Here’s an eerie fact I’ve noticed about Half-Life:
The game was made in 1998. It takes place on a day in the early 2000s in which a disaster occurs that changes the world. It is a bright, sunny day. And about a minute after Gordon Freeman arrives at the Black Mesa Research Facility, the voice on the Black Mesa Announcement System says, “The time is 8:47 AM”.
Can anyone figure out what’s creepy about this?
It’s always bright and sunny somewhere, Freeman lives on site so he didn’t just arrive, 8:47 AM common reasonably likely time to be late for a shift and on a scheduled transit system. Only really leaves a world-changing disaster to be anything special, and that’s incredibly common in sci-fi.
To many straws.
Crypt you are forgetting that Americans forget that people exist anywhere else in the world.
With that in mind OP, I’m assuming you are talking about the twin towers because terrorists=aliens?
The time that the first plane hit the World Trade Center was 8:46:30 AM local time. I live in the same time zone (Eastern Time).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_for_the_day_of_the_September_11_attacks
The time mentioned at the beginning of Half-Life is 8:47 AM, only 30 seconds later. When I saw that in Black Mesa, I actually wondered if the developers put it in because of that. I looked back at the original Half-Life to see if it is the same (it is).
In the original Half-Life, the announcement of the time is made 15 seconds after the start of the game. In Black Mesa, the game starts a bit earlier, so it reaches that point 30 seconds after the start of the game.
So with both the original Half-Life and Black Mesa, the local time at the start of the game is, to the minute, the same local time that the first plane hit the World Trade Center on 9/11.
Didn’t Valve retcon Resonance Cascade’s official year to 1998?
I fail to see how it is eerie though. It was 8:46 earlier this morning as well, and that is in real life which is arguably more relevant to 9/11
Easy to make connections when none exist, just to make things interesting for yourself.
I saw Jesus face in my toast this morning.
guys it’s 12:02 am right now and there were two towers i’m really scared guys EERIEEEEEEEEE
Because of this thread, I decided to watch The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers starting at 8:46 in the morning today.
That’s some spook-ass stuff, startin’ to freak me out.
I always thought that Half Life took place in 2001 or 2002, since the monitors in Kleiner’s lab are pretty old models (1990s?), and if general human technology (computers and anything outside Black Mesa East) hadn’t made any improvements in the last 20 years, it would make sense for the scientists in HL2 to use hardware from the 1990s to the early 2000s.
From what it says on the Half-Life wiki, the Black Mesa Incident occurs in the early 2000s.
https://half-life.wikia.com/wiki/Black_Mesa_Incident
With Half-Life, the general atmosphere of the game has struck me as being similar to 9/11. It has you trying to escape from a massive facility where an epic disaster has occurred, on a bright sunny day.
I suppose it’s more meaningful to those of us that were close to 9/11.
I’ve played Half-Life since well before 9/11. Although I didn’t get to play the full version of Half-Life until 2005, I played Half-Life: Uplink in late 1999, and the Opposing Force demo in early to mid 2001.
One of the survival traits in humans is pattern recognition. However, this can sometimes lead to “errors”. For example, looking at a series of pictures taken in rapid succession and then viewed in the same rapid succession will give the illusion of movement (movies). Another example is seeing bunnies in random cloud formations. It’s why my avatar is just a series of colored dots but taken together, the human brain resolves it as a single picture (of the cute “Fizzgig” from Dark Crystal), itself just a puppet (fabric, faux hair, plastic, etc), but is given the illusion of being alive by its movements created by the puppeteers.
Anything with a time listed in it that’s close to something else will be inevitably linked to something else. A movie mentioning the 11th of September will be “eerie” if something traumatic happens on that date later. If the 9/11 attacks happened on a Friday the 13th, it would’ve been “eerie” for the series of movies sporting that title. If the 9/11 attacks happened at 8:45 AM, you would’ve linked it to the scene from Back to the Future where Marty exclaims that the Doc’s clocks are slow (“Are you telling me it’s 8:45?” “Precisely!” “Damn! I’m late for school!”) and it would’ve been eerie.
It’s just random coincidence.
We should be worried about all of those replicants that are going to start plaguing the streets about four years from now. Talk about eerie.
But it was a bright sunny day Daniel. A BRIGHT, SUNNY, DAY.
This part in particular is important.
One thing that actually is creepy: In Deus Ex (2000), due to memory restrictions, couldn’t render the world trade center. The in-game explaination was that they were destroyed in a terrorist attack, like the Statue of Liberty was in-game. Heebie-Jeebies are had.
It must be a different time zone, I don’t know… I’m not crazy smart… I do agree, it should be at least a little dark, but, well, I don’t know how to explain…
Did you just like your own post?
But if it was 8:47 am…it was like 11:47 am. Or 10:47, with daylight savings (idk I live in AZ we don’t do that)
Soo…
Founded in 2004, Leakfree.org became one of the first online communities dedicated to Valve’s Source engine development. It is more famously known for the formation of Black Mesa: Source under the 'Leakfree Modification Team' handle in September 2004.