'Gnarly Forensic' Photo On Reddit Discovered That Half-Life 2 Used It For Its Zombies

"Half-Life 2" is a 2004 first-person shooter game from Valve.

It features puzzles and thorough storytelling, as well as physics-based gameplay never before introduced in popular games. As Gordon Freeman, players have to join a resistance movement to liberate Earth from the control of an alien empire, the Combine.

When it was released, the game received universal acclaim, and won more than 30 Game of the Year awards.

In 2020, Valve released a prequel of the game, called "Half-Life: Alyx", which boast VR technology for a much more immersive gameplay experience. But regardless, Half-Life 2 is still considered a classic game, cited as one of the best games ever made.

18 years on from its release, Half-Life 2's gameplay experience certainly cannot compare to more modern ones. But still, not everything about the game has been unearthed.

In this case, Half-Life 2 fans have made a discovery about one of its models, which apparently use a real photo from a real medical book.

The model in question, is found sinde the corpse01.mdl file, which is used to depict one of the zombies in Half-Life 2.

But the file, which has become a popular skin mod, was actually ripped from a real forensic photo.

This was realized when a user on Reddit on the r/eyeblech subreddit shared a photo of a deceased man with the caption: "Some pretty gnarly forensic photographs."

Later, another Reddit user replied by saying that "oh hey 1st one's the half life 2 corpse01."

The only difference between the one on Half-Life 2 and the real one is that both eyes are missing in Half-Life 2's model, otherwise, the rest looks exactly the same.

"Imagine being burnt to death only for game developers to put your mutilated face on a dead citizen model in a game. Understandable why the model always felt... off and out of place to me and many others," commented another user.

Another user joked that the person was "killed by the Combine," and another commented that he must've "went face to face with a headcrab and lost."

Headcrab first appeared as an enemy in the original Half-Life in 1998. Since then, the alien parasitoid is also found in subsequent Half-Life games, and has been considered to be one of the main staples of the Half-Life game series.

Using existing data for games can be controversial, especially because games are commercial, and that the developers may encounter copyright issues.

But when it comes to designing corpses or dead people or animals in video games, game designers do this for a particularly good reason.

Mortal Kombat 11, which was released in 2019, is the most realistic in the series so far, and that it reportedly took its toll on those who worked on it.

After spending months to create photo-realistic animations of bones breaking, disembowelment, decapitation, blood spraying, and more, at least one of the designers was left with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

The designers had to do study such gory things in order to design the game's Fatalities and Brutalities, which are essentially finishing moves to kill the opponent.

"You’d walk around the office and one guy would be watching hangings on YouTube, another guy would be looking at pictures of murder victims, someone else would be watching a video of a cow being slaughtered," said one developer who wished to remain anonymous.