Weird Half-Life secret shows Gordon Freeman can actually talk, kind of

pcgamesn.com:

Half-Life is famous for a lot of things. From the classic Black Mesa labs to the sinister G-Man and always hilarious scientist NPCs, the Valve FPS game remains a staple of the genre, even some 25 years later. But above all, Half-Life is perhaps known for Gordon Freeman, and his principle, mute protagonist gimmick. Since he doesn’t talk, it allows the player to put themselves fully into his HEV-suited shoes, and imagine themselves inside the Half-Life world. But if you discover a spooky little secret in Half-Life, it turns out that Gordon Freeman does, in a way, kind of actually speak. Perhaps this is the big character reveal we’ve all been waiting for ahead of Half-Life 3.

When you die in Half-Life, the HEV suit makes a telling little noise. We can all hear it in our heads, that final ‘beep, beep, beeeeeep’ as the suit’s vital sign readings flatline. Run in front of a turret gun. Trip the laser beam on a satchel charge. Plummet to your death from the top of a ladder. All familiar experiences to the Half-Life veteran, and all accompanied by that iconic sound effect.

But where does it come from? You’d think it just emanates from the suit somehow, or plays automatically when the game detects that you’ve died. Game development, however, is rarely that simple, and it turns out Valve has a secret little trick to make the death sound effect play properly.

In the Half-Life game engine, GoldSrc (pronounced ‘gold source’), sound effects have to come from some kind of in-game entity. They can’t just materialize in the world – they have to be attached to a character or, in some later versions of the engine, such as Source, an object. In Portal, for example, a lot of GLaDOS’s voice lines are ‘spoken’ by cubes and other items that