I am curious about this. G-Man always gave me the feeling that he was acting with the Black Mesa personel since the beginning of the whole project.
The whole design of the research facility - including here the sectors revealed in Opposing Force and Blue Shift - gives the idea of a purpose-made facility. Missle silos ready for releasing rockets, entire labyrints of portal machines, equipment storage areas near the main teleporters, besides the contention areas, like the ones of Op4.
It’s like he already knew the disaster that was coming, and the whole base was somewhat ready to deal with it (the facility, not the people).
Ah, and why entire security systems started to fail by the time of the test?
PS: one idea for the silo: it was ready to do what Magnusson and Kleiner did in Ep2.
Well one could consider that G-man was working with or in direct relation to the american government who was seen invading Xen in the prologue of Half Life 1. He, as mentioned by Nihilanth is not human- seen saving Adrian Shepards life in opposing Source, benevolent, neutral.
Working completely in the interests of a larger agenda which due to the deployment of Gordon in Half Life 2 is either Anti-combine or chaotically neutral. Either way it’s working in parallel with earths forces, the same earth forces completely fucked over and reamed by the Combine. Potentially and this is a big if he’s seen arguing with that scientist over that mornings experiments. Trying to stop them from happening, to stop the combine from coming or in the shortsighted version just stop the event itself. After shit gets fucked he becomes sort of a benefactor and evaluator of the situation, calmly, rationally deliberating what needs to happen while not interfering with the situation that is well beyond the scope of ‘fucked’ into something completely different.
I don’t personally see him as malevolent, but there’s still allot of open avenues to explore and mostly unanswered questions.
I don’t think G-Man wanted to stop the experiment. In Ep2, Eli speaks about a “mutual friend” (G-Man) who make the old scientist authorize the test.
G-Man is a professional chess player.
snaps his fingers Oh snap, he -did-, fuck I haven’t played that in a while. Well knowing this It’s possible he’s a combine agent and one of the hugest plot devices in the history of video games, potentially they could just joker him out and ‘It’s all apart of the plan’ their way to the end. But that’d be a bit obvious.
Jesus, I have to catch up.
About the silos and such: It’s a military missile base turned into a high-tech lab with many areas of research. The weapon/ammo storage in lambda was for the Xen exploration team, who were sent to get specimens from Xen, possibly dead or alive.
ok. And the big containment areas which are in Op4? Large rooms like that ones musn’t be made without a specific purpose.
I’ve also always wondered why valve chose to give him a briefcase with the Black Mesa logo, in hl1. Was his character’s role just underdeveloped at that time? Or was he somehow working in BM, or in collaboration with the xen project. Obviously he had some relation because in ep2 (iirc) it’s revealed that he provided them with the xen crystal.
And of course there’s the ominous dialogue at hl1’s ending, like “xen is now under our control” and about your weapons being “government property”
I don’t think the Black Mesa scientists actually knew what they were doing when they were communicating with G-man. They might have had direct contact, and listened to him, but I can’t imagine they actually were in on the whole thing.
Also, even though he helped the combine get here, he could still be working for the earth forces. His goal may have somehow been to trick the combine on to earth, where they would either be in some way trapped/cornered, or there is something unique to earth (possibly Freeman?) that will in the end help him reach his final goal.
At the moment, I can’t say theres enough information to say anything for certain about the G-man. Even with what we have, you can’t be sure exactly which side he’s on or why he would choose either side.
Was G-Man working with BM team since the beginning?
OMG Daniel Junek is GMAN!
Black mesa was a missile silo, then it got decomishioned and converted into a scientific research facility, probably starting with the rocket test labs. Then the usual research was carried out, then came the teleporter experimentations.
With the discovery of Xen mass amounts of areas where created for the sole purpose of studying the borderworld, mainly the Lambda core, which is one of the newest areas of the complex.
The observation areas where still in part under construction during the time of the Resonance Cascade.
I don’t think the G-man worked for blackmesa, or even at it, and i imagine he was never there before the day of the incident. I imagine his cover was some form of U.S government oversee’er, his briefcase logo could simply be because he needed to look the part, and/or anything in their would have been to do with blackmesa.
I didn’t say he worked for Black Mesa, only that he could be near the scientist since the beginning of the facility.
BTW, he could have used the scientists, manipulating to make them believe he was a somewhat “top man” of the government (only to get their respect), to achieve his goals. The resonance cascade, the alien invasion and all the other things were only random events to help him complete his objetives.
It’s because of this G-Man could be directly or not connected with BMRF.
If I recall correctly, Valve didn’t originally intend to make a sequel to Half-Life, and only decided to expand on the story after the game sold so well and so many players wanted to see more (EDIT: Well, I wasn’t ENTIRELY correct there. They left it open for a sequel, but were quite prepared to leave the Half-Life universe behind and work on something else entirely, had it not been for HL1’s sheer success. [From https://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showpost.php?p=10650493&postcount=2. Two different quotes there touch on their original plans for expanding on HL1]), so the Gman as a character was probably just underdeveloped at the time, or they decided to take him in a different direction in HL2 and beyond.
As for his involvement at BMRF, it’s clear from Ep2 that the Gman was instrumental in the specific experiment that caused the resonance cascade, since he provided the crystal that went into the anti-mass spectrometer, but I’m not aware of any evidence for anything beyond that.
I personally don’t think he worked at Black Mesa. I think he probably just showed up one day disguised as a government agent, provided the crystal sample, then stuck around to watch the results.
You’d think the scientists would be wondering how he had access to xen, given how Black Mesa seems to be the only facility on earth capable of reaching xen with their technology