Concerned by Christopher C. Livingston

In 1996 Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington, two former Microsoft employees who had become millionaires over their stint with the company, decided they wanted to create a computer game. They started their own developer, Valve, decided the game would be a 3D first-person shooter, got the license for the Quake engine (from id Software, makers of Wolfenstein 3D and Doom) and hired the best coders and animators available. From the start of the project they were focused on a particular vision: instead of just creating a virtual shooting range, they wanted to build a complex, dense and intriguing world, where a sci-fi story with a believable outline could be smoothly told in an appealing setting populated by full-fledged characters, surrounded by a tense soundtrack. They set themselves to explore the full possibilities of the medium and they delivered. After some delays, Half-Life was released on November 8, 1998, being later recognized as the best release of the year and one of the most acclaimed games of the decade. There's no need to get too technical explaining why it worked so well (NPCs with a much improved AI and digital skeletons, scripted chains of events to advance the narrative without cutscenes, ...), basically it made most shooters released before it seem hollow and stripped of any life and set a very high bar for subsequent products.

Half-Life revolves around an incident happening at the Black Mesa Research Facility, as you control one of the scientists working there, Gordon Freeman, trying to make sense of it and escaping, armed with a crowbar. The idea of building a game around the story, and not the other way around as was usual, is central to Half-Life as a series. Marc Laidlaw, science fiction and horror writer, was brought in to devise the suspenseful plot and rich characters and was also responsible for that aspect in Half-Life 2, where we check with Freeman as he wakes up, after about 20 years in stasis, finds out an alien race laid waste to Earth and now controls the last remnants of organized society in a totalitarian fashion, and so has to join his surviving colleagues from Black Mesa in their resistance against the invaders. To guarantee the expectations of millions of fans for another innovative masterpiece would be met, Gabe Newell authorized an unlimited budget and didn't put pressure on the team regarding release dates. The second game arrived on November, 16 2004, after more than 5 years of work, 40 million dollars and, again, some delays. The world felt even more organic, set in a variety of very different scenarios with plenty to explore, with state-of-the-art graphics (and amazing display of light and shadows), enhanced object manipulation and more elaborate environmental puzzles thanks to the best implementation of realistic physics to date (and one of the best weapons in any video game), the inclusion of vehicles, over 150 pages of dialogue delivered by actors like Robert Guillaume and Robert Culp and incredible facial animation for the NPCs that allowed them to convey emotions and reactions even just through their eyes, all built within a brand new engine, Source. By the end of the year it was considered a classic, and even today is still regarded as one of the best games ever.

The first game spanned three expansions and depicted the Black Mesa Incident from the perspective of other witnesses, while the story of the second kept unfolding in two episodic sequels (the promised third is anathema to gamers worldwide, 8 years waiting and counting as Valve gets distracted with its groundbreaking gaming plataform, Steam). Besides the spin-off Portal, both Half-Life games also spawned dozens of modifications by talented players, usually known as mods, such as MINERVA, GoldenEye: Source or Black Mesa. Some became extremely popular and were made "official" by Valve: Counter-Strike, Team Fortress, Day Of Defeat and garry's mod, also known as GMod. GMod was developed by Garry Newman and released just weeks after the HL2, on Christmas Eve. It allows for players to freely manipulate the items, vehicles, weapons and ragdoll models of the characters from the game, as well as user-created ones, posing them however we want to. And that's actually what I want to talk about today.

the Webcomics are a very particular medium. While the Internet allows for creative persons to share their work without having to resort to a publisher, the level of interest most of the projects shared in such a way attract ins't at the same level as their offline counterparts. Since the late 90s, digital artworks, fan fiction and flash movies created in barely-lit bedrooms proliferated in hundreds of dedicated communities such as deviantART and ytmnd and were consumed enthusiastically there, but those were usually tightly knit groups and those kind of projects rarely reached a widespread audience, even when they became memes. As for webcomics thought, a few managed to appealed to the masses early on, even before broadband access, and nowadays several have become phenomenons, such as The Perry Bible Fellowship, Penny Arcade, xkcd, Axe Cop, MS Paint Adventures or Will Save The World For Gold. The one I bring today is in the middle of the road though, a webcomic that was much loved, but only by a selected and associated audience.

Concerned was launched in May 1, 2005. Its author, Christopher C. Livingston, got inspired by the narrative of the by-then fairly new Half-Life 2 and decided to turn it into a parody with the help of GMod. Not all webcomics are drawn, and this one was virtually staged. He wasn't the first to use a tool such as GMod to make a comic (even in the prolific GMod community examples quickly surfaced), but his effort was much more sustained than what was common. Livingston kept at it for a year and a half, for a total of 205 issues (at first with three released every week, and then two). The utterly amateurish look the early strips had was constantly improved upon, but the writing was sharp and funny from the start, although some of the jokes may be lost in readers unfamiliar with the game. With the subtitle "The Half-Life and Death of Gordon Frohman", the comic followed the titular character and his dealings with the dictatorship in City 17 a few weeks before the events of Half-Life 2 happen. Unlike his fellow citizens, he is happy with the state of things and sees the alien overlords as a friendly people that only wish what's best for Earth, so obviously he longs to become an human-combine hybrid. He gets confused with the prophetic hero of Black Mesa several times on his way and due to his incompetence may end up helping the rebel cause more than he wishes. The name of the comic comes from Frohman correspondence with his idol Wallace Breen, the representative of the power of the aliens, part of which ends up in the game itself.

Note: The videos in this post show the really great opening scenes for the main Half-Life games (you can see the ubiquitous G-Man in both), while the images are some of my own experiences in GMod. If you want to check out other comics made using the mod, explore this website. The ongoing series " The Adventures of Hercule Cubbage" are a good place to start.