitely cover more cut enemies and be more thorough in finding facts. i will definitely most of these into a follow up!
10:05 I didn't think Headcrabs did anything to the victim's brain. From what I've seen, it appears they envelop the head & sever the spine at the neck with their "beak", & then hijack the nervous system & pilot the victim like a puppet. If you look at the models of both headcrab & zombie you can all but confirm it. Considering the existential horror that Half-Life is portraying I would consider this 100 health territory...
...But then I watched 23:10. Wierd. Haven't played Alyx yet. Maybe they grow tentacles into the victim's brain like roots & poke around till they take complete control? Or maybe the crab has it's own way of seeing? Either way, the zombie shouldn't be able to see, as their eyes are covered by the crab...
There's a change in their physiology between the first and second game. In HL1, the crabs have a much more complex underside and their hosts (which seem to be implanted so tight that their skulls are visible) seem to have been completely assimilated, resulting in their robotic movement and completely inhuman sounds. In HL2, the hosts seem to be a little more conscious, resulting in less coordinated movement and their clear ability to still feel pain as well as making it possible to the host to die without killing the crab. I guess that because HL2 introduces several crab variants that are implied to be the result of Combine experimentation, you can chalk up the general inconsistency up to that too.
Invisible areas on headcrab that allows hosts to see?
In my opinion, the zombies probably are just blind, and only rely on sound for their targets. Would make sense, considering Jeff.
@@TheGreatHalberd But in HL1 they have eyes that are somewhat hard to spot
Something I noticed when looking at the gruesome image of all the zombies, every single one has a broken jaw. My theory is that the beak breaks into the skull, envelopes the head, snaps the neck (which is why they tilt back, most likely kept alive by the headcrab's modification to the body), and like you suggest, possibly use tentacles that spread from the brain throughout the entire nervous system to control them. Fast zombies are more sophisticated, and quite literally trim the fat of their vessel. I think the fast headcrabs outright kill and ""revive"" the human vessel, hence the growling and more feral sounds it makes.
"God is not with us". Took me a while to pause on that frame.
Interesting video. Learned some new things despite having watched a lot of content on HL. Thanks 😊
That subtle underlying depressed tone as you read off the script makes this video so much better. It probably wasn't even intentional, but if so, you're a genius. Please keep making videos about topics like this because the atmosphere in this video is just absolutely great. I've re-watched this video several times and it still gives me goosebumps.
And if you look at some of the words on screen they chang sometimes into implications of doom and that the viewer doesn't exist.
@@jakthehobo1471 yeah wtf is that about? i saw one that said god is not with us.
@@bruh_original adds to the creepiness of the iceberg
26:25 The way I think what the "It's all a simulation" section might actually be referring to. Instead of it being a joke or something, I think could be related to when the Gman hired Gordon at the end of HL1, meaning that the events of HL2 could be the "simulation" it was taking about.
As in, the Gman placed Gordon in a Hypothetical scenario after putting him in stasis, as if he was training Gordon for something much worse that the Combine has to offer.
If there's a threat out there greater than the Combine then what hope is there?
I've always wanted to see more aspects of the multiverse and alternate timelines explored in the HL franchise, I'm glad they're finally dipping their toes in that pool. So much potential.
Welp , then Alyx being left as a hole in story...
@@Sorta8 Well perhaps the situation we see is indeed a hypothetical and has not entirely happened yet. Alex is a part of it and to her it is reality but to anybody looking in it's a bizzare state of affairs.
Perhaps that's why G-man's employers did not care for Alyx whereas G-man, who is more of a 'boots on the ground' type, saw her potential.
To them Alyx is another hypothetical who will never amount to as much as Gordon, but to G-man, she's just as interesting as characters like Shepard.
@@alephkasai9384 welp ,she saved Gordon a LOT of times. That would explain things , but G-Man was trapped in "thing" during actions of Alyx , but it also can be count as simulation , simulation idea leaves lots of unanswered questions and GIANT place for theories . Dunno but I personally prefer to not count this as the thing .-.
27:11
The piano sounds seem to be organic instead of just a soundtrack, as they are coming from certain parts of the map.
It's either probably a radio playing it or gman having a fucking blast
True, I should have mentioned that the piano seems to be a part of the environment's sound.
alyx: where this piano music came from?
gman:*piano music intensifies*
I can 100% confirm that the russels lab one is from a radio.
Considering the whole weirdness of this place, I assume that piano song is just trapped in time and space with the building, and just playing on repeat endlessly.
For the last entry, I'm of the opinion that the resistance *can* win, and thats part of why Alyx is so valuable. She can hack combine technology, and use it for herself. This might mean that over time the resistance can develop technology as strong as the technology the combine have, by reverse engineering it or something along those lines, allowing them to defeat the combine
Especially because when the 7 hour war happened, militaries would only have technology similar to what we have
At 27:33 the, “Am I missing something here,” text flashes red for less than a split second and says, “God is not with us.” Interesting... Also it does it again at 28:05 and says, “You don’t exist.”
Its just him messing with us
@@akurvaanyadat Or is he!? Nah yeah he's just playing with us for the simulation part, neat and creepy detail
This is the way
@@Zomasu Lol why the random Mandalorian reference?
@@masterjuiced1101 Dunno lol that was the first thing that came to mind when I was reading your comment.
27:32 GOD IS NOT WITH US
28:04 YOU DONT EXIST
Reality is constantly shifting’
I don't like that tbh God is always here
spooky
Is this some cryptic hint I don't get?
@@agentdark5858 what god?
The audio that plays when Gordon is around that small playground in half life 2 is probably a memory he had when he was a kid or just the fact that he remembers that the earth was once a better place
Maybe that's why the file is named memory
nah ghosts it’s ghosts
@@ishwarkothandaraman3354
Oh shit, makes total sense now
No I don’t think so.. it could be but the place is set in Europe and Gordon lived in america before black mesa happened
Fleadsy a playground is a playground regardless of location
I swear to god, I dont know who rubbed off on who, but Gabe and Kojima meeting in person had to have influenced one or the other because real time moss growing is a feature for its own sake kind of idea that only someone like Kojima would put in their game regardless if anybody noticed it.
The passport reference gave me enough serotonin to survive another day, thank you. Bless you.
Every copy of Half-Life is personalized
I mean like why not using an upgraded version of half life like i mean half life is a good game but like i rather use black mesa because of the half life 2 engine
In what way is it personalized
You wouldnt get it
How?
@@Marzsala nah it's sm64
"God is not with us." 27:33
"You don't exist." 28:05
Such a good ice berg video my man idk why but I fucking love half life plot and its world. Also idk why but these "scary" gaming type stuff make me really creeped out for some reason
i shall make my own theory on these
21:57 Prospero still lived on in the original Half Life, the soundtrack that opens the train ride is called Prospero01, other tracks from this cancelled project are there as well, the files are Prospero01 through 05
You can actually find the consoling couple at the end of episode 2, just before the final mission when you get to the resistance base. Right as the gate opens, sprint parallel to the gate, and you'll see a couple sprinting from left to right. Follow them and you'll end up at a cliff, with one of them expressing their relief at finally obtaining freedom.
The consoling couple is also near the end of Half Life 2 during Follow Free Man and they're in their battle gear there.
@@effervescentrelief One of the best couples in gaming history no cap
Wait, legit, is that real?
@@RexxiToon "no cap" zoomer
@@Sapphiregamer8605 Yes it is, I found them on my recent playthrough without having known they were still alive, and was surprised to see them at White Forest. I have played Valve's games for years and still find new things to discover many years later.
Part of me wonders if the woman in the reversed version of the radio is Alyx trying to communicate to Gordon while in stasis.
I like how you think
Its an auditory illusion, no ones there.
@@funnycat4241 i like to think this is true
@@funnycat4241 I like to think this is false
Obviously this theory only works retroactively since we're dealing with possibly parallel timelines now in Half Life.
The craziest AND most likely theory I’ve heard is that GMan represents Valve / Gabe Newell. Gordon “Freeman” is you, the player who is “free”, not bound to the half life universe. When playing as Gordon you are living a half-life... you control a character in a game, but his fate is predetermined.
So much of the lore centers around the notion of control, and free will. The game puts into question what is free will. Are these NPCs alive themselves, totally ignorant to the layer of reality above them in our physical existence?
Hm and maybe that's why game named Half-Life. One half is your real life, another half is in Valve's universe :)
@@jarig I'm pretty sure the game is called Half-Life because of its science-related stuff, but I get what you mean.
Personally My "gman is valve" Theory I've Been Having Is Just That GMan Works For Valve Or Something
Not That They Are Valve Itself Or Gaben; Just That They Work For Valve
@@indeepjable So basically a sort of video game DM? They orchestrate the plot to go forward (Gman giving the crystal for example), give us the illusion of free choice (Mathew Mercer's technique of each town being the same is a good example) and check that things don't go/actually go haywire (Him detonating the bomb in opposing force) and when helped he gives us our wish at the cost of another "Employment" (HL Alyx's ending)
Yeah Probably; Essentially
Helping Valve Guide The Player To The Intended Path
I like to think that "personal holocaust" is referencing all the times the player has died as freeman. A rare ludonarrative point made in games like nier: automata, super meat boy and of course the dark souls series.
23:38
Hallucinations were a mechanic from a leaked development map at valve, it allowed you to see strange things from the corner of your eye every now and then.
What? I thought the hallucinations stuff was about the beta gman map with weird colorful pictures coming towards you.
Please tell me more of this cause I've never seen that before.
@@Th3bAc0nBiTs27 that was from a hl2 beta map. this is a concept for episode 3
@@Th3bAc0nBiTs27 idk i saw it from valve news network a couple years back
Not gonna lie im watching this at 1 in the morning, and the way Gman said "personal holocaust" scared the shit out of me. This is my first time hearing this cut dialouge.
Same im awake at 1: 00 am and this is horrifying
It sounds goofy, not scary.
Same, 1am rn
@@Agateflame 4:30am
8 am haven't slept yet and some stuff in the video is a bit eerie
Underrated vid, the algorithm has blessed me today
thanks for watching!
@@accessiblefunky hope you get more subs 🙏
@@that1pieperson80 thank you!
Dude very disturbing profile pic
Me?
Freeman declining the gmans offer is what creates the alyx timeline
uhh no
Why do i go from 100hp to 1hp when the teacher asks me something.
Underated comment
Poison head crab
I've always had a weird feeling that not everything in the half life lore is made up. Something about it gives me a gut feeling that somehow this shit is true.
Only reason a multi dimensional empire hasn’t exterminated our species is because they haven’t noticed and don’t care.
@@misanthropicservitorofmars2116 I think there's a very good case to be made for G-Man being a Shu'Lathoi based on some of Marc Laidlaw's work, or more specifically a "fully-hatched" one- creatures capable of both great intellectual and psychic feats- and it is very much apparent he is not human. Max Derrat put out a pair of videos that explained the theory very well.
ruclips.net/video/G24kDQdkwlM/видео.html
ruclips.net/video/W1eQSN6_AMk/видео.html
It’s allegory for communism I think
@@scruffy3528 that's the most American remark I've ever seen. literally has nothing to do with communism
Well Black Mesa is based on Archleta Me sa compound (google it)
I just noticed that at the after credits scene of Half Life: Alyx Eli wears his Harvard shirt, wich in HL2 ep2 he doesn't.
they actually patched that so eli has the blue diamond shirt now in the end credit scene
@@accessiblefunky uno reverse moment
@@accessiblefunky Reality is constantly changing. We keep switching timelines.
Before the patch it was the most confusing point of the entire timeline. I personally interpret the story-line as a single timeline that G-Man manipulates, as opposed to believing that there are multiple timelines. When I first played the game and was trying to piece together what happened, it appeared to me as though there was a separate timeline that began at some point between seeing Eli at Black Mesa East and seeing him with the diamond sweater in ep2. Of course, after the patch revealed that it was unintentional I wrote off the entire separate timeline theory as being fans not accepting that Valve can retcon their own story.
Fun fact: all of the Half-Life games take place when Lamarr is alive, which is why there’s no Half-Life 3/Half-Life 2: Episode Three, because, Lamarr died in the rocket that got launched in Half-Life 2: Episode Two.
Which means all the Half-Life games revolve around Lamarr.
But hey, that’s just a theory!
Kinda surprised that with the "Citadel screams" one you didn't go on to mention the beta sound files of actual screaming and wailing in pain over what sounds like a radio or otherwise as a distant echo and how one of the screams, known as trans6, is said to be heavily sampled from sounds recorded by the Judica-Cordiglia brothers in 1963 of the "first female Soviet cosmonaut" who supposedly died while reentering the Earth's atmosphere and having her craft burn apart. Even further than that is the theory that the Citadel itself is one giant bio-mechanical living being with these sounds just being the normal sounds it makes.
That was always my theory about the citadel, how it was kind of like a parasitic entity that was weaving its way into the earth and creating a sort of twisted symbiosis.
@@homeygfunkoffacherryfruitl4971 I mean I don't think it's like a truly LIVING being that has freewill, consciousness, and so on. But more that it's a creature who's very life force appears to be built around the creation of Synths biological parts since as far as we know there is no way of completely creating the bio mass behind them and that the energy drawn from the Citadel's "living body" is what's used to power stuff like the universal teleporter at the top of the structure. And also doing something like that is just such a Combine thing to do, especially considering they harvest the energy of vortigaunts as a means of powering their own structures asway means kaiju sized being made into a building is extremely fitting.
@@homeygfunkoffacherryfruitl4971 Also I can't forget how in the earliest concept arts of the Citadel by Viktor Antonev that the Citadel used to have a highly bio-mechanical design rather than just completely mechanical.
You should mention that the "first female Soviet cosmonaut" who "died while reentering the Earth's atmosphere" is fake. You can see it by at least translating the speech, its simply has a bad grammar.
@@Akamalov1 Yes. But the point is that it's still a very bizarre and disturbing audio clip for Valve to have sampled for Half-Life 2 regardless.
"Is that the door? With a raised (Silence)"
Copyright bullshit at its finest. He probably meant to say "with a raised pitch".
@@ItsCosmoTewulf he did I remember
This is what I get from the timeline stuff:
There's a total of two timelines that we know: one where Eli lives and the other one where Eli dies. Eli had to die so that Alyx could save him with the help of the G-man. This moment is where the single timeline we know divides in two, each timeline defined by the status of Eli after the happenings of Episode 2.
If I were tell you witch timeline is the real one, I think is the one were Eli lives, since that's the timeline Valve wants to explore in the next Half Life.
Yeah, I think Valve just did a clever retcon. I doubt they're ever gonna actually go back to the one where he dies, and instead use this new retcon to change the story in Half-Life 3 and have it go a different direction.
I think its really just a retcon yeah but I can see them doing some switcheroo at the end of HL3 where you save Alyx from Gman and then Eli vanishes from existence or something like that.
Glad someone brought up the theory that G-Man is Valve. I actually thought about it long time ago. Like at the end of HL1 G-Man offers the player a choice of continuing along the path of the game plot or refuse and let go. I take it developers themselves are asking you at the end of the game "Did you like our game. Whould you like to see what's next? Subscribe if you have to!". Jokes aside, i guess i can call G-Man as Gabe's Man, yeah... The fact that this G-Man appears everywhere watching Gordon going places.... it's like developers is watching you play their game in real time. Probably like watching beta-testers playing the game, while standing behind their back. And if you ask me - i think Vorts are actuall devs themselves. I remember Gabe once said in an interview that he decided to leave the development cycle to the dev team alone for some time to observe how things change from the consumer POV. And what we saw in EP1? Vorts blocking G-Man from controlling Gordon overall
Perfect, this is the definitive Iceberg of Half-Life.
Thank you!
The first one was shit
@@accessiblefunky when part 2
@@grummanf14tomcat40 soon
The "It's all a simulation" could be a reference to this bit extracted from one of the Half Life 2 trailers called "Psyche"; a really trippy one with a lot of images appearing on-screen. One of said images resembles some sort of medical diagnosis with the following text;
under observation. Galvanic activation with seve ... cidence of seizure and muscular catatonia, reco ... litration of 30 ml sample, sustained alpha activity ... Freeman, Gordon; increased activity in neural iso ... no response. Subject to availability and urgency ... unknown vector at this time. Requirements of ... beyond current threshold for amgydalic suppressi ... dark energy remnants in the simulation until basal ... f evaluation despite objections of caretakers give...
This image was used as evidence for the typical theory of "All the adventure happens in the mind of the protagonist", with Gordon being in the hospital in catatonic state or in direct coma. The reason of this state would be the beam that hit Gordon at the beginning of the Resonance Cascade. However, there could be something more, as the text mentions a simulation, caretakers refusing something and the presence of dark energy, the very thing that powers the Combine war machine. There's also the thing with the name of the game; Half Life, as it could reference the real state of Gordon, being between life and death, aside of the atomic concept that everybody knows.
This is all I personally know, I tried to find more information about this theory, but all I found was a guy posting something like this in Reddit and then getting ridiculed for how over-exploited and generic this types of theories are.
On a side note... Damn! Epistle 3 is 3 years old already? Shit, how time slides between our fingers :(
I'm pretty sure you're kinda right about the "life and death" part, but I would interpret the title "Half-Life" to be as Gordon is in a chaotic situation that he doesn't know wether he'll get out alive or not.
There was actually a HUGE HUGE thread about it on Facepunch forums back in the day, it's a shame Garry closed it down. It was quite well thought-out and people were even trying to figure out what metaphors the characters represent in said dream, it was an interesting read to say the least. Glad somebody mentioned it.
@@Artistwannabe perhaps that post is still saved in the wayback machine archive website? if you still have a link we might be able to find it there.
I thought it said “gordon has no free wifi”
NOOOOO
Well, techically he dont have free wifi
Of course he doesn't have free wifi. The Combine charges an arm and a leg for wifi access. It's insane. No wonder the resistance fights so hard.
You could argue that everyone has "free WiFi". It;s the internet service that you pay for, not "WiFi". You can have WiFi, without internet... I'll show myself out.
Free WiFi anywhere you go
"the Cat" is also a reference to Cronenberg's the Fly movie, in which a failed teleportation of a cat ends up creating a sentient and agonizing blob of flesh and exposed nerves.
in the fly it's a baboon actually, and it got turned inside out, still alive.
"they do exist" "God is coming" PIcture of gman with white noisy eyes and strange noise. Whaaaaat
God is not with us.
@@whatisahandlebruh you don't exist
@@NekosSan yes I’ve been seeing the creepy red text and it’s been bugging me uhh W H Y is it there?!?!
@@burgburger1568 yea same
I heard that the "hallucination stuff" is because of the start of the game, when the experiment in Black Mesa goes wrong, you get hit by a lightning... This induces Gordon into a "catatonic state" making all that he sees in Half Life a hallucination.
Oh wow
That's correct. Also, the title of the series may also allude to not only the term applied to the study of Physics, Chemistry, etc - which would make sense in context to the surface-level story of the game - but to the following theory as well, referring to Gordon being "half alive" after the Black Mesa incident.
Kind of makes you think they already had a basic idea of what the story or outcome was going to be from the very beginning of its development which makes sense - albeit, they might've discarded the idea because of possible backlash.
It could also be a few of the beta maps for half-life 2 that show Gordon hallucinating in what seems like half-life 1's hazard course. You loop through it a few times, every time being a bit different, and he zooms down a hallway to gman.
That's more like a dream
@@somefries3101 you're right. The theory really implies he's under a catatonic state after the incident.
There are a lot of tidbits and details throughout all of the games that support this theory - or were supposed to, at the very least.
Man, I still can't shake the feeling that the G-Man is somehow Freeman, making sure he goes where he is needed.
Like a future version of himself forcing the present version of himself to do as he did before.
Of course, that'd be a paradox, but the lore/gameworld is crazy enough to warrant it.
g-man
G(ordon free)man
@@meerkatman6852 oh shid of fug you're onto something
That was my first idea when I saw G man for the first time
i always think that. I mean it works.
3:29 Funny conclusion you came to regarding the dead scientists in HEV suits, plus having 100% confidence in that conclusion. I always figured the other men in HEV suits were those who perished while pursuing the very mission Freeman was sent on. Did I miss something in the storyline that explained why those scientists were there?
No because the where already aware of xen and that's how there already a Portal built also why there were aliens that had been captured from xen in some of the complex there plenty areas where they been kept showing the player that they knew about this place for a very good while now
Referring to the cat theory, in half life alyx, there is a missing cat poster. Forgot where but I know there is
Interesting
Yes that's in the first chapter of the game. Although my thinking was that it was for a cat that you can actually see in starting area if you look down to a lower balcony. Who knows maybe its the same one that's referenced in hl2.
it's in the area where you talk to a resistance member in a laundry room
To me, the radio sounds like it's saying "Dead. Everyone's dead Gordon. Dead." Creepier than "Gordon, can you hear me? Gordon, can you hear me?" or "G-man can you hear me? G-man can you hear me?"
The hallucination stuff is apparently some of the trippy physics (the Matrix code looking letters in HL1 G-Man ending I think).
thanks for letting me know!
@@accessiblefunky I can clearly remember something about A HL3 Leak related to "Hallucinations". It was a clip of a player looking at a point, then looking behind and seeing one of those "Error" things. It was aparrently gonna be used on that 2014 HL3 Prototype thing, but my memorie may he faulty here.
@@peace9272 If I remember correctly the HL3 that got prototyped then cancelled in 2016 caused Marc to leave Valve.
@@accessiblefunky
Found The Hallucination clip!
ruclips.net/video/h3m7Oc08Ur0/видео.html
At 5:50 in this VNN video!
@@peace9272 oh damn thank you very much!
I would argue that "Freeman's Limitless Potential" refers to the fact that Freeman is the Player Character, and as such, can save/reload an infinite number of times to overcome any obstacle or perfect any part of the story. This further solidifies the possibility that G-Man is indeed Valve, talking to the PC directly, with the prescience that the player exists outside of the game and can always determine specific outcomes. Simultaneously, G-Man knows what the outcome will be, since Freeman can only stay within the confines of the games rails - hence G-Man is Valve because Valve designed the game, and the player, no matter how many times or different ways they try something, the game will always end the same way.
I have my own Half-Life Iceberg theory: Gman is evil. (or, at least, not on the human's side)
Everyone keeps trying to say that he's on the human's side, but every action he does is against humanity and nobody brings it up. His meddling in Black Mesa caused the portal storms decimating the Earth and then causing the Combine to invade, and then at the end of Half-Life 2, if Gman had had his way, Gordon would have been whisked off, the Citadel would have been destroyed, causing a portal storm allowing the full Combine forces to invade, and humans would have been fucked. It was only through the help of the Vortigaunts that Freeman was able to stay and help eventually close the Citadel portal.
I like to think that Gman is doing this for his own entertainment. Like a game of chess with himself. Messing with things to see what happens.
I feel like gman works for whoever pays him, in whatever he needs.
i like to think that gman is trying to use humanity to destroy the combine. he cause the black mesa incident to lure them in
I used to think Gman was just a freelance "problem solver" for forces beyond our comprehension but the games clearly hint at him having his own personal agenda which is at odds with that of his current "employers."
I believe Gman was initially working for the Combine during HL1 but over the course of events he was gathering his own little personal hit squad of different Black Mesa survivors to use for his own purposes later on. By the events of HL2 he's working for new employers that are at odds with the Combine but no one realizes that Gman has been playing the long game by inserting his plants like Alyx into significant positions that will greatly influence things in his favor down the line. This was all thrown out of whack by the vortigaunts in Episode 1 freeing Freeman from Gman's control, which forced him to improvise and focus on using Alyx as his new pawn, though indirectly rather than how he did it through Freeman.
What his motives are we still don't know but goddammit if Valve don't know how to craft a compelling mystery that keeps us hooked.
G-Man’s alignment is neither good nor evil, and that’s probably the scariest part about him. He doesn’t singularly assist the humans or the Combine, he is working for a group that is more powerful than himself, and he possesses more power than the Combine, making this group ungodly and terrifyingly powerful. They have an end that they kicked off with the delivery of the sample and the Black Mesa Incident, and we cannot predict what it will be, because their aim is beyond our comprehension. G-Man’s employers are so powerful that they don’t need him to play mind games with the Combine to take over the Earth so they can have it; they’d take it if they wanted it. There is no way to predict what he’s trying to achieve.
a bit of a correction: the ending of episode 2 was not retconned. those events still happened, but the timeline was changed through events that occurred in half life alyx. retconned implies that events were changed outside of the media itself and not as a result of events within the media, like you wouldn't call what happens in back to the future a retcon.
true, i guess "retcon" implies something else. still trying to wrap my head around the timeline
@@accessiblefunky I'm in the camp that believes HL:A Alyx and HL:2 Alyx are the same entity. That Gman merely made Alyx a sleeper agent, suppressing all her memories of The Vault, conveniently placing her out of harm's way.
He then wakes Gordon up from stasis for the events of HL2, and makes it his current goal to use up the rest of Gordon's potential, to cast him aside when he's useless. Notice how often Alyx is with Gordon throughout the three games, and proving herself just as powerful (if not moreso.)
Once the Advisor comes through, that's when G-Man "activates" HL:A's ending, where Alyx kills the Advisor, and he takes her as Gordon's replacement.
This way, there's less time travel involved, and really the only "retcon" is the final moments of Ep2. Instead of Eli dying and Alyx mourning, Gman shows up, wakes up the Sleeper in Alyx, we'd see her blast the advisor, and then fade away.
I love how everything that is half-life related is always so dramatic
when alyx asks “combine off earth” g-man will split in two and one will vanish, thats probably combine off earth universe.