To paraphrase from the description - Hierarchy Problem is a reinterpretation of Half Life aimed at putting the setting in a hopefully moderately more realistic context. It's normally in a big long Google Doc, but I figured it'd be fun to try and narrate the timeline section for youtube. I don't really make videos or narrate things in general, so I apologize in advance if this isn't any good. Almost all of the images in this video were made by me, either in Garry's Mod or Photoshop, with the exception of 49:40, which is a screenshot from the game Space Engine. You can find a lot more of my art in my Discord server! discord.gg/6r2Rd6Ue8H The original doc is linked in the description and includes a bunch of extra stuff like communications transcripts from the Black Mesa Incident, various worldbuilding notes, a style guide, and more. I've also written short stories (well, just one for now) which you can also find through that document. EDIT: Alright, I just want to throw in an extra thanks to all of you who are writing such nice comments. It's difficult to reply to all of them but they all mean a great deal to me and I love reading them all. I never expected that people would take this video the way they have. Seriously - thank you all.
i love the 1970s era helvetica bold signs all around the complex, thats incredibly accurate to real us government signage before the late 80s its all over washington
You’ve definitely punched leagues above your weight class, so to speak I’m only 30 minutes in and I kind of wish the games played out like this instead of
Welcome to HALF-LIFE muddafaka....the subjugation of Earth and death of billions is just a small part of a plan we'll never see concluded because valve doesn't make games anymore 💪💪💪
I hold degrees in Emergency Management and Homeland security and I'm an army national guard vet and currently work in law enforcement. I just wanna say in my professional opinion this is incredible. I love the little detail that all the responding agencies had trouble communicating because they didn't share common radio frequencies. During Hurricane Katrina, responding agencies had that exact problem, and it led to a major revision of the National Response Framework. Hell, the NRF wasn't even developed yet.
It is always kind of shocking how in so many disasters, miscommunication is a bigger killer than the disaster itself. Someone can't get through to the district fire chief who is needed to authorize XYZ, so nobody knows that ABC is happening, and it just gets worse and worse...
@@nuclearpotato4073 As a psychiatrist - miscommunication is also the biggest killer of personal relationships. People not wanting to tell, or believing that another person should telepathically "understand" how they feel (Because of course it feels good being understood without saying a single word) is the main reason breakups, fights, anger, and even murders happen. If we were to ever end as a civilization - it will be because of miscommunication and our egos
Black Mesa: Took 40 years to develop teleportation that barely works. Aperture Science: Went from shower rings to fully functional quantum tunneling in like 2 years, all on a price sector budget.
To be fair, black mesa was going to whole new dimensions, aperture was teleporting from place to place within the same universe traveling from one dimension to another is gonna take like 40 years. Not tryna stir a heated argument, just keep the discussion thus forward sane
Unfortunately in Hierarchy Problem Aperture is primarily a robotics and engineering research and consulting firm out of Detroit that falls in hard times as their main driving force - charismatic CEO Cave Johnson - fell ill in the 80s, ultimately getting bought out by Rockwell International during the 1991 recession, contributing to a period of corporate hostility and stagnation.
@@nuclearpotato4073 oh shit, so in your reinterpretation of half-life's lore, portal doesn't exist. i think it's good to say this, because then people don't claim that your video(s) are the "true canon"
My favorite touch is the Vort caressing his box of corn pops at 50:39. He's been through so much and was just liberated from the Nihilanth's control, stranded on an alien world around people who would no sooner shoot him. He just wants his pops.
@@Zackcraft102 The citadel starts being ruined, though that means a good part of the C17’s resistance would die in an explosion or being shot by combine enforcers, or mauled by zombies or antlions
@@Zackcraft102 The remaining White Forest Resistance starts working on a rocket that could potentially sever the connection between the Combine on Earth and the Combine Overworld.
I would say that it sounds like an insane thing to make an hourlong video about, but you can't underestimate the ability of video essayists to babble about nothing for hours and hours
i mean to be honest assuming black mesa had a issue where they had authority over the government, committing illegal classified projects beyond what they were contracted to do, i wouldn't be very surprised. they were able to literally get away with building a entire facility with no consideration abide by osha safety regulations and protocol. which probably created alot of Immortality rates
36:37 "In the midst of the fighting, theoretical physicist Gordon Freeman had attained a borderline messianic reputation among the soldiers and marines at Black Mesa, as a man who could not be killed. [...]" That made me laugh out loud. Gordon as the man but on all sides not just BMRF staff. Love this alternative, more realistic take - and Gordon is still rambo!
@@Mahrooby I like to imagine it being him doing sign language with Barney having to act as an interpreter or something while the FBI agents get increasingly frustrated before just being like "well, it obviously wasn't you"
its cosmic horror for freeman too, he's literally a slave to cosmic forces he can never understand, carrying out wetwork for reasons he could never comprehend. His entire existence is a cosmic crowbar being used by various people to manipulate the cosmos.
Can't remember where from, but I recently heard someone say that: Half-Life is a series where Gordon Freeman is playing an FPS, and the Combine are playing Stellaris.
@@447GHT Gordon was frozen in Stasis after HL until he was suddenly dropped on a train in HL2, immediately killing hundreds of people and blowing up a whole city. His story is full of horror, but he does not seem to care, that's why he was chosen.
Easily and by far my new favorite interpretation of the events of the series. The fairly restrained and limited take on Freeman's role, the "cover-up" not including the literal massacre of any and all eyewitnesses in two layers (first of the BMRF staff by the HECU, then of the HECU by the "Black Ops"), and especially the relatively non-demonizing portrayal of the Combine (terror strikes and general attacks on civilians being "limited", jobs and currency still being a thing, the fact that non-essential goods and services as major as cars are still being produced and distributed, etc) are so very, very refreshing.
@history_moose I am here cuz i have a idea for a mod: starts out on a plane flying over black mesa right when the resonance cascade happens, everyone on the plane disappears except for the player, later military jets shoot it down, and then the player has to survive and witness the events leading to the 7 hour war This video is a valuable resource for ideas 🙏
Gotta agree. They say a picture can often say more than a thousand words and my of them did. They really, as simple as some of them individually are, draw you in. At times I felt "Hell I was there" or "Hell, I can suddenly picture the scene unfold as if it was animated and ongoing, not just static". Half-Life is the stuff of legends, memorable and I dare say (for now, nothing actually is) eternal. You could fill whole games or plots or even movies or TV shows (pray they end up being a good adaptation like Fallout) just about Half-Life 1's worsening crisis as many actors work together. Forfeit the dumb 90s/2000s video game logic and TV trope of "backup is hostile" and you got yourself an epic tale in which you could even individually focus on select characters thrown into uncertainty or outright or delayed chaos depending on where they fit into the events and where and who they are.
@@Unknown-ek1ox that last part especially, I’ve always appreciated civilian/outsider perspectives on stories where a cataclysmic event is usually told through a playable hero, cause you get this slow build and cacophony, where you know but the character(s) don’t, massive tension, etc. This video especially, I love the store view with the (authentic!) EAS screens filling every TV
I honestly kind of regret not putting more in. I've got a lot more pictures that I came close to putting in, but hesitated because I felt like there were already too many. I would've if I'd known people liked them so much.
@@nuclearpotato4073 I feel like the ones provided were alike to chapter markers, representing sections of the video’s script. If you could find a way of presenting the others though, I’m certain a lot of people here would check it out. I especially like the digicam ones :>
@@nuclearpotato4073 The more the merrier. It would've made the video even better if the screens were of the same caliber. At times I even felt the changes were too slow, but that's nitpicking on a high level, really. Back when I started in hobby movie editing (mostly for a player group I ran, with a Corporation flavor) I learned the harder way or over time that people on average favor more visual changes than dwelling on the same camera angles, scenes or pictures. Your video is surely a relative exception because especially "lore nerds" and those interested in the franchise or game world won't mind it as much as other target audiences. But yeah it generally helps still I'd say. Hard to say what the right formula is (e.g. "a new scene, picture or camera angle every X"). It's very unique and dependent. And various people will have other ideas about it. When in doubt, go with gut feel or when you think "where it makes sense". A few more wouldn't have hurt though. E.g. when you have a new notable story emphasis or key scene unfold in the text, then add an according picture to further visualize it. IDK, from the top of my head when it is briefly mentioned that Gordon is arrested for questioning, a brief unique scene for that in some (interrogation) room or some other fitting area would've been dope. If I recall right (without watching it again) it wasn't visually covered. Again, nitpicking on higher levels, but an idea for future works to keep in mind. Or you can eventually upload a second version with more pictures and scenes depicted as bonus content at some point.
Very impressive. I always liked the idea of the HECU actually being there to save people. The inclusion of the Thunder Child tank was 10/10. Also really captured the scope of just how bad the Black Mesa Incident was.
Perhaps describing the Black Mesa Incident in a "moderately more realistic context" in the style of an official debrief can give a certain interpretation. As if what is said is sugar-coded to hide the government's intentions around what they really wanted Black Mesa to do with Xen as well as to hush the secure details and shift blame for the disaster. At least that's how I want to interpret it. Great stuff
Sugar coated. The phrase comes from the concept of having something gross (such as a medicine pill) and coating it with a better flavor (like sweetness from sugar). It hides the truth (the disgusting pill) by masking it with news that isn't {as} bad (coat of sugar). Sugar coding something would mean like if you replaced "a" with glucose, "b" with sucrose, and so on. A code made up of sugar.
Its a neat video. But theres a lot of HECU whitewashing and Gov. Competence washing. It detracts from the total fubar situation that happened in the game. The HECU was so bad at their job they had to send the Black Ops to liquidate the liquidators. If you want a realistic take on Half Life then literally read The Mist. Which is what the game is inspired by.
Yeah, I've noticed the same, lol. This is a lot more amateurish compared to the stuff that other people have been putting out, but I figured that I may as well strike while the iron was hot.
@@nuclearpotato4073from what i’ve seen, this is the best. the worldbuilding is very in-touch with the realities, and touches on the human aspect which many other versions don’t
@@nuclearpotato4073I want you to reinterpret half life 2 as a sequal to this because this is interesting also as a joke make Gordon responsible for the seven hour war foundation of the resistance before he goes into stasis
This is the THREADS of Half-Life. I'd love to see a movie using this version of the narrative, showcasing the beginning-to-end fuck-up that this was, and then a quick look at the seven-hour war and the years following.
great video and reimagining man, was great to watch at 1 am i LOVE the idea of the HECU not killing black mesa personnel, and gordon freeman being treated by HECU soldiers as a messiah, and eli vance helping with communicating with vortigaunts. the worldbuilding too is very nice, how the response efforts were going and the visual images, i liked it a lot i also liked the images that showed what online forums were talking about when the black mesa incident was happening, really immerses me into what the people were thinking when this was happening, and make me feel with them im going to show this to my child and say that the black mesa incident actually happened very good work man!!
The soldiers don't know what's happening; all they know is that somehow aliens are popping in around Black Mesa. In that context it'd be crazy for them to NOT be following their orders, no matter how awful they seem on the surface. G-Man and Breen were both in on allowing the Combine to invade, so with them passing bad intel to whoever is giving orders to soldiers on the ground, there are a hundred reasons they could have made up to get them to kill scientists. Or maybe the government thought the rift was going to fade on its own, and thought the potential benefits to international power were so immense that it was worth keeping it a secret at all costs. Or they decided it was far too dangerous a technology to continue pursuing and that everyone involved was too dangerous to be kept alive. Point is, soldiers are gonna do what they're told, especially in a context as crazy as an alien invasion. All they knew about Freeman was that he'd been killing their buddies. This video is wildly revisionist for no good reason.
The soldiers don't know what's happening; all they know is that somehow aliens are popping in around Black Mesa. In that context it'd be crazy for them to NOT be following their orders, no matter how awful they seem on the surface. G-Man and Breen were both in on allowing the Combine to invade, so with them passing bad intel to whoever is giving orders to soldiers on the ground, there are a hundred reasons they could have made up to get them to target scientists. Or maybe the government thought the rift was going to fade on its own, and thought the potential benefits to international power were so immense that it was worth keeping it a secret at all costs. Or they decided it was far too dangerous a technology to continue pursuing and that everyone involved was too dangerous to be kept alive. Point is, soldiers are gonna do what they're told, especially in a context as crazy as an alien invasion. All they knew about Freeman was that he'd been killing their buddies. This video is wildly revisionist for no good reason.
youtube keeps deleting my detailed argument so all i can say is that soldiers would do what they're told in an alien invasion. this isn't a "reinterpretation," it's a full on rewrite, solving problems that aren't there
@@MenachemSchmuel It is a reinterpretation because I'm reinterpretating the events of Half Life. If that's too complicated for you to understand, you don't have to watch it.
To think - all this is going on as Freeman's running around merking entire HECU squads while talking like a pirate and creating a new verse to Modern Major General.
@@nuclearpotato4073Freeman's Mind reference. In that series, Gordon is characterized as a neurotic and deeply selfish man who slowly turns into a psychopath as the Black Mesa disaster progresses
I mean, he can still do all this (save for merking HECU squads), the situation's deep enough in shit Hell, maybe he can nab some "funny wheels" from a medic or something.
I remember really liking these images you made after you posted them on Reddit, but now that you've tied it all together with a coherent narrative and narration, it's even more outstanding. Part of me wishes you retconned the events of Half Life 2 and the Seven Hour War because it feels like a real "Shoot the Shaggy Dog" moment as TvTropes puts it, and this new Vortigaunt-Human 21st century seems much more interesting to explore than Half Life 2, but nonetheless, amazing work and was a very entertaining watch.
It's an interesting prospect, but to be honest, the fact that all of humanity's efforts to reverse the Resonance Cascade in the face of forces beyond their comprehension is sort of what I like the most about the whole thing. The death of untold millions and the subjugation of Earth was just a part of an overall plan (that we're probably never going to see concluded)
Black Mesa's research of point-to-point teleportation lead to unforeseen consequences and an alien invasion. Meanwhile, Aperture Science was dicking around with portal technology as early as the 80s. I mean there is serious irony in Black Mesa trying to get a person from one place to any other place, and causing the events of HL2, but Aperture's portals could get you to the freaking moon.
@@jamesrosewell9081 I don't know if it's been disproven necessarily, since the only way to prove or disprove it would be to have a global thermonuclear war. It's just us trying to make do with computer models which kill considerably less people.
@@jamesrosewell9081 has it been disproven? its not actually a theory solely focused on "its cold like winter' but that the crops would die out due to radiation, airborn debris/smoke creating clouds that limit sunlight. IE: making farmland barren. I suppose a massive exchange would cause bigger issues for life than crop loss... but the point of Nuclear Winter as a cohesive theory is to say "even a limited exchange could be disastrous"
I'm a citizen who currently staying at City 22, working on those machinery for "their" military equipment. I just want to say your video is so great, man. thanks for reminding us to the global tragedy 23 years ago that shockingly devastating all of us. I remember 20 years ago (I was 14 back then), I lost both of my parents to the incident and I just can't really think anything anymore that day, as if I just floating to the river waiting for either my salvation or my doom... but here I am, I know this is not entirely paradise to the humanity, but at least I lived until now, waiting for great things to come. I'm certain the next day will be the turning point for us all, for the freedom that they took away from us... EDIT: but until now, oh god I hope the combine won't find out about this...
@@chibisayori20 Apparently I heard some guy named something like Dussel downloaded the internet before the war, he must’ve been distributing this to high ranking resistance members.
I love the idea of HECU being initially being sent in to clean up any witnesses but eventually turning around and helping the staff to escape after they realize how wide spread the invasion is. With how disorganized everything was it makes sense that some squads will still be hostile upto Forget about Freeman. Ik this is a more realistic take on the Black Mesa incident but did it still get nuked in the end by the black ops? Also where was Shepard in all of this? Plus I'm curious of how much misinfo there would be about the actual incident. It'd be awesome to have something like Art Bell's coast to coast AM discussing conspiracy theories about the facility and really badly designed late 90s websites trying to leak the "truth" but are obviously very wrong about a lot of things.
regarding the nuke, i think in the video it said that that black mesa and surrounding areas got bombed heavily within the final hours, still devastating but no nuke
Like the guy above me said, no nuke - a massive strategic bombardment campaign is launched to destroy the laboratory and city instead. Shepard is also still reasonably around somewhere, as I've tried to focus more on the broader incident instead of individuals (since individuals had barely any power in a scenario like this) but he could still be around within Hierarchy Problem. As for misinformation, it'd probably be very severe. Nobody would trust the official government narrative of the disaster and anything they say, even if correct, would just be discounted outright. You'd have a fair amount of people coming out of Black Mesa talking about some crazy shit they saw, but human memory sucks (and a lot of them would just be randoms caught in the middle of it all) leaving them with bizarre ideas of what happened.
i swear when the incident happened black mesa literally became people's most favorite area-51 site obsession except it's a research organization and they made a literal rift to interdimensional hell...... ahhh yes i can already hear the most insane ramblings from the alien conspiracists going extremely nuts over this event, realizing that the government
i swear when the incident happened black mesa literally became people's most favorite area-51 site obsession except it's a research organization and they made a literal rift to interdimensional hell...... ahhh yes i can already hear the most insane ramblings from the alien conspiracists going extremely nuts over this event, realizing that the government was trying to hide it and then realize that the vortigaunts exist with their own entirely unique language and culture among other discovery of new alien races
counter argument to HECU being "nice guys" (instead of being this specially curated task force formed to unquestionably commit war crimes) is Hurricane Katrina, and other apocalyptic cases where the military basically let people die, herded them toward death, or directly massacred people. Katrina because it was a confluence of military, police, and private militaries, the latter particularly that engaged in documented massacres when the SHTF (although poor people are probably considered more expendable than gov contracted scientists, who could help the HECU. But thats not how the military thinks). Thats more the realistic view on US military (and i have a 700+ page book of documented US mil war crimes on my shelf to back this reasoning up), valve's depiction of the HECU was more realistic, where valve's depiction of BM Security was unrealistic, as they are based on Wackenhut who guarded Area 51, and are a notoriously cutthroat outfit similar to HECU.
I was got so caught off guard hearing ace combat soundtrack. this is great, the presentation really made me felt like I was watching an analysis of an actual event that happened
You know, while I do love fighting two conflicting different factions in Half-Life, having the military as your allies would have been awesome. I could imagine the HECU showing up, cocky at getting the the chance to kill aliens, while annoyed at having to rescue and babysit scientist, including Freeman. Only for the situation to prove much worse than anticipated, suffering casualties, with many NPC's dropping like flies around Freeman, who survives thanks to his HEV suit. Over the course of the operation, they come to respect Freeman who manages to hold his own, and fight alongside them, even offering to escort him to his objective, recognising he and the other scientist are the best hope of stopping the invasion.
"smells like...smells like another babysittin' job to me, man. Babysittin' job my ass! This has 'training mission' written all over it! Why else would they have kept our orders secret from us, huh!? Yeah, what the hell for, man?"
These pictures are so cool dude. This gives me an idea about the 7 hour war. Most people imagine the 7 hour war as the combine just wrecking the entire earths militaries , but I think it can also be interpreted that the portal storms disorganized the worlds militaries and social cohesion, and the Combine forces intervened in a way that would’ve been seen as on behalf of humanity, and maybe by a lot of the world seen as a good thing. This would make sense as to why people would be so willing to surrender and later collaborate, because many would interpret that we weren’t even at war with the Combine in the first place! Rather it would seem to them that the combine were the saviors of earth in its hour of crisis during the portal storms. Only later on in the following years of occupation would the combine become slowly more authoritarian, like a frog boiling. This concept to me is much more scarier then the combine invading and conquering. It’s more unsettling, and emulates closer how authoritarian governments have operated in the past
That's an interesting way of looking at it, actually. I tried to aim it a little towards that, but I imagine that angle still falls a little flat in the midst of a massive orbital bombardment campaign.
@@nuclearpotato4073 yeah I was going to comment after watching the whole thing that I think your take of the 7 hour war being conducted almost entirely remotely is also pretty cool
I've always wanted to see a few different versions of Half Life including one where the marines are there to help and evacuate personnel, and this has made me want to see a version where they aren't the only people there doing so I'd also love to see a Half Life mod where you aren't in Black Mesa, nor are you a scientist, soldier or whatever, you're just some joe schmoe, something along the lines of the L4D protagonists, maybe you're just a manager at a store, an office worker or a non-social shut-in who still lives with their parents, and you're not trying to do anything greater than just surviving
There was a mod like that years ago I can't remember the name of, you start out in an apartment then a portal storm erupts and there's xen monsters outside your apartment you gotw fight
As a lifelong worldbuilder, i appreciate this so much. The bulk of my creative work that isn't poetry consists of timelines, in universe writing, maps, location profiles, overviews of technlogy and concepts, and very rudimentary illustration of all of the above. As someone wirh almost no interest in character narrative, I love so much this specific format of narrative presentation. Especially for Half Life. Great work, cant wait to explore your doc.
Man, loved this narrative and how you managed to turn something "short" into a whole detailed storyline. My only gripe was the lack of headcrab action, headcrabs would have been a massive issue as they were one of the primary wildlife transported to Earth and would have made a disaster of refugee centers and disoriented civlians along the state.
This. I can only imagine how the psychological effects of headcrab attacks and having to deal with them would add to the already wild public discourse regarding the Black Mesa incident.
I always found the premise of American Marines killing their own countrymen on their own soil a bit unreliastic. I’m glad you addressed the Marines as more as a “rescue” force rather then a cover up operation
I honestly feel like you'd sooner see Marines turning on the people giving them those orders than actually willingly embark on mass murder of unarmed American civilians on a scale like that
@@nuclearpotato4073 My dad who had been in the marines can confirm that as he said all US military have the authority to refuse orders to kill and murder civilians and they can arrest or execute any military personal who insists on following such orders as its unconstitutional as the US military duty is to uphold and protect the constitution of the USA and the American people. Now the black ops I can see trying to follow the orders only to be force the military.
The only reason the military doesn't tend to kill _American civilians_ is because they're too busy killing foreign civilians. Do you think someone like Eddie Gallagher *wouldn't* "willingly embark on mass murder of unarmed American civilians"? Although if they did start killing American civilians they'd have to avoid intruding into the National Guards favorite past time, shooting and bayoneting unarmed students (Kent State and the response protest at the University of New Mexico respectively) Also, it wasn't just some lone wolf thing with Gallagher, he was reported several times by other SEAL team members but they were all dismissed by the SEAL command structure, and he was only prosecuted years later because some of those reports gained public visibility. Otherwise the cover up would be successful and he would've gotten away scot free, except he still actually got away scot free anyways, and was also championed as a hero by many politicians and talking heads (mostly Republicans, but plenty of people across the board were perfectly fine defending such an abhorrent war criminal).
@@from_no_whereWhy is your shizo post the first time I hear of this? Well Seals being psychos is nothing new, Special Forces tend to be unhinged like that but for the other stuff is everyone too busy bitching about the cops killing some black guy to notice?
I don’t know how many people have noticed, but I gotta say, I really appreciate the level of historical accuracy that was put into the U.S. Marines and the HECU soldiers, I especially liked that picture of the soldier on the motorcycle with the DBDU covered PASGT. Most modern depictions of HECU soldiers will have high cut helmets and generic modern LBE and vests, but everything in this video is true to the period. Awesome work!
37:02 To be a fly on the wall for THAT conversation. I imagine however ludicrous it sounded, the German pilots were certainly ready to lend a hand in such a dire situation.
It's actually explained in the Google Doc - the soviets did their own teleportation experiments, but it resulted in the team seemingly disappearing. The team was stranded in Xen, and eventually died of natural causes. Meanwhile, the scientists on Earth ended the project
I like how the Xen forces were portrayed as disorganized and a silent force while the Combine was portrayed as a much more organized force in their actions
Dude this is really dope. I've spent hours thinking and imagining the world around Black Mesa, and this fits that niche so well. Though I say I subscribe to the date of December 5th, 2000 being the date the black mesa event occurred, either way though things still fit with that, and this is a great reimagination. The pictures are really well done as well and really bring alive the late 90s/early 2000s world Black Mesa takes place in. I just love it man. Bravo.
Really good choice in music, I never realized how barotrauma's music fits the vibe of half-life. Also good detail on the military side of things, I enjoy that you mentioned National Guard and other actual Marine bases sending support to Black Mesa. I just read through the document you made for this. Dude holy hell, this is amazing. Probably the best world building on the Half-life universe. Good Job.
The image of the Vortigants and the Humans together is one of the most adorable or even wholesome thing i have seen, even when there is an invasion of aliens coming, is good to know there is people who put their differences apart to fight a bigger enemy
I do wish I could do more to capture just how insane it was, but I'm unfortunately limited by the models I have access to. Perhaps the giant jeans and whatever else will come one of these days...
This got to be the BEST video about the events of Half Life 1. The images with the realistic touch of soldiers wearing the correct ALICE and uniforms, the DEFCON, the aircrafts, the point on narration. Man, this is video is simply awesome.
This is one of the most well Written Half life fan films I have ever seen, and I Truly believe you deserve all the praise your getting for your efforts
Indeed, I tried writing a little more about the Indian Point crisis as an extra in the document, but I couldn't quite figure out a convincing way to get the HECU involved with a hostage crisis at a nuclear power plant so I've kinda just left it up to the imagination.
@@nuclearpotato4073I think that maybe getting the HECU to be the on-site advisors/observers to FBI SWAT and HRTs would be appropriate? I think it would make sense as Delta had done the same at Waco in 1993.
I actually had to check to see if Black Mesa was a real institution after this, I never even thought about it being based on a real entity before this video, you perfectly captured the essence of a oft forgotten research institution in this. Of course it isn't, but this got me beyond immersed. Absolutely well done.
well yeah, I mean, the point is that this is not a black site, it would be a real nuclear research center and town, similar to picayune and it's space launch base, which my grandfather worked with and on. the thing that caught me off guard was the incredibly well forged 2000s era liason website.
Brilliant video all around! Much of this is going to be firmly engrained in my memory and influence my view of events surrounding the Black Mesa Incident. This basically put in words my own speculations or answered my questions about what was going on in the larger scope (i.e. the earthquake or shockwave in the New Mexico desert at the moment of the resonance cascade, the radius of the Xen rift expanding, Xen sightings in surrounding areas, the eventual evacuation for New Mexico, why the Xen incursions got worse on the second day despite the failed satellite rocket and seemed more like a deliberate military invasion because of Nihilanth, and when the portal storms began and quickly spread worldwide). I also wanted to see a scenario where despite the cover-up story hampering efforts, the military worked with the civilians of Black Mesa. This is a very good video!
The biggest suspension of disbelief when playing Half life for me is how convenient the government will try to kill every witness and burn evidence in Black Mesa. It's not like the test site is infested with international spies or anything. It never implies in the game. The more I play Half life, the more I try to answer that question and the more answers I can think of, the less I enjoy the game as a whole. I love your reinterpretation. Not only it is highly detailed and could work as a movie. But you make what's so special about Gordon Freeman and how he becomes a praised legend even after Earth is defeated. I love the production behind it and want to see if you can interpret Portal lore in Half life universe. Portal lore in my opinion is the less detailed and less connected to Half life besides few reference and the... Borealis.
Whats happening to Boeing whistleblowers shows that it isn't far fetched. Plus Marines are never in the know and could be fed false Info and the dialogue shows that they think it's sabotage or a terrorist attack, the fact that Freeman continues to rack a higher body count plays into that theory which is why they get so desperate to take him down.
Thanks! You can find all of my art on my Discord server, though I'm starting to realize that I should probably start a DeviantArt account or something like that.
@@nuclearpotato4073 i think he is mixing up you and Turtl, he did a lot of other gmod scenebuilds and he posted a good bit of them in the project zomboid discord server a few years ago
speaking of project zomboid, this video kinda reminded me of the whole "world going to shit" aspect of both games also both games take place in the southern united states and feature the end of the world as we know it
@@nuclearpotato4073 yeah jug is right, he also did some half life scene builds on the server a while ago that are very similar to your stuff. Though istg I saw that pic of the Vortigaunt on a stretcher somewhere on discord I just cant put my finger on what server though...
It's gorgeous! One thing I'll note however, is that Kleiner in one of the episodes talked about how the Combine used the perforation into our reality at Black Mesa as a means to enter the Universe. The scenebuilds are fantastic, though. A couple of times I thought you were using a completely different game engine, but on closer examination I realized it's just really good Source Engine scenebuilds and photoshop. Excellent video. EDIT: Reading the google doc, i'm also not a big fan of the change to Xen. However, i'll also say there are some fantastic images of the evacuation that i was wondering why they weren't in the video!
It does go some way to explain why the US kept it under wraps; they didn't want to reveal their technical inferiority if Russia actually was ahead of them by that much.
Yeah, I'm curious about that plot point too. About how the Russians got to Xen first. Maybe it was a classified Soviet-era experiment that was shut down post-Cold War and forgotten about? Were the Russians still secretly conducting their own independent Xen explorations at that time? It also does beg the question on why the Russian government did not reveal, at least privately to their American counterparts, this curious detail. I would assume they would probably share what they knew about Xen in the aftermath of the Black Mesa incident.
Well, the multiverse in Half-Life lore is a thing; given that in most of the alternate universes the multiverse research was spearheaded by "Aperture Science" - to a certain extent distinct from the mainline Aperture due to parallel Apertures being, well, parallel universe counterparts, - I suggest that in this "somewhat realistic AU" Soviet researchers from NPO "Diafragma" did reach Xen, but due to the collapse of the Soviet Union (and, possibly, some sort of incident in the "Diafragma" research facility - leak of gaseous neurotoxin due to malfunction of automatics, maybe) all knowledge of that breakthrough was lost even to the post-Soviet higher-ups.
@@DrCraniumwith the kind of secrecy ascribed to operations like PROJECT KHONSU, it’s altogether possible for everyone who has any knowledge of the event to be in one room (if the team is poorly managed with full knowledge of how dangerous the research is). if a disaster kills everyone in that room, all that’s left are people with vague impressions of what was going on and all the knowledge is lost.
The Black Mesa Research Facility reminds me of the USAF base in regional outback south Australia near Woomera. They conducted surface to air and flight an orbit southern hemisphere navigation and Research an technology systems. Green peace still thinks there us Submarines in the middle of the outback too.
@@nuclearpotato4073 I was a kid in the 90s when the Gulf war broke out. I remember seeing them training an dog fighting around and above town. Australian F-111 and American FA-18 fighter jets. Those end levels of Half-Life when the HECU is on the retreat. The fighter jet sounds ingame that are distant was like that all day. I think Half-Life is sci-fi Chernobyl..
This is REALLY, REALLY, REALLY FUCKING GOOD. Ive always loved watching disaster debrief videos like those of Brick Immortar, and this video did everything those do and more in the context of Half-Life. Sometimes it's just nice to see really interesting stories an entirely grounded form of media, and this video just MAKES. ME. WANT. MORE. Impressive fucking work, man. Be proud of yourself
Of the suicide squad that entered the Lambda Complex only Gordon and two Marines reached the Nihilanth. I choose to believe Shepard was one of those Marines.
@@Hellhound23691wonder if the other marine is in reference to Mitchell from HDTF That game was a shit but somehow it ended as permanent part of the culture of HL community
The use of the M1008 CUCV at 14:25 is a nice detail. At this stage they were being replaced in Army usage but were prevalent in ANG units at this time. You put hella effort into this.
Very interesting! One small bit of headcanon I have is that EM spikes on Earth can actually trigger incursion events. How many times does Gordon turn on some heavy equipment only for Xen wildlife to immediately appear? I am not 100% sold on the "innocent HECU" take, but I certainly think that a fully-evil-HECU take is somewhat more absurd. Still, infighting during the course of the event seems only reasonable, and you've set up a pretty much perfect situation, where there's no real command structure, conflicting orders, and no clear battle lines. I would expect to see at least a few situations where there were HECU fighting on two different sides. Perhaps the biggest element you seem to have either dropped or simply skipped over are the headcrabs. If they were simply alien life forms, I would say they're absurd, but it's worth noting: they are from an alternate universe, not a different planet in our own. They could have evolved in a universe nearly identically to our own, explaining their biological compatibility. Moreover, they were successful on Xen, the inter-universal petri dish. They and all other xenian life must be extremely versatile and resilient. I am in love with your description of the scientific world before the resonance cascade. I wonder if Aperture exists in this world. Their fully-automated manufacturing lines would be very advanced for 2001, as would their apparently successful work in uploading human minds, while simultaneously inventing a totally different and superior form of teleportation, yet never being able to actually bring it to market. The idea of AI intelligence explosion is somewhat discredited now (there are hard limits on how small a logic gate can get, and we're actually really close, and it takes a LOT of time to physically build the hardware), but perhaps GLADos circumvented some of those limitations and managed to do something pretty impressive. Still doesn't explain why they hooked up a computer-controlled nerve gas dispenser to their air ducts, though.
Im in love with your AU of Half Life its so much more grounded And the fact that the HECU isnt comming verious war crimes on the BMRF staff but just doing fine until the loss of air supiriority is amazing Some one should make a Black Mesa/Half Life mod set in this version of events Edit: P.S, if you did the screenshots in Gmod, could you compose a list of public addons used to do that eye candy?
I honestly wasn't thinking of doing much past this but given the reception I'm really starting to look into it now. Can't guarantee it will all be about Half Life, though.
@@nuclearpotato4073 Anything in this post story briefing style video would be great. You've got a good formula here! Could stick to video games or even books/movies/stories.
Love the more realistic take on this subject, wish I had more of a vocabulary to explain how/why, or even had the ability to like this video more than once, but this video is something I didn't actually think I wanted or needed until I watched it, its everything I could have asked for lol. Documentary Format, Early 2000s, Alternative History, Half-Life, and with images to go with it too!
that pic of a researcher in an hev suit fighting alongside hecu marines and an m1 abrams tank went so hard, loved this au i like how you actually gave a plus side to the combine taking over earth, like yeah theyre bad but at least now taking care of the portal storms are THEIR problem
this has to be one of the most incredible pieces of creative media I've ever seen come out of the Half-Life community. the way the whole situation unravelled felt so real, and I loved how strong the focus was on all the different government agencies faltering communication - the breakdown of communication is such a massive part of disasters and the portrail here was fantastic for the extent of that reach for such a massive event. Also *loved* the images, especially the web ones in IE, they looked like a lot of fun to put together :p I think the one main critical thing I could say is that while most photos were from an angle that looked like someone had taken that photo, there were a couple where it felt a bit out of place, e.g. the one with the soldiers arriving inside the complex which showed them from the front, which didn't make much sense as they were scanning the place. Someone standing in their way to take a photo would be a bit weird lol
I'd love to say more about all of it but don't wanna write something too long (and bit busy now lol) but genuinely, this has had me in awe the whole way through. The aesthetic and attention to detail is phenomenal. I saw someone mentioned in another comment as well about the era-accurate style of the Black Mesa facilities shown early on with big bold text signs is so sick. Stuff like the sign near the start about the "If this light is flashing turn back immediately." (paraphrasing) - that sort of stuff makes all the photos so fun to look for all the little details.
It would be cool to go over how various remnants of militaries and such formed what would become the Resistance. The resistance after all is quite organized compared to what you would expect of them having basically no resources whatsoever.
I’m in love with this. The entire video was literally perfect! I never thought of the events playing out this way! And I also seen your freindly HECU art a while back! Although my only question is where were the Black Ops in all this? But besides that I really like the video. Hope to see more Half Life content soon!
I've retooled the Black Ops as the Air Force Special Infiltration Team that gets sent in to recover the data from the Lambda Complex. I'm glad you enjoyed it!
Interesting! While watching this I was thinking if you could do something similar like this but with the history of the HECU and the changes they had over the years, (gear, weapons, tactics, ETC.)
You took the time and effort to create an old-school style website for the BMRF and made me feel old with a Teletext page, something I almost forgot existed. What an awesome video
This video is a great spin on the Black Mesa Incident, especially the part on where the HECU is actually helping the scientists and Gordon Freeman to help destroy the Nihilanth. I see it as a good thing that the HECU is actually helping the scientists escape, rather than killing them straight-up. I’m also fairly curious on why you haven’t mentioned the Prototype Labs from Half Life Blue Shift, as that was probably where the whole talk of teleportation started.
The dark truth is honestly that I actually haven't played Blue Shift or Opposing Force before, but to my understanding the building you visit in Blue Shift houses all the older stuff that isn't used much anymore so wouldn't be as relevant in a story like this.
@@nuclearpotato4073 Blue Shift meshes really well with this. Opfor meshes kinda well. It humanizes HECU and is somewhat compatible with your take, but not entirely. Still good, though.
NGL this was amazing and the attention to detail and random world events by people was very interesting such as a fisherman finding a leech and the spread of the resonance cascade's effects in general.
Had this recommended to me before, but only got around to watching it today. Great stuff! I like how Freeman still plays a big role even with all the various changes to what happened.
To paraphrase from the description - Hierarchy Problem is a reinterpretation of Half Life aimed at putting the setting in a hopefully moderately more realistic context. It's normally in a big long Google Doc, but I figured it'd be fun to try and narrate the timeline section for youtube. I don't really make videos or narrate things in general, so I apologize in advance if this isn't any good. Almost all of the images in this video were made by me, either in Garry's Mod or Photoshop, with the exception of 49:40, which is a screenshot from the game Space Engine. You can find a lot more of my art in my Discord server! discord.gg/6r2Rd6Ue8H
The original doc is linked in the description and includes a bunch of extra stuff like communications transcripts from the Black Mesa Incident, various worldbuilding notes, a style guide, and more. I've also written short stories (well, just one for now) which you can also find through that document.
EDIT: Alright, I just want to throw in an extra thanks to all of you who are writing such nice comments. It's difficult to reply to all of them but they all mean a great deal to me and I love reading them all. I never expected that people would take this video the way they have. Seriously - thank you all.
This message is endorsed by:
[RobCo Industries].
how would a scenario where the Xenium Resonator succeeds in closing the rift work out? :D
i love the 1970s era helvetica bold signs all around the complex, thats incredibly accurate to real us government signage before the late 80s its all over washington
@@circleinforthecube5170 I just can't get enough of that depressing southwestern government building aesthetic
You’ve definitely punched leagues above your weight class, so to speak I’m only 30 minutes in and I kind of wish the games played out like this instead of
I like how halfway through this video I was like, "maybe this time humanity wins : )"
*It's fucking half life*
Welcome to HALF-LIFE muddafaka....the subjugation of Earth and death of billions is just a small part of a plan we'll never see concluded because valve doesn't make games anymore 💪💪💪
@@nuclearpotato4073 *sees Deadlock* I wish what you said was true
@@Twiddle_things If i just don't acknowledge it it'll be like it doesn't exist. Please god don't let it exist
@@nuclearpotato4073 hopefully the whole fix tf2 situation will delay the game just a bit longer. any time delayed is good
ofc it's half life, it wouldn't be half life without humanity being under the bus now would it? [i guess halo counts too]
I hold degrees in Emergency Management and Homeland security and I'm an army national guard vet and currently work in law enforcement. I just wanna say in my professional opinion this is incredible.
I love the little detail that all the responding agencies had trouble communicating because they didn't share common radio frequencies. During Hurricane Katrina, responding agencies had that exact problem, and it led to a major revision of the National Response Framework. Hell, the NRF wasn't even developed yet.
It is always kind of shocking how in so many disasters, miscommunication is a bigger killer than the disaster itself. Someone can't get through to the district fire chief who is needed to authorize XYZ, so nobody knows that ABC is happening, and it just gets worse and worse...
I love it when bureaucracy and military nerds make overly detailed stuff that’s crazy accurate to life like this.
@@nuclearpotato4073 As a psychiatrist - miscommunication is also the biggest killer of personal relationships.
People not wanting to tell, or believing that another person should telepathically "understand" how they feel (Because of course it feels good being understood without saying a single word) is the main reason breakups, fights, anger, and even murders happen.
If we were to ever end as a civilization - it will be because of miscommunication and our egos
@@RazorsharpLT Hideaki Anno was right, miscommunication is the problem of people...
Black Mesa: Took 40 years to develop teleportation that barely works.
Aperture Science: Went from shower rings to fully functional quantum tunneling in like 2 years, all on a price sector budget.
And then proceeded to keep it in the testing stage for decades in hopes that they can get more funding just because of the testing
To be fair, black mesa was going to whole new dimensions, aperture was teleporting from place to place within the same universe traveling from one dimension to another is gonna take like 40 years. Not tryna stir a heated argument, just keep the discussion thus forward sane
Unfortunately in Hierarchy Problem Aperture is primarily a robotics and engineering research and consulting firm out of Detroit that falls in hard times as their main driving force - charismatic CEO Cave Johnson - fell ill in the 80s, ultimately getting bought out by Rockwell International during the 1991 recession, contributing to a period of corporate hostility and stagnation.
@@nuclearpotato4073 oh shit, so in your reinterpretation of half-life's lore, portal doesn't exist. i think it's good to say this, because then people don't claim that your video(s) are the "true canon"
@@nuclearpotato4073 So no GLaDOS and Wheatley shenanigans....
:(
My favorite touch is the Vort caressing his box of corn pops at 50:39. He's been through so much and was just liberated from the Nihilanth's control, stranded on an alien world around people who would no sooner shoot him. He just wants his pops.
And Corn Pop was a bad dude. And he ran a bunch of bad boys.
@@JinKee Biden again? I thought I saw the last of him in city 14.
dude just wanted some corn pops my man
He's like those Men In Black aliens who love coffee
36:24 'It's so over'
36:39 'We're so back'
44:55 'it's so over'
51:13 'We're so back'
58:30 'Yeah it's over.'
Freeman reappears
@@Mentallyheldwe’re so back
@@Zackcraft102
The citadel starts being ruined, though that means a good part of the C17’s resistance would die in an explosion or being shot by combine enforcers, or mauled by zombies or antlions
@@SomeGrunt_On_TH-cam it’s so over
@@Zackcraft102
The remaining White Forest Resistance starts working on a rocket that could potentially sever the connection between the Combine on Earth and the Combine Overworld.
I thought this was gonna be a youtube video essay about half life's unrealistic hierarchies or something, I'm glad it's just an actually good video
I would say that it sounds like an insane thing to make an hourlong video about, but you can't underestimate the ability of video essayists to babble about nothing for hours and hours
What hierarchies
😊😊😊😊😊@@nuclearpotato4073
Half life has lots of lore but Black Mesa really doesn’t. There’s no official hierarchy chart or whatever.
i mean to be honest assuming black mesa had a issue where they had authority over the government, committing illegal classified projects beyond what they were contracted to do, i wouldn't be very surprised. they were able to literally get away with building a entire
facility with no consideration abide by osha safety regulations and protocol. which probably created alot of Immortality rates
36:37 "In the midst of the fighting, theoretical physicist Gordon Freeman had attained a borderline messianic reputation among the soldiers and marines at Black Mesa, as a man who could not be killed. [...]"
That made me laugh out loud. Gordon as the man but on all sides not just BMRF staff. Love this alternative, more realistic take - and Gordon is still rambo!
Dude's blessed by Alien Space God to be the most fearsome alien killer this side of the Rio Grande, after all
@nuclearpotato4073 And on a meta-level, we are the multidimensional beings that are guiding him lol
"did you do a terrorism?"
*rapid flashlight clicking*
"I like the cut of your jib, funny Creamsicle man!"
@@Mahrooby I like to imagine it being him doing sign language with Barney having to act as an interpreter or something while the FBI agents get increasingly frustrated before just being like "well, it obviously wasn't you"
@@nuclearpotato4073 making Freeman mute is actually such a simple but effective bit of lore, amazing
its MY sleepover and I get to choose the movie!
Lol imagine watching an documentary about hierarchy order of an fictional story
@@sam-sp5zk dont gotta imagine, thats what im currently doing
@@sam-sp5zk Not to distract from the point here but this isn't about the "hierarchy order" of anything
*nowdays valve software not making movies about own games. and always they lying about everythings to community.*
Sounds nice :)
Half Life may be a sci-fi action game to Freeman, but it's undoubtedly a cosmic horror story to everyone else.
pretty sure it’s cosmic horror to Freeman too. Can you imagine doing what he had to do to survive, seeing what he saw?
@@447GHT i actually don't have to imagine becuase theyve made 4 games about it
its cosmic horror for freeman too, he's literally a slave to cosmic forces he can never understand, carrying out wetwork for reasons he could never comprehend. His entire existence is a cosmic crowbar being used by various people to manipulate the cosmos.
Can't remember where from, but I recently heard someone say that: Half-Life is a series where Gordon Freeman is playing an FPS, and the Combine are playing Stellaris.
@@447GHT Gordon was frozen in Stasis after HL until he was suddenly dropped on a train in HL2, immediately killing hundreds of people and blowing up a whole city.
His story is full of horror, but he does not seem to care, that's why he was chosen.
"I know the human being and fish can co-exist peacefully."
Never heard that quote before.
what timestamp
5 sec before the end @@dasarath5779
@@dasarath5779the end of the video
If only he could've been right 💔
So Called President Bush Has Been Through the Wringer ...
didn't realize this was alternate timeline until you said the FBI interviewed freeman. i thought it was just lore formatted as an AAR lol
FBI " What do you mean you killed a giant space baby!?"
Honestly that would have been cool on it's own.
I didn't realize this was an alternate timeline until I read this comment!
"TELL US! WE HAVE BEEN TRYING TO CRACK YOUR FOR 20 HOURS JUST TALK ALREADY!"
...
"WHY WON'T HE JUST SAY SOMETHING!?!??"
I really need a timestamp for that because i'm having trouble remembering the chapter it's in.
Easily and by far my new favorite interpretation of the events of the series. The fairly restrained and limited take on Freeman's role, the "cover-up" not including the literal massacre of any and all eyewitnesses in two layers (first of the BMRF staff by the HECU, then of the HECU by the "Black Ops"), and especially the relatively non-demonizing portrayal of the Combine (terror strikes and general attacks on civilians being "limited", jobs and currency still being a thing, the fact that non-essential goods and services as major as cars are still being produced and distributed, etc) are so very, very refreshing.
Also, you know, not Sterilizing Mankind (as far as we know).
I saw the original photos and the creator said it was a different timeline where the HECU decided not to massacre civilians
@@RandomDude26073 Yeah, I'm the one who made the original photos
@@nuclearpotato4073 oh neat, well I loved the idea, so great job. I’m glad you decided to make this video, it was very fun to watch.
It’s half life 2, with a bit less grimdark
I never expected to see hecu carrying a vortigaunt on a stretcher
same
@history_moose I am here cuz i have a idea for a mod: starts out on a plane flying over black mesa right when the resonance cascade happens, everyone on the plane disappears except for the player, later military jets shoot it down, and then the player has to survive and witness the events leading to the 7 hour war
This video is a valuable resource for ideas 🙏
@@NoVIcE_Sourceholy shit is that novice source
@@NoVIcE_Source oh shit I watch your videos LOL
@@NoVIcE_Source wow youre on my comment
“Jesse, there’s a fucking Vortiguant in the RV Jesse”
-Local Albuquerque resident, May 17th 2001
RoachDogg Junior.... I never thought I'd live to see the day you graced my very comment section.....
I have to seriously commend these photo pieces, they're incredibly realistic and authentic, rich with emotions, too. This is excellent.
Gotta agree. They say a picture can often say more than a thousand words and my of them did. They really, as simple as some of them individually are, draw you in. At times I felt "Hell I was there" or "Hell, I can suddenly picture the scene unfold as if it was animated and ongoing, not just static".
Half-Life is the stuff of legends, memorable and I dare say (for now, nothing actually is) eternal. You could fill whole games or plots or even movies or TV shows (pray they end up being a good adaptation like Fallout) just about Half-Life 1's worsening crisis as many actors work together. Forfeit the dumb 90s/2000s video game logic and TV trope of "backup is hostile" and you got yourself an epic tale in which you could even individually focus on select characters thrown into uncertainty or outright or delayed chaos depending on where they fit into the events and where and who they are.
@@Unknown-ek1ox that last part especially, I’ve always appreciated civilian/outsider perspectives on stories where a cataclysmic event is usually told through a playable hero, cause you get this slow build and cacophony, where you know but the character(s) don’t, massive tension, etc. This video especially, I love the store view with the (authentic!) EAS screens filling every TV
I honestly kind of regret not putting more in. I've got a lot more pictures that I came close to putting in, but hesitated because I felt like there were already too many. I would've if I'd known people liked them so much.
@@nuclearpotato4073 I feel like the ones provided were alike to chapter markers, representing sections of the video’s script. If you could find a way of presenting the others though, I’m certain a lot of people here would check it out. I especially like the digicam ones :>
@@nuclearpotato4073 The more the merrier. It would've made the video even better if the screens were of the same caliber. At times I even felt the changes were too slow, but that's nitpicking on a high level, really.
Back when I started in hobby movie editing (mostly for a player group I ran, with a Corporation flavor) I learned the harder way or over time that people on average favor more visual changes than dwelling on the same camera angles, scenes or pictures.
Your video is surely a relative exception because especially "lore nerds" and those interested in the franchise or game world won't mind it as much as other target audiences. But yeah it generally helps still I'd say.
Hard to say what the right formula is (e.g. "a new scene, picture or camera angle every X"). It's very unique and dependent. And various people will have other ideas about it.
When in doubt, go with gut feel or when you think "where it makes sense". A few more wouldn't have hurt though. E.g. when you have a new notable story emphasis or key scene unfold in the text, then add an according picture to further visualize it.
IDK, from the top of my head when it is briefly mentioned that Gordon is arrested for questioning, a brief unique scene for that in some (interrogation) room or some other fitting area would've been dope. If I recall right (without watching it again) it wasn't visually covered.
Again, nitpicking on higher levels, but an idea for future works to keep in mind. Or you can eventually upload a second version with more pictures and scenes depicted as bonus content at some point.
45:13 I love the nod to war of the worlds with the tanks name
There were ships of shapes and sizes, Scattered out along the bay
@@jacknagel9387 And I thought I heard her calling
As the steamer pulled away
@@smltvt*heroic singing intensifies*
@@smltvt the invaders must have seen them, for across the coast they fired.
the one image with a vortigaunt snacking on chips goes hard
three times the salt
He got shot at by Marines 18 times and just deserted the nilainth, let him rest
“The “chips” of fried oil are most delectable.”
- Some vortigaunt shortly after the Black Mesa Incident
Very impressive. I always liked the idea of the HECU actually being there to save people.
The inclusion of the Thunder Child tank was 10/10.
Also really captured the scope of just how bad the Black Mesa Incident was.
FAREWELL THUNDER CHILD
@@germanwarrabbit Love Jeff Wayne's WOTW
Perhaps describing the Black Mesa Incident in a "moderately more realistic context" in the style of an official debrief can give a certain interpretation. As if what is said is sugar-coded to hide the government's intentions around what they really wanted Black Mesa to do with Xen as well as to hush the secure details and shift blame for the disaster. At least that's how I want to interpret it.
Great stuff
Sugar coated. The phrase comes from the concept of having something gross (such as a medicine pill) and coating it with a better flavor (like sweetness from sugar).
It hides the truth (the disgusting pill) by masking it with news that isn't {as} bad (coat of sugar).
Sugar coding something would mean like if you replaced "a" with glucose, "b" with sucrose, and so on. A code made up of sugar.
@@ninjaguyYT no sugar coding is when you drink a 4 loko and use a computer
@@ninjaguyYTdead internet?
@@Conman9310 always has been.
Its a neat video. But theres a lot of HECU whitewashing and Gov. Competence washing. It detracts from the total fubar situation that happened in the game. The HECU was so bad at their job they had to send the Black Ops to liquidate the liquidators.
If you want a realistic take on Half Life then literally read The Mist. Which is what the game is inspired by.
There has been an interesting uptick in realistic mockumentary style half life lore videos and im loving it. Keep up the good work!
Yeah, I've noticed the same, lol. This is a lot more amateurish compared to the stuff that other people have been putting out, but I figured that I may as well strike while the iron was hot.
It’s exactly the kind of stuff I’ve been looking for since I was like 8 😭
Can you link me some of the others please? I really love these kinds of videos they scratch my geek brain really good
@@nuclearpotato4073from what i’ve seen, this is the best. the worldbuilding is very in-touch with the realities, and touches on the human aspect which many other versions don’t
@@nuclearpotato4073I want you to reinterpret half life 2 as a sequal to this because this is interesting also as a joke make Gordon responsible for the seven hour war foundation of the resistance before he goes into stasis
This is the THREADS of Half-Life. I'd love to see a movie using this version of the narrative, showcasing the beginning-to-end fuck-up that this was, and then a quick look at the seven-hour war and the years following.
100%, although I can’t decide whether I want to see a movie of this timeline or the canonical one.
omg yeah imagine like hbo chernobyl but it's this
@@IAmaAPerson Exactly. Like the movie THREADS. (A hard watch but a must-see for humanity.)
great video and reimagining man, was great to watch at 1 am
i LOVE the idea of the HECU not killing black mesa personnel, and gordon freeman being treated by HECU soldiers as a messiah, and eli vance helping with communicating with vortigaunts. the worldbuilding too is very nice, how the response efforts were going and the visual images, i liked it a lot
i also liked the images that showed what online forums were talking about when the black mesa incident was happening, really immerses me into what the people were thinking when this was happening, and make me feel with them
im going to show this to my child and say that the black mesa incident actually happened
very good work man!!
Same here and also at 1:00 am
The soldiers don't know what's happening; all they know is that somehow aliens are popping in around Black Mesa. In that context it'd be crazy for them to NOT be following their orders, no matter how awful they seem on the surface. G-Man and Breen were both in on allowing the Combine to invade, so with them passing bad intel to whoever is giving orders to soldiers on the ground, there are a hundred reasons they could have made up to get them to kill scientists. Or maybe the government thought the rift was going to fade on its own, and thought the potential benefits to international power were so immense that it was worth keeping it a secret at all costs. Or they decided it was far too dangerous a technology to continue pursuing and that everyone involved was too dangerous to be kept alive.
Point is, soldiers are gonna do what they're told, especially in a context as crazy as an alien invasion. All they knew about Freeman was that he'd been killing their buddies. This video is wildly revisionist for no good reason.
The soldiers don't know what's happening; all they know is that somehow aliens are popping in around Black Mesa. In that context it'd be crazy for them to NOT be following their orders, no matter how awful they seem on the surface. G-Man and Breen were both in on allowing the Combine to invade, so with them passing bad intel to whoever is giving orders to soldiers on the ground, there are a hundred reasons they could have made up to get them to target scientists. Or maybe the government thought the rift was going to fade on its own, and thought the potential benefits to international power were so immense that it was worth keeping it a secret at all costs. Or they decided it was far too dangerous a technology to continue pursuing and that everyone involved was too dangerous to be kept alive.
Point is, soldiers are gonna do what they're told, especially in a context as crazy as an alien invasion. All they knew about Freeman was that he'd been killing their buddies. This video is wildly revisionist for no good reason.
youtube keeps deleting my detailed argument so all i can say is that soldiers would do what they're told in an alien invasion. this isn't a "reinterpretation," it's a full on rewrite, solving problems that aren't there
@@MenachemSchmuel It is a reinterpretation because I'm reinterpretating the events of Half Life. If that's too complicated for you to understand, you don't have to watch it.
To think - all this is going on as Freeman's running around merking entire HECU squads while talking like a pirate and creating a new verse to Modern Major General.
Well I don't quite know about that
@@nuclearpotato4073Freeman's Mind reference. In that series, Gordon is characterized as a neurotic and deeply selfish man who slowly turns into a psychopath as the Black Mesa disaster progresses
@@ryguy9876I am 90% sure the shift happens when he hits his head on the ceiling of wooden planks in “power up”
Not in this version. There is no HECU massacre.
I mean, he can still do all this (save for merking HECU squads), the situation's deep enough in shit
Hell, maybe he can nab some "funny wheels" from a medic or something.
This is too perfect for half life community
Well shucks...
"HE-coo" hahahah
I always thought it was supposed to be "Heck-You"
Maybe, but that's just how I've always pronounced it
tbh i've always just read it out as H E C U
@@heliveruscalion9124well it's an acronym, so that can also work well
Heavy
Ess
Cunts in
Uniform
"And if you see dr breen, tell him i say *Heck-You!*"
I remember really liking these images you made after you posted them on Reddit, but now that you've tied it all together with a coherent narrative and narration, it's even more outstanding. Part of me wishes you retconned the events of Half Life 2 and the Seven Hour War because it feels like a real "Shoot the Shaggy Dog" moment as TvTropes puts it, and this new Vortigaunt-Human 21st century seems much more interesting to explore than Half Life 2, but nonetheless, amazing work and was a very entertaining watch.
It's an interesting prospect, but to be honest, the fact that all of humanity's efforts to reverse the Resonance Cascade in the face of forces beyond their comprehension is sort of what I like the most about the whole thing. The death of untold millions and the subjugation of Earth was just a part of an overall plan (that we're probably never going to see concluded)
@@nuclearpotato4073unless…
Someone should show this to Ross Scott because it addresses most of the unrealistic aspects
He is busy fighting a different war. Against capitalism.
Seems like a scary prospect but I can't lie and say that I wouldn't be interested in seeing what he has to say
Black Mesa's research of point-to-point teleportation lead to unforeseen consequences and an alien invasion.
Meanwhile, Aperture Science was dicking around with portal technology as early as the 80s.
I mean there is serious irony in Black Mesa trying to get a person from one place to any other place, and causing the events of HL2, but Aperture's portals could get you to the freaking moon.
Imagine if they had just been so triggerhappy with nukes that the combine just went "ah damn it's one of those unbearably hot planets"
A full nuclear exchange would likely make the planet colder through ashfall and the nuclear winter, but it's the same sort of extreme
@@nuclearpotato4073 Nuclear Winter has been disproven, actually. Such effects wouldn't happen after massive thermonuclear exchange.
@@jamesrosewell9081 I don't know if it's been disproven necessarily, since the only way to prove or disprove it would be to have a global thermonuclear war. It's just us trying to make do with computer models which kill considerably less people.
@@jamesrosewell9081 has it been disproven? its not actually a theory solely focused on "its cold like winter' but that the crops would die out due to radiation, airborn debris/smoke creating clouds that limit sunlight. IE: making farmland barren. I suppose a massive exchange would cause bigger issues for life than crop loss... but the point of Nuclear Winter as a cohesive theory is to say "even a limited exchange could be disastrous"
I'm a citizen who currently staying at City 22, working on those machinery for "their" military equipment. I just want to say your video is so great, man. thanks for reminding us to the global tragedy 23 years ago that shockingly devastating all of us. I remember 20 years ago (I was 14 back then), I lost both of my parents to the incident and I just can't really think anything anymore that day, as if I just floating to the river waiting for either my salvation or my doom... but here I am, I know this is not entirely paradise to the humanity, but at least I lived until now, waiting for great things to come. I'm certain the next day will be the turning point for us all, for the freedom that they took away from us...
EDIT: but until now, oh god I hope the combine won't find out about this...
how do you have internet?
Possible anticivil activity detected in comments. Contain. Cauterize. Sterilize.
That's gonna be a re-educating boah
@@chibisayori20
Apparently I heard some guy named something like Dussel downloaded the internet before the war, he must’ve been distributing this to high ranking resistance members.
@@SomeGrunt_On_TH-cam and low ranking resistance members can fuck off from being able to use internet :)
I love the idea of HECU being initially being sent in to clean up any witnesses but eventually turning around and helping the staff to escape after they realize how wide spread the invasion is. With how disorganized everything was it makes sense that some squads will still be hostile upto Forget about Freeman.
Ik this is a more realistic take on the Black Mesa incident but did it still get nuked in the end by the black ops? Also where was Shepard in all of this?
Plus I'm curious of how much misinfo there would be about the actual incident. It'd be awesome to have something like Art Bell's coast to coast AM discussing conspiracy theories about the facility and really badly designed late 90s websites trying to leak the "truth" but are obviously very wrong about a lot of things.
regarding the nuke, i think in the video it said that that black mesa and surrounding areas got bombed heavily within the final hours, still devastating but no nuke
Like the guy above me said, no nuke - a massive strategic bombardment campaign is launched to destroy the laboratory and city instead. Shepard is also still reasonably around somewhere, as I've tried to focus more on the broader incident instead of individuals (since individuals had barely any power in a scenario like this) but he could still be around within Hierarchy Problem.
As for misinformation, it'd probably be very severe. Nobody would trust the official government narrative of the disaster and anything they say, even if correct, would just be discounted outright. You'd have a fair amount of people coming out of Black Mesa talking about some crazy shit they saw, but human memory sucks (and a lot of them would just be randoms caught in the middle of it all) leaving them with bizarre ideas of what happened.
i swear when the incident happened black mesa literally became people's most favorite area-51 site obsession except it's a research organization and they made a literal rift to interdimensional hell...... ahhh yes i can already hear the most insane ramblings from the alien conspiracists going extremely nuts over this event, realizing that the government
i swear when the incident happened black mesa literally became people's most favorite area-51 site obsession except it's a research organization and they made a literal rift to interdimensional hell...... ahhh yes i can already hear the most insane ramblings from the alien conspiracists going extremely nuts over this event, realizing that the government was trying to hide it and then realize that the vortigaunts exist with their own entirely unique language and culture among other discovery of new alien races
counter argument to HECU being "nice guys" (instead of being this specially curated task force formed to unquestionably commit war crimes) is Hurricane Katrina, and other apocalyptic cases where the military basically let people die, herded them toward death, or directly massacred people. Katrina because it was a confluence of military, police, and private militaries, the latter particularly that engaged in documented massacres when the SHTF (although poor people are probably considered more expendable than gov contracted scientists, who could help the HECU. But thats not how the military thinks). Thats more the realistic view on US military (and i have a 700+ page book of documented US mil war crimes on my shelf to back this reasoning up), valve's depiction of the HECU was more realistic, where valve's depiction of BM Security was unrealistic, as they are based on Wackenhut who guarded Area 51, and are a notoriously cutthroat outfit similar to HECU.
I was got so caught off guard hearing ace combat soundtrack. this is great, the presentation really made me felt like I was watching an analysis of an actual event that happened
It really happened to my buddy Keith back in '01
There goes thunder-child! With the civilians cheering it on from the sidelines. Nice reference.
Weird, that’s the second America Patriot profile I’ve seen recently, which is also related to Valve
You know, while I do love fighting two conflicting different factions in Half-Life, having the military as your allies would have been awesome.
I could imagine the HECU showing up, cocky at getting the the chance to kill aliens, while annoyed at having to rescue and babysit scientist, including Freeman. Only for the situation to prove much worse than anticipated, suffering casualties, with many NPC's dropping like flies around Freeman, who survives thanks to his HEV suit. Over the course of the operation, they come to respect Freeman who manages to hold his own, and fight alongside them, even offering to escort him to his objective, recognising he and the other scientist are the best hope of stopping the invasion.
"smells like...smells like another babysittin' job to me, man.
Babysittin' job my ass! This has 'training mission' written all over it! Why else would they have kept our orders secret from us, huh!?
Yeah, what the hell for, man?"
These pictures are so cool dude. This gives me an idea about the 7 hour war. Most people imagine the 7 hour war as the combine just wrecking the entire earths militaries , but I think it can also be interpreted that the portal storms disorganized the worlds militaries and social cohesion, and the Combine forces intervened in a way that would’ve been seen as on behalf of humanity, and maybe by a lot of the world seen as a good thing. This would make sense as to why people would be so willing to surrender and later collaborate, because many would interpret that we weren’t even at war with the Combine in the first place! Rather it would seem to them that the combine were the saviors of earth in its hour of crisis during the portal storms. Only later on in the following years of occupation would the combine become slowly more authoritarian, like a frog boiling. This concept to me is much more scarier then the combine invading and conquering. It’s more unsettling, and emulates closer how authoritarian governments have operated in the past
That's an interesting way of looking at it, actually. I tried to aim it a little towards that, but I imagine that angle still falls a little flat in the midst of a massive orbital bombardment campaign.
@@nuclearpotato4073 yeah I was going to comment after watching the whole thing that I think your take of the 7 hour war being conducted almost entirely remotely is also pretty cool
I've always wanted to see a few different versions of Half Life including one where the marines are there to help and evacuate personnel, and this has made me want to see a version where they aren't the only people there doing so
I'd also love to see a Half Life mod where you aren't in Black Mesa, nor are you a scientist, soldier or whatever, you're just some joe schmoe, something along the lines of the L4D protagonists, maybe you're just a manager at a store, an office worker or a non-social shut-in who still lives with their parents, and you're not trying to do anything greater than just surviving
There was a mod like that years ago I can't remember the name of, you start out in an apartment then a portal storm erupts and there's xen monsters outside your apartment you gotw fight
@@stephenmccabe1489 It might've been 1187.
@@ZikShadow That's exactly what he describes.
I'm gunna tell my kids this was 9/11
Thank god someone is finally teaching their children right
But this is worse than 9/11 and they are both tragic. :(
Hey I remember seeing this on TV before college and thinking it was a movie till I turned the volume up.
This video takes me back to the early days of SCP. Absolutely love the work man.
But just slightly after it’s “ahhh monsters and funny food” stage
LOVE the use of high altitude sprites at 26:35, really makes it seem otherworldly
I'm doing my best to spread the knowledge that those things exist, far too many people are blissfully unaware that they're out there
@@nuclearpotato4073 instantly just made this amazing, one of the most underrated atmospheric phenomena
Holy smokes! Never heard of these!
Admirable attempt to give Half-Life events more grounded spin. You've painted rather convincing picture of how the Earth fought and fell.
As a lifelong worldbuilder, i appreciate this so much.
The bulk of my creative work that isn't poetry consists of timelines, in universe writing, maps, location profiles, overviews of technlogy and concepts, and very rudimentary illustration of all of the above.
As someone wirh almost no interest in character narrative, I love so much this specific format of narrative presentation. Especially for Half Life. Great work, cant wait to explore your doc.
Black Mesa makes Boeing look like they have good risk assessment and quality assurance
Man, loved this narrative and how you managed to turn something "short" into a whole detailed storyline.
My only gripe was the lack of headcrab action, headcrabs would have been a massive issue as they were one of the primary wildlife transported to Earth and would have made a disaster of refugee centers and disoriented civlians along the state.
On the other hand, Headcrabs are so intrinsically horrifying that extermination efforts would easily be funded
This. I can only imagine how the psychological effects of headcrab attacks and having to deal with them would add to the already wild public discourse regarding the Black Mesa incident.
I always found the premise of American Marines killing their own countrymen on their own soil a bit unreliastic.
I’m glad you addressed the Marines as more as a “rescue” force rather then a cover up operation
I honestly feel like you'd sooner see Marines turning on the people giving them those orders than actually willingly embark on mass murder of unarmed American civilians on a scale like that
@@nuclearpotato4073 My dad who had been in the marines can confirm that as he said all US military have the authority to refuse orders to kill and murder civilians and they can arrest or execute any military personal who insists on following such orders as its unconstitutional as the US military duty is to uphold and protect the constitution of the USA and the American people. Now the black ops I can see trying to follow the orders only to be force the military.
The only reason the military doesn't tend to kill _American civilians_ is because they're too busy killing foreign civilians. Do you think someone like Eddie Gallagher *wouldn't* "willingly embark on mass murder of unarmed American civilians"?
Although if they did start killing American civilians they'd have to avoid intruding into the National Guards favorite past time, shooting and bayoneting unarmed students (Kent State and the response protest at the University of New Mexico respectively)
Also, it wasn't just some lone wolf thing with Gallagher, he was reported several times by other SEAL team members but they were all dismissed by the SEAL command structure, and he was only prosecuted years later because some of those reports gained public visibility. Otherwise the cover up would be successful and he would've gotten away scot free, except he still actually got away scot free anyways, and was also championed as a hero by many politicians and talking heads (mostly Republicans, but plenty of people across the board were perfectly fine defending such an abhorrent war criminal).
@@from_no_where
The difference is American civilians shoot back
Remember Waco
@@from_no_whereWhy is your shizo post the first time I hear of this? Well Seals being psychos is nothing new, Special Forces tend to be unhinged like that but for the other stuff is everyone too busy bitching about the cops killing some black guy to notice?
This feels a lot more believable, even if less exciting, than what happened in the actual Half Life timeline.
I don’t know how many people have noticed, but I gotta say, I really appreciate the level of historical accuracy that was put into the U.S. Marines and the HECU soldiers, I especially liked that picture of the soldier on the motorcycle with the DBDU covered PASGT. Most modern depictions of HECU soldiers will have high cut helmets and generic modern LBE and vests, but everything in this video is true to the period. Awesome work!
37:02 To be a fly on the wall for THAT conversation. I imagine however ludicrous it sounded, the German pilots were certainly ready to lend a hand in such a dire situation.
I love the Ak 47 shells bit, leaving that plot point open really makes me wonder what happened. Could be a whole story of its own.
It's actually explained in the Google Doc - the soviets did their own teleportation experiments, but it resulted in the team seemingly disappearing. The team was stranded in Xen, and eventually died of natural causes. Meanwhile, the scientists on Earth ended the project
I like how the Xen forces were portrayed as disorganized and a silent force while the Combine was portrayed as a much more organized force in their actions
Dude this is really dope. I've spent hours thinking and imagining the world around Black Mesa, and this fits that niche so well. Though I say I subscribe to the date of December 5th, 2000 being the date the black mesa event occurred, either way though things still fit with that, and this is a great reimagination. The pictures are really well done as well and really bring alive the late 90s/early 2000s world Black Mesa takes place in. I just love it man. Bravo.
Really good choice in music, I never realized how barotrauma's music fits the vibe of half-life. Also good detail on the military side of things, I enjoy that you mentioned National Guard and other actual Marine bases sending support to Black Mesa.
I just read through the document you made for this. Dude holy hell, this is amazing. Probably the best world building on the Half-life universe. Good Job.
The image of the Vortigants and the Humans together is one of the most adorable or even wholesome thing i have seen, even when there is an invasion of aliens coming, is good to know there is people who put their differences apart to fight a bigger enemy
One thing that I really appreciated is how well you captured late 90s early 2000s fashion. It’s a nice detail.
I do wish I could do more to capture just how insane it was, but I'm unfortunately limited by the models I have access to. Perhaps the giant jeans and whatever else will come one of these days...
This got to be the BEST video about the events of Half Life 1. The images with the realistic touch of soldiers wearing the correct ALICE and uniforms, the DEFCON, the aircrafts, the point on narration. Man, this is video is simply awesome.
26:56 just noticed G-Man
Nice touch!
This is one of the most well Written Half life fan films I have ever seen, and I Truly believe you deserve all the praise your getting for your efforts
Thank you!
Here before this hopefully blows up. Also, is the mentions of a 1995 hostage situation at a nuclear facility called Indian Point a reference to CS?
Indeed, I tried writing a little more about the Indian Point crisis as an extra in the document, but I couldn't quite figure out a convincing way to get the HECU involved with a hostage crisis at a nuclear power plant so I've kinda just left it up to the imagination.
@@nuclearpotato4073I think that maybe getting the HECU to be the on-site advisors/observers to FBI SWAT and HRTs would be appropriate?
I think it would make sense as Delta had done the same at Waco in 1993.
I actually had to check to see if Black Mesa was a real institution after this, I never even thought about it being based on a real entity before this video, you perfectly captured the essence of a oft forgotten research institution in this. Of course it isn't, but this got me beyond immersed. Absolutely well done.
It isn't real you say...? Check again..............
@@nuclearpotato4073 💀
You checked? Any unknown calls after, anyone creeping around the house, knocking insistently on the door?
Hello, are you still there?
😂💀
well yeah, I mean, the point is that this is not a black site, it would be a real nuclear research center and town, similar to picayune and it's space launch base, which my grandfather worked with and on. the thing that caught me off guard was the incredibly well forged 2000s era liason website.
GOD BLESS THE SERBIAN GOVERNMENT FOR GIVING US THIS !!!!!!
KOSOVO JE SRBIJA !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
his name is EMBERSONIA!!!!!!
@@nuclearpotato4073 Embersonia fuckin smells. Now Kaupla, thats the place to go.
nah@@gurntsaltta7421
@@felixbirgersson9168 no one's believing your fucking lies federalist scum
plus everyone knows SFRK is way better anyway
Brilliant video all around! Much of this is going to be firmly engrained in my memory and influence my view of events surrounding the Black Mesa Incident. This basically put in words my own speculations or answered my questions about what was going on in the larger scope (i.e. the earthquake or shockwave in the New Mexico desert at the moment of the resonance cascade, the radius of the Xen rift expanding, Xen sightings in surrounding areas, the eventual evacuation for New Mexico, why the Xen incursions got worse on the second day despite the failed satellite rocket and seemed more like a deliberate military invasion because of Nihilanth, and when the portal storms began and quickly spread worldwide). I also wanted to see a scenario where despite the cover-up story hampering efforts, the military worked with the civilians of Black Mesa. This is a very good video!
The biggest suspension of disbelief when playing Half life for me is how convenient the government will try to kill every witness and burn evidence in Black Mesa. It's not like the test site is infested with international spies or anything. It never implies in the game. The more I play Half life, the more I try to answer that question and the more answers I can think of, the less I enjoy the game as a whole.
I love your reinterpretation. Not only it is highly detailed and could work as a movie. But you make what's so special about Gordon Freeman and how he becomes a praised legend even after Earth is defeated. I love the production behind it and want to see if you can interpret Portal lore in Half life universe. Portal lore in my opinion is the less detailed and less connected to Half life besides few reference and the... Borealis.
Yeah, I just can’t see marines killing civilians like that.
@@theashman7836 lol, lmao even
@@theashman7836have you ever seen a marine LOL
@@theashman7836 is this sarcasm, it's hard to tell
Whats happening to Boeing whistleblowers shows that it isn't far fetched. Plus Marines are never in the know and could be fed false Info and the dialogue shows that they think it's sabotage or a terrorist attack, the fact that Freeman continues to rack a higher body count plays into that theory which is why they get so desperate to take him down.
The renders look so incredible, and i'm floored that were done with GARRY'S MOD. I'd love to see more of the models/scenes. nice work!!!
Thanks! You can find all of my art on my Discord server, though I'm starting to realize that I should probably start a DeviantArt account or something like that.
I remember seeing the scene builds for this on the zomboid server, I had no idea they would be used for this banger of a video!
Wait, what? I'm not in the Zomboid server and have never posted anything there. You sure it was me?
@@nuclearpotato4073 i think he is mixing up you and Turtl, he did a lot of other gmod scenebuilds and he posted a good bit of them in the project zomboid discord server a few years ago
speaking of project zomboid, this video kinda reminded me of the whole "world going to shit" aspect of both games
also both games take place in the southern united states and feature the end of the world as we know it
@@nuclearpotato4073 yeah jug is right, he also did some half life scene builds on the server a while ago that are very similar to your stuff. Though istg I saw that pic of the Vortigaunt on a stretcher somewhere on discord I just cant put my finger on what server though...
It's gorgeous! One thing I'll note however, is that Kleiner in one of the episodes talked about how the Combine used the perforation into our reality at Black Mesa as a means to enter the Universe.
The scenebuilds are fantastic, though. A couple of times I thought you were using a completely different game engine, but on closer examination I realized it's just really good Source Engine scenebuilds and photoshop. Excellent video.
EDIT: Reading the google doc, i'm also not a big fan of the change to Xen. However, i'll also say there are some fantastic images of the evacuation that i was wondering why they weren't in the video!
Which ones? If I didn't use them, it's probably just because I didn't think they were that good
The Russian casing discovery was really interesting, even if it wasn’t very explored
It does go some way to explain why the US kept it under wraps; they didn't want to reveal their technical inferiority if Russia actually was ahead of them by that much.
Yeah, I'm curious about that plot point too. About how the Russians got to Xen first.
Maybe it was a classified Soviet-era experiment that was shut down post-Cold War and forgotten about? Were the Russians still secretly conducting their own independent Xen explorations at that time?
It also does beg the question on why the Russian government did not reveal, at least privately to their American counterparts, this curious detail. I would assume they would probably share what they knew about Xen in the aftermath of the Black Mesa incident.
my dumbass immediately went into the meme answers for this
"orb of pisskey" and all that other stuff
Well, the multiverse in Half-Life lore is a thing; given that in most of the alternate universes the multiverse research was spearheaded by "Aperture Science" - to a certain extent distinct from the mainline Aperture due to parallel Apertures being, well, parallel universe counterparts, - I suggest that in this "somewhat realistic AU" Soviet researchers from NPO "Diafragma" did reach Xen, but due to the collapse of the Soviet Union (and, possibly, some sort of incident in the "Diafragma" research facility - leak of gaseous neurotoxin due to malfunction of automatics, maybe) all knowledge of that breakthrough was lost even to the post-Soviet higher-ups.
@@DrCraniumwith the kind of secrecy ascribed to operations like PROJECT KHONSU, it’s altogether possible for everyone who has any knowledge of the event to be in one room (if the team is poorly managed with full knowledge of how dangerous the research is). if a disaster kills everyone in that room, all that’s left are people with vague impressions of what was going on and all the knowledge is lost.
The Black Mesa Research Facility reminds me of the USAF base in regional outback south Australia near Woomera.
They conducted surface to air and flight an orbit southern hemisphere navigation and Research an technology systems.
Green peace still thinks there us Submarines in the middle of the outback too.
It's a sort of agglomeration of Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories and Vandenburg Air Force Base, so that seems about right
@@nuclearpotato4073 I was a kid in the 90s when the Gulf war broke out. I remember seeing them training an dog fighting around and above town.
Australian F-111 and American FA-18 fighter jets. Those end levels of Half-Life when the HECU is on the retreat. The fighter jet sounds ingame that are distant was like that all day.
I think Half-Life is sci-fi Chernobyl..
@@v8matey23:41 America's Chernobyl even?
I really love how gman appears in the background of some photos Very clever touch
The images by themselves are absolutely incredible, thank you for making them!
This is REALLY, REALLY, REALLY FUCKING GOOD. Ive always loved watching disaster debrief videos like those of Brick Immortar, and this video did everything those do and more in the context of Half-Life. Sometimes it's just nice to see really interesting stories an entirely grounded form of media, and this video just MAKES. ME. WANT. MORE.
Impressive fucking work, man. Be proud of yourself
This is awesome, love how you expanded on the worldbuilding.
Well shucks...
I hope that Gordon and Adrian were able to fight side by side in this scenario
Of the suicide squad that entered the Lambda Complex only Gordon and two Marines reached the Nihilanth. I choose to believe Shepard was one of those Marines.
@@Hellhound23691wonder if the other marine is in reference to Mitchell from HDTF
That game was a shit but somehow it ended as permanent part of the culture of HL community
The use of the M1008 CUCV at 14:25 is a nice detail. At this stage they were being replaced in Army usage but were prevalent in ANG units at this time. You put hella effort into this.
I love the thunder child reference. Send that tank to fight massive alien tripods
Very interesting! One small bit of headcanon I have is that EM spikes on Earth can actually trigger incursion events. How many times does Gordon turn on some heavy equipment only for Xen wildlife to immediately appear? I am not 100% sold on the "innocent HECU" take, but I certainly think that a fully-evil-HECU take is somewhat more absurd. Still, infighting during the course of the event seems only reasonable, and you've set up a pretty much perfect situation, where there's no real command structure, conflicting orders, and no clear battle lines. I would expect to see at least a few situations where there were HECU fighting on two different sides.
Perhaps the biggest element you seem to have either dropped or simply skipped over are the headcrabs. If they were simply alien life forms, I would say they're absurd, but it's worth noting: they are from an alternate universe, not a different planet in our own. They could have evolved in a universe nearly identically to our own, explaining their biological compatibility. Moreover, they were successful on Xen, the inter-universal petri dish. They and all other xenian life must be extremely versatile and resilient.
I am in love with your description of the scientific world before the resonance cascade. I wonder if Aperture exists in this world. Their fully-automated manufacturing lines would be very advanced for 2001, as would their apparently successful work in uploading human minds, while simultaneously inventing a totally different and superior form of teleportation, yet never being able to actually bring it to market. The idea of AI intelligence explosion is somewhat discredited now (there are hard limits on how small a logic gate can get, and we're actually really close, and it takes a LOT of time to physically build the hardware), but perhaps GLADos circumvented some of those limitations and managed to do something pretty impressive. Still doesn't explain why they hooked up a computer-controlled nerve gas dispenser to their air ducts, though.
Well it turn out Apature went into stagnation after their founder died so…portal doesn’t exist here and Apature has gone bankrupt and closed it doors
This pleases the half life tism
NO WAY! I've been following your reddit for like 2 years, I had no idea you had a youtube channel! Your art is so cool man. I absolutely eat it up
Thank you! And you weren't missing much before this, I haven't done much with my channel until now.
Now that Craig Mazin’s done a show based on a game, I would love to see a Chernobyl style Half Life mini series showcasing the Black Mesa Disaster
Holy shit, this is by far the best video I’ve seen on the black mesa incident. If only if they made a movie about this.
26:07
"kill-wyvern"
Nice Patlabor 2 reference.
You might be the first person across everywhere I've posted the image to actually recognize that
Must have watched that video 5 or 6 times already, on still watching it again.
Very good job!
Hopefully you make more of these.
Im in love with your AU of Half Life
its so much more grounded
And the fact that the HECU isnt comming verious war crimes on the BMRF staff but just doing fine until the loss of air supiriority is amazing
Some one should make a Black Mesa/Half Life mod set in this version of events
Edit: P.S, if you did the screenshots in Gmod, could you compose a list of public addons used to do that eye candy?
This was incredible! Great work man. Definitely hope to see more from you soon!
I honestly wasn't thinking of doing much past this but given the reception I'm really starting to look into it now. Can't guarantee it will all be about Half Life, though.
@@nuclearpotato4073 Anything in this post story briefing style video would be great. You've got a good formula here! Could stick to video games or even books/movies/stories.
Love the more realistic take on this subject, wish I had more of a vocabulary to explain how/why, or even had the ability to like this video more than once, but this video is something I didn't actually think I wanted or needed until I watched it, its everything I could have asked for lol. Documentary Format, Early 2000s, Alternative History, Half-Life, and with images to go with it too!
that pic of a researcher in an hev suit fighting alongside hecu marines and an m1 abrams tank went so hard, loved this au
i like how you actually gave a plus side to the combine taking over earth, like yeah theyre bad but at least now taking care of the portal storms are THEIR problem
half life 2's intro if any other game studio made it:
(ok but seriously super awesome video very well done)
half life but WOKE because of the WOKE BABY INDUSTRY
who tf is president bush, the president was keemstar
The aliens are coming, we've been compromised!
*throws you off the ship*
this has to be one of the most incredible pieces of creative media I've ever seen come out of the Half-Life community. the way the whole situation unravelled felt so real, and I loved how strong the focus was on all the different government agencies faltering communication - the breakdown of communication is such a massive part of disasters and the portrail here was fantastic for the extent of that reach for such a massive event.
Also *loved* the images, especially the web ones in IE, they looked like a lot of fun to put together :p
I think the one main critical thing I could say is that while most photos were from an angle that looked like someone had taken that photo, there were a couple where it felt a bit out of place, e.g. the one with the soldiers arriving inside the complex which showed them from the front, which didn't make much sense as they were scanning the place. Someone standing in their way to take a photo would be a bit weird lol
I've also forwarded this on to some friends. The number of views on this is criminal for what it is
I'd love to say more about all of it but don't wanna write something too long (and bit busy now lol) but genuinely, this has had me in awe the whole way through. The aesthetic and attention to detail is phenomenal. I saw someone mentioned in another comment as well about the era-accurate style of the Black Mesa facilities shown early on with big bold text signs is so sick. Stuff like the sign near the start about the "If this light is flashing turn back immediately." (paraphrasing) - that sort of stuff makes all the photos so fun to look for all the little details.
@@thennoth2860 Go for it. I'm fine with long comments - I love seeing what people have to say about all this.
It would be cool to go over how various remnants of militaries and such formed what would become the Resistance. The resistance after all is quite organized compared to what you would expect of them having basically no resources whatsoever.
42:22 "SQUAD! WE. GOT. FREEMAN! ALIENS. GOT. NOTHING!"
I’m in love with this. The entire video was literally perfect! I never thought of the events playing out this way! And I also seen your freindly HECU art a while back! Although my only question is where were the Black Ops in all this? But besides that I really like the video. Hope to see more Half Life content soon!
I've retooled the Black Ops as the Air Force Special Infiltration Team that gets sent in to recover the data from the Lambda Complex. I'm glad you enjoyed it!
Interesting! While watching this I was thinking if you could do something similar like this but with the history of the HECU and the changes they had over the years, (gear, weapons, tactics, ETC.)
Your interpretation of half life is so damn cool, especially with those scenes in the video. I love it.
You took the time and effort to create an old-school style website for the BMRF and made me feel old with a Teletext page, something I almost forgot existed. What an awesome video
Of course… the Nihlianth was running from the Combine, and defeating it allowed the Combine to arrive on Earth
red sprite meterological phonomena is absolutely insane, this shits 10/10 good job
More people have got to start doing shit with red sprites, they're too scary and weird to not feature in every horror thing
@@nuclearpotato4073 same thing with the internet world reacting to a situation and realistic infrastructure being impacted
@@nuclearpotato4073 The upside down has come
War of the Worlds Reference spotted at 46:13 oorah!!!! Come on Thunderchild!!!
STANDING FIRM BETWEEN THEM.....
By far one of the best Half Life videos I've seen on the platform. Bravo and cant wait to see what you do next!
This video is a great spin on the Black Mesa Incident, especially the part on where the HECU is actually helping the scientists and Gordon Freeman to help destroy the Nihilanth. I see it as a good thing that the HECU is actually helping the scientists escape, rather than killing them straight-up.
I’m also fairly curious on why you haven’t mentioned the Prototype Labs from Half Life Blue Shift, as that was probably where the whole talk of teleportation started.
The dark truth is honestly that I actually haven't played Blue Shift or Opposing Force before, but to my understanding the building you visit in Blue Shift houses all the older stuff that isn't used much anymore so wouldn't be as relevant in a story like this.
@@nuclearpotato4073 bruhhhhhhhhhhhh, you should totally check out the old expansions like half life decay and some of the cut content tho
@@nuclearpotato4073 Blue Shift meshes really well with this. Opfor meshes kinda well. It humanizes HECU and is somewhat compatible with your take, but not entirely. Still good, though.
NGL this was amazing and the attention to detail and random world events by people was very interesting such as a fisherman finding a leech and the spread of the resonance cascade's effects in general.
Amazing video! Hope you continue to do more like this.
Had this recommended to me before, but only got around to watching it today. Great stuff! I like how Freeman still plays a big role even with all the various changes to what happened.