Talk:Retcons

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Kleiner in Half-Life

I thought it was always implied that the white doctor performing HLR was Kleiner, the one that comments the activities in the test chamber. — Unsigned comment by ZaInT

Please sign your comments. Kleiner's presence in Half-Life has been debated many times, but Valve never confirmed anything. Klow 10:23, 4 February 2012 (UTC)

The glasses scientist is named Nerd in the files

When i look at the decompiled files for the scientist mdl, there is 4 heads and a headless body 1. Luther (the black guy) 2. Nerd (The glasses guy) 3. Einstein 4. Slick

Half-Life 2: Episode Two retconing Anomalous Materials lobby

I disagree that during G-Man's speech in Half-Life 2 Episode Two the room he's sitting in is intended to be the same lobby as seen in Anomalous Materials.

I think that the fact that there are multiple locations in the Black Mesa Compound that have a giant screen that says "Black Mesa Research Facility" would disprove this assumption; such as the lobby you find in the Resonance chapter of Half-Life Decay (which it honestly resembles more than the Anomalous Materials one). — Unsigned comment by Lukerp

I would like to see sources that let us lean more firmly into ascertaining that the room is the AM lobby. Such as entity names or scene prefixes or something. I have not found such information myself, after having checked the vmf, the vcd and the individual file names. The entities and the vcd tags refer to the space as "blackmesa" or "bm" (or don't refer to it, as some have generic names or reused from other bits).

I get why it's easy to compare the two locations, the obvious connections being the placement of desk, map, monitors, the entrance and the exit to a corridor together with where that leads. And the fact it would be something Gordon/player for sure would have seen before. But there's just as many differences, and if anything, it appears as dream-like or metaphorical.

So I think stating that the design of the Anomalous Materials lobby featured in Half-Life was changed and that it is the redesigned lobby, is different from saying that the Heart-to-Heart lobby reflects/resembles/references the original lobby. Cvoxalury (talk) 23:42, 3 July 2024 (MSK)

It is unnecessary to find a veritable smoking gun that formally declares the location in this Ep2 G-Man sequence as being the Anomalous Materials lobby since it is abundantly clear what the overwhelming intention was. The G-Man is currently talking about Black Mesa when it appears, and the scene itself plainly states it's in the "Black Mesa Research Facility", so that dramatically reduces the possible number of locations it could very well be depicting. As for what location that is, it's not a question by this point (Ep2's release) that Valve considered the opening chapters of the original Half-Life to be the most iconic and recognizable of the game. A similar G-Man sequence from HL2's opening already featured an iconic HL1 level within its montage of locations, and the very Anomalous Materials lobby in question was also seen in HL2 in Kleiner's group photo, albeit in its original HL1 form. We don't have to stretch our imagination far (or at all, really) to ascertain that this outright-stated Black Mesa location being shown to us by a figure who has already before demonstrated the ability to show us familiar, previously-visited sites sitting in a room that matches the literal first room of the previous title's (the one that actually took place in Black Mesa) opening non-tram ride chapter, one that Valve had already highlighted prior, is not simply a coincidence. To not identify this as a rendition of the Anomalous Materials lobby is missing the forest for the trees.

Note that this next point is not at all necessary to the above determination, but I compared the brush work of HL1's C1A0 lobby to this Black Mesa room in Ep2's ep2_outland_02. The whole thing is not a one-to-one match, which is not unexpected, but the orientation of both rooms match. There's a quarter chance of that being a coincidence, but closer scrutiny of the brush work shows there's an exact match with the curve leading into the side hallway, a telltale sign that someone at Valve copied the original HL1 brush work into Source Hammer and built on top of and round this geometry, slowly eliminating the original HL1 brushes until it was largely replaced. However, it looks like at least one brush survived untouched. This is possibly a coincidence, but in the context of the overwhelmingly clear intention of the scene, it's far more likely to be corroboration of the initial assertion. Here's a gallery showing my comparison: https://imgur.com/a/VurBKu6

Some other details to take into account:

• The textures used for the map behind the desk in HL1's lobby ("LAB1_MAP1" and "LAB1_MAP2") never appear elsewhere in the game (except for the deathmatch map Datacore), hence there are no other giant screens of this type ever seen anywhere else.
• Said map textures never appear in either Opposing Force or Blue Shift. It's only other appearance in the entire series outside of deathmatch is Decay's Mission 4: Resonance level. Nonetheless, we can rightly assume that Valve was not thinking about any Gearbox expansion locations, let alone one from the most obscure console-only installment, when it came time to summon a familiar HL1 level location in Ep2.

Given the that the Black Mesa lobby in Ep2 is meant to evoke the familiar HL1 lobby, the only remaining contentious point is how to handle the wording of describing the clear visual differences. I'll note one more thing here: Between HL2 and Ep2, while they obviously are surreal and dream-like in nature, none of the other locations summoned in the G-Man sequences are deliberately transformed or otherwise unrepresentative of the locations as we've already seen them in the past or would ultimately see them later in the journey. For the AM lobby here to intentionally be metaphorical (as opposed to a straight up depiction of the location it's representing) would be the lone aberration among these two G-Man sequences. It would also be without explanation, because why would the G-Man show Gordon something that isn't actually supposed to be Black Mesa (which he explicitly did in HL2) when he's specifically talking about Black Mesa?

Again, this can be whittled down to missing the forest for the trees. In Episode Two, the G-Man starts talking about Black Mesa, and we're shown a Black Mesa location that does indeed look familiar. This exact same scenario played out not long before in a prior game. There's little reason to believe it's any deeper than that. Marphy (talk) 05:50, 4 July 2024 (MSK)