If you’re a veteran, you’ve probably played Half-Life 2, which was released in 2004. In the game, you’ll probably see a model of a burned corpse with the code “Corpse01.mdl.” The burning corpse appears several times in Half-Life 2’s sewers and other parts of the game’s world, and is a mainstay of the game’s setting.
In the last few days something surprising has happened. Everything was going well until a fan discovered that the face of the burned corpse was the face of a real corpse. Events have moved away from this hypothetical corpse, as some gory images and graphics confirming this have been published, and a user has linked a snapshot of the corpse to the attached character in Half-Life 2.
On the other hand, there is a lot of controversy surrounding this hypothetical corpse, as some believe it is just a coincidence that the real corpse and the hypothetical one look very similar. However, the evidence is overwhelming, and it seems that developer Valve simply took photos of a man who had died a tragic death and placed them to complement the game's corpse model. You can, of course, check out the screenshots from the video above, taken by YouTuber Richter Overtime.
Despite the strangeness of the situation and the fact that the developer took inspiration from the face of a real corpse, this doesn't seem to be anything new for the industry. We've seen the GTA series take inspiration from real-world cars and weapons, as well as the more violent combat and city neighborhood designs throughout the series.
Perhaps the real-life inspiration was hidden for too long, but I suspect the developer, Valve, didn't know at the time that we'd find out the truth about it in 2022.
