Half-Life 2 fans pretty sure one of the venerable shooter’s character models is based on images of a real-life corpse, and they’re modding it out of the game.
A content warning before we go any further: This article contains a discussion of some pretty gnarly images of what would seem to be a real and badly damaged human corpse. I won’t link to the images of the corpse in question — that would be grotesque — but you will find an embedded tweet later in this piece that contains a spoiler-shielded image of the Half-Life 2 character model the community is trying to remove. If you’d prefer not to read about this, for any reason, no problem! I completely get it!
Here, I’ll even drop a spoiler banner in to put some extra space between you and the rest of the article. If you’re ok with continuing, I’ll meet you in the paragraph below.
As spotted by TheGamer, word of the character model’s origins began to spread earlier this week after users on the r/eyebleach subreddit noticed that some especially grisly photos resembled a badly burnt human model in Half-Life 2. The internet detectives got to work, linking the images to a medical book.
The model in question, Corpse01.mdl, has also appeared as a character skin in Garry’s Mod. An image of the model was shared by YouTuber Richter Overtime on his Twitter, with photos of the seemingly related corpse posted in the comments below it.
Did you know?
“corpse01.mdl” from Half-Life 2 and GMod is textured using real photos of a dead, burnt body
The original picture is from a medical book, and will be in the replies (NSFW warning) pic.twitter.com/iDe3Ia65Id
— Richter Overtime (@richterovertime) December 19, 2022
As Half-Life historians Metrocop see it, HL2‘s original approach and design were far darker than what eventually appeared in the finished game. Corpse01.dll appears to be one of a very few assets that has survived from that much earlier development period.
At the time of writing, its still unconfirmed if Corpse01.mdl was created using this real-life corpse as its basis, though the available evidence is credible. As Mortal Kombat developers at Netherealm will tell you, using extremely confronting, disturbing, or otherwise gruesome images as reference material is far from a rare event in AAA video game design, where gore is part of the product. There are many artists and developers within the games industry that have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorders because viewing disturbing, gory, or grotesque images as reference material for hours on end was part of the daily grind. And what kind of industry are we fostering when gore is the thing we’re trying to make look hyper-realistic and accurate? I suddenly have an even greater fondness for the shapeless, formless red Quake gibs of my youth.
Another fairly thorny ethical question: This person died in what appears to have been a pretty awful way. Is it okay to use their body as set dressing for a video game because it makes the product seem grittier and darker? Obviously, Half-Life 2 was created in a very different era of game design. Would the same standards that applied to its development then apply to similar products today, and is it fair to judge it against a modern standard?
Regardless of where you land on those questions, if you’d like to play Half-Life 2 free of any potentially very real corpses, the HL2 community already has a mod available that alters the model to look like a blend of Dr Breen and Dr Kleiner’s faces.
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