Eighteen years after its release, Half-life 2 continues to fascinate. A macabre secret has just been discovered. Sensitive souls refrain.
If you have played Half Life 2, you have no doubt come across corpses of burnt people, scattered all over the game. For many, they are frightening. Imagine that they hide an even more macabre secret: their head would come from a real deceased, reports The Gamer in an article published on December 21.
According to fan discovery, documented on Reddit, the Corpse01.mdl model developed by Valve would use a photo from a medical book. Videographer Richter Overtime (137,000 subscribers) summed it up perfectly in a video published on December 19. Numerama was able to see the photo in question (we won’t share it, of course) and compare it to the character seen in Half Life 2. Except for one detail, the resemblance is edifying.
A macabre secret discovered in Half-Life 2
By putting the photos side by side, we realize that the developers have made only one modification: the remaining eye of the corpse has been removed. For the rest, we find the same elements at the level of the teeth or even traces of burns on the face. The hair has been removed. The victim would be a member of the mafia whose face had been burned. Knowing this story, we have even less desire to come across Corpse01.mdl in Half Life 2 (by the way, some already want to make it disappear with mods).
Why would Valve have allowed itself to use a real photo to model a virtual corpse? For the sake of realism, no doubt — knowing that at the time, development techniques were less advanced than today. In 2022, a title like The Callisto Protocol proves that you can go very far in reproducing gore and horror — without the need for real-life elements.
In his video, Richter Overtime also shares an anecdote that supports the discovery. Artist who worked on Left 4 Dead 2 (another game developed by Valve), Bronwen Grimes explains that her team had a file full of photos of people disfigured due to illness or accident. They were to be used for the in-game zombies. Eventually, they were too unbearable to look at, and Valve took a healthier approach: using photos of insulation materials and potatoes to model the infected.
This macabre secret of Half Life 2 reminds us of how problematic the race for realism can be when it is linked to graphic violence or a vision of horror. This is true for players, who do not necessarily want to be shocked. It is also for the developers, who must find tricks to obtain a credible rendering, while preserving their sanity. As such, a Kotaku article published in May 2019 reports that a developer of Mortal Kombat 11 had to deal with post-traumatic stress disorder from the extreme violence of the fighting game.
