Half-Life 2 character features the face of a real life corpse, fans discover

Content warning: this article contains mentions of graphic imagery which some readers may find disturbing.

Developers will often stuff games to the brim with unique quirks and details - which is a huge part of the fun of playing. Discovering a Red Dead Redemption 2 Easter egg four years after the game was released maintains both intrigue and interest.

Skyrim players recently discovered a weird glitch 11 years after release, while The Last of Us Part I players spotted a heartbreaking new detail about Joel. You get the idea. This latest Half-Life 2 discovery though is definitely not what we had in mind. There’s nothing fun about this at all. In fact, it’s very disturbing.

Speaking of Valve, take a look at Portal below which has been updated with RTX.

Prepare yourselves folks, this one is morbid. Almost 18 years on from its release, Half-Life 2 players have discovered that one character model actually uses the face of a real life corpse. As reported by The Gamer, the discovery was shared by Twitter user richterovertime who took to the site to write: “Did you know ‘corpse01.mdl’ from Half-Life 2 and GMod is textured using real photos of a dead, burnt body.”

The photo of the body was reportedly taken from a medical text book. The burnt corpse model features throughout the game, but particularly in the sewer section. Kotaku added that Valve copied the photo exactly, except that the real-life right eye was used on the left side of the face in the game. It’s quite chilling to think that a real life corpse has been hiding in plain sight in Half-Life 2 for so long.

As Kotaku further went on to point out, this is something that should surely be rectified with a patch now that it’s been discovered. It’s no secret that developers often research real life ‘gore’ but to actually use a photo of someone’s charred corpse, that’s dark Valve.