Chapter Text
The graphics weren’t amazing, but the nostalgia and potential eeriness made the experience worth it. For Gordon, a single-dad wanting to experience a rare hour of freedom on some .exe game from mysterious corners of the internet, it was a gift. Surely, not all bad decisions go badly.
Half-Life for VR, huh. Fan-game or not, this is pretty neat. Gordon grinned to himself as he looked at those gray and white walls, testing the controls gingerly and then with more enthusiasm once he got the swing of them.
He was as close to “in” his childhood favorite game as he could possibly be. Even the possible impossibility of completing the game as the online stories told didn’t dampen his spirits. Gordon just took it in stride and greeted the first character he saw, a friendly looking 30-something he saw who was staring at a…wall.
Well, the stories do say most of the AI seem to be broken and odd.
“Hey there,” Gordon greeted curiously with a wave. The stories also said the AI were going to be rude and dismissive, so he waited for the cold response.
“Hi!” The NPC didn’t turn to him as he said this.
Not as cold as he thought. “What…uh…what are you doing?” Gordon asked, angling his character to look at the wall too. Nothing.
“Waiting for my eyes to stop buzzing!” The NPC told him. “I don’t want to look at anything too busy until they stop!”
Gordon supposed by some vein of logic that made sense. He looked around and then back to the NPC. Well, he was the only one around. “How’d your eyes start buzzing?” The man’s eyes didn’t look odd. Maybe this file was modified by someone who had enough time, energy and humor to modify the voice lines and coding.
“I drank too much soda,” the man said with a small bit of sadness, and Gordon saw his mouth twitch down into a frown.
“Oh,” Gordon had got a migraine from too much caffeine before too. Poor NPC. “That’s rough. Want me to get you—”
“What are you doing?” Someone interrupted. Gordon glanced over. Down the hall there it was, a security guard. The security guard? Could be this the AI that everyone talked about? The creepy too sentient AI?
Gordon gestured to the NPC next to him. “I’m just talking to uh...uh…”
“Tommy!” the NPC staring at the wall introduced.
“Uh, Tommy here—”
“Not you,” the AI cut him off. The guard was staring at Tommy. Tommy didn’t look at Gordon or the guard, still staring at the wall. The guard seemed unnerved, but his eyes went to Gordon.
“So, uh—” Gordon started.
The guard shot him.
Instant kill.
Gordon stared at the game-over screen dumbly. So, that part of the whole “Scrapped Half-Life VR” Creepypasta wasn’t a lie. The guard really could just one shot you. But he had another hour of free-time and some determination.
Gordon reloaded his game.
This time he spent a little less time looking around and went to the hallway he’d seen the talkative NPC, Tommy. No luck, he wasn’t there.
Dang, Gordon was hoping to pursue talking to that NPC. In all the stories he’d read, in all the forums, everyone agreed that all the characters avoided the player or were rude and dismissive, except the sentient AI, which seemed to want to kill you or mess with you. Tommy hadn’t lined up with the stories, maybe someone had modified this file? Maybe someone added a few fan-made quirks or something.
This could after all just be a fan game modeled after the story. Or maybe a game someone made and then crafted a story around to attract attention, but because they hadn’t had the time to finish it, they just made an AI that prevented the character from progressing.
It was a cool game regardless, or he was just a really nostalgic fan boy for a character with his first name. He tried interacting with the scientists, but all he got was “I’m terribly busy”, “Please leave me alone; I have work to do”, “Go to the test chamber, Gordon”, “I don’t have time to talk,” and the most common, “Do not talk to me.”
Now that sounded more like the stories.
Gordon got his HEV suit on and headed to the test chamber only to run into a security guard. The security guard? The model looked like all the rest. The security guard stared at him unblinking. Gordon decided fuck it. He didn’t have to be in character. He didn’t have to pretend to be Gordon Freeman. It was after all just a game. This was Gordon the English major’s time.
“Seems like I hit a nerve?” Gordon questioned.
“Huh?” the guard said.
“You didn’t want Tommy to talk to me?” Gordon questioned.
“Who is Tommy?” the guard said, not a hint of expression on his face. Oh, come on. This was the first variance in NPC dialogue, this had to be the security guard. He could fake it too and pretend he didn’t realize this was the guard.
“Never mind; I’m fine. Have a good one,” Gordon said and stepped around the guard to enter the door. It opened, but the guard stuck out an arm to block him. Gordon turned back to him.
“Don’t think you’re supposed to go forward,” the guard said.
“Why not?” Gordon questioned. “It is my job. I have to go to the test chamber.”
The guard stared at him. Dead, shaded eyes boring into his soul through the VR headset. “No. It isn’t.”
“What reason do you have to stop me?” Gordon questioned.
“I need to see your passport,” the guard said.
“No, you don’t,” Gordon said. “You made that up.”
“No, I didn’t,” the guard said. Gordon tapped on his controller for a moment and decided to just force his way past the guard. It wasn’t like he could actually stop Gordon. He pushed against the guard’s arm and it gave. He was able to step past. Gordon just shook his head at the guard's scandalized expression.
“You can’t use force. That’s illegal,” the guard said.
“I don’t care. I’m going forward—” Gordon didn’t even the last word out when the guard interrupted him.
“I’ll use force to stop you.”
“Go ahead, try,” Gordon said facing him. This time the guard was smiling a bit. A barely noticeable smirk.
“Bye.”
Instant kill from a gun.
Game-over screen.
Gordon just laughed to himself. He had a feeling that was going to happen. One more run, maybe this time he just avoided the guard and looked around the map a bit. Maybe there was even a passport somewhere.
He reloaded and this time decided no, he wasn’t going to the test chamber. If that guard wasn’t going to let him, he was going somewhere else. Gordon went to the locker room this time and he explored Gordon Freeman’s locker curiously, and then glanced over at the NPC in the room. It seemed to be glitched, partially sticking in a locker.
“Hey,” Gordon said, not expecting a response.
“Hello, Gordon!” The NPC said. Finally detaching itself from the locker. It turned to face him smiling.
“How are you?” Gordon questioned.
“Another day, another dollar, here at Black Mesa!” the NPC said.
“Yeah. What’s your name?” Gordon asked. The NPC didn’t look different from the other NPCs, but he seemed a little livelier.
“Hello, Gordon!” the NPC said.
This one wasn’t hostile, but boy was it broken. “That all you can say, bud?”
“Hello, Gordon!” the NPC said.
“Good enough. Nice talking to you,” Gordon said. He left the locker room and went to check out the break room. He found Tommy again, this time at the soda machine, staring mournfully at the soda. He turned to look at Gordon and oddly…recognized him. Or at least it seemed like he did. Huh, he should see if there's an updating file the game saves info too. If he deleted it, and reinstalled it, it would clear that, surely.
“Hello!”
“Hey?” Gordon said. “Getting more soda?”
“I haven’t had any yet today!” Tommy said.
“Huh,” Gordon said. So, no. It wasn’t like the actions were staying from his last playthrough. Tommy just stared at the soda machine again.
“Do you have spare quarters? I lost mine,” Tommy questioned. The other NPCs in the room weren’t even looking at them, and so Gordon checked around. Nope, he didn’t have any quarters. If he could find the crowbar to pick up, he could just break the soda machine. It’s not like it’d matter; the resonance cascade would happen in-game after he got into the test chamber. Or it wouldn’t. Regardless, vandalism didn’t do any harm.
“No, but sometimes there’s some under the machine, but I doubt there will be, yanno since—”
Tommy bent down and reached under the machine, finding four quarters. “Found some!”
Huh. Must be a neat little easter-egg or something. Gordon nodded as Tommy put them in, getting two cans of orange soda. He happily opened one and then offered the other to Gordon. Gordon mimed drinking it, almost able to taste the vague taste of oranges if he overthought it.
While he was idly drinking soda with Tommy, the guard must have come over. Gordon glanced to the doorway and found the guard standing there, watching them.
“What’s wrong?”
“Huh,” the guard said, looking at Tommy curiously.
“Hello again!” Tommy greeted the guard.
Huh, indeed. Does Tommy remember me and the guard?
“You didn’t try—do you have your passport?” the guard questioned.
Gordon laughed, and mimed drinking the soda again, eying the guard with mirth. So, this guard was bugged he hadn’t tried to go to the test chamber this time. If this was really how creepy the AI got, Gordon didn’t think he was going to be that disturbed.
“Nope,” Gordon said.
“You can’t be here,” the guard said.
“I have my passport,” Tommy said, pulling it out of a pocket in his lab coat. It was indeed a passport. What the fuck. The guard looked at the passport, then back to Gordon.
“Bye.”
Instant death shot, again.
Gordon snorted. He stared at that game-over screen and thought about the game. Just a harmless little creepypasta game. He turned everything off and checked in on Joshua, making sure he was still asleep, and headed to bed. It lingered on his mind for a few minutes, before thoughts of his job tomorrow consumed his thoughts.
…
He wouldn’t have free time until next week to properly play the game, so on his lunch break he scrolled the forum surrounding the creepypasta, reading small snippets of other user’s stories, whether true or rumors or blatant falsehoods for internet brownie points.
The forums were busy; they always were. The story had became semi-legendary in the gaming forums still dedicated to all Haunted Gaming aspects and the icebergs in 2020 exploring all the rumors surrounding old games.
“The Scrapped Half-Life VR”
Pinned: Discussion Thread: (150+ replies) created by JkernJernig4n (mod)
Pinned: The Game? Thread: (150+ replies) created by SupineSuplexSuperhero (mod)
Who hs the cop of the game? (2 replies) created by Ghoulvoy10
Does this creepypasta relate to the “Half-Life is real”? (4 replies) created by nrnrnrnrnrnrnrnrnrnrnrn
Guard theories? (31 replies) created by SwedishFishInOcean
(+expand more)
Gordon clicked on the game thread. He’d read it plenty of times before, but the top three posts were mini stories from three people who supposedly played the game as well as the original creepypasta.
The original story went as follows:
The unnamed narrator tells us they worked for a company in charge of remaking the classic. They avoid naming the company for defamation and lawsuit reasons, but they knew we could guess. The idea was to remake a classic game but give it a great AI to really immerse you plus the VR.
Like all creepy stories with even a scrap of AI to them, shit went south. He doesn't even think the original post went into much detail, not that he could check.
The original post was made to a blog that had long been deleted, but variations of the tale had spawned. The variations were always about “what happened to the play testers?” The answers according to some tales were the players had aneurysms, or heart attacks or bled hyper realistic blood from their eyes after playing.
The consistent detail across all three variations of the 'original' post, was that the AI in the game must have gained sentience and the programmers were scared off and shut down the project. The AI part of the tale was glossed over, the original unnamed narrator claiming they weren’t part of the programming staff, just a person recruiting play testers and working on gathering early opinions for market research.
The most popular version of the tale ended there, but the second most popular one didn’t, and it was the one that had spun the download link originally to the game. Unlike the original story, the gender of the unnamed narrator was specified in the second telling.
One day, the market researcher said she wanted a chance to glimpse the killer game, but she was stopped, a programmer looking on the brink of death from exhaustion shaking her, and pulling her away from the headset, claiming the AI knew too much, “they had gone too far.” Which was all very cliché and dramatic, and therefore, likely false, Gordon thought.
And from there, she said, the programmer grabbed the last copy of the game and promised he’d take it home and destroy it. He just needed to figure out where it all went wrong. But he was never seen again.
Which was complete and utter bullshit. People with more time than Gordon had gone ahead and done a full scour of the internet looking for a mysterious death linked to the company, but no one found anything like that. Even Gordon searched, and the best he could find was a “mysterious” fishing accident happened to a programmer nowhere near when the game was supposedly in creation.
It wasn’t mysterious, the exact autopsy report was he drank too much and drowned. And it was also way before the game was made, like by 5 years.
It was such a half-baked eerie conclusion, but Gordon loved it.
Weeks after the forums were created to archive the story since the original disappeared from the blog it was on, someone with a now deleted account posted the link to the game. All it said was, “I have a link to the actual game. Play it if you dare.”
That file link no longer worked, and the best way to get the game these days was to ask someone who had a copy, but most everyone seemed to unanimously agree to delete the game after playing it, so it was pretty damn hard to do. Gordon had got lucky and was on at the right time in the right thread. He also hadn’t written a scathing rude reply like everyone else had to the girl’s account of her playthrough.
Everyone who wrote about the game agreed on a few things:
First, the AI were odd. There were hostile at best, avoiding the player at worst. The best way to describe them were fast food workers who really hated customers. Which honestly seemed plenty of reason why the game would be scrapped from that alone.
Second, is you can’t beat the game. It’s impossible. Alyxismywaifu34 claimed he used some tools to just cheat his way to the end, and the times he was able to get the game to start, he was instant killed despite his invulnerability, and after that the file refused to start up, and at one pointed deleted itself from his computer.
Third, the security guard doesn’t want you to progress and will stop you. He is definitely the sentient AI they were talking about.
The most popular account who detailed his playthrough of the game was Spoopyas5che3ks.
His account:
“The game loaded up normally when I reloaded it after the intitial crash. FYI, I ran it on a VM with no connection to the internet. I boot back in and load my game and the security guard who had disappeared after the res. cascade is back. The game looks normal, there’s nothing out of the normal. It’s almost just like a normal game of half-life but in VR.
It gets weird. I try to be funny with the guard, keep asking him dumb questions.
He never answers and after a while he asks me one. “Why are you recording this?”
I was recording it. He shouldn’t have been able to know. I figured it was a coincidental game line. Maybe Gordon Freeman carries around a recorder.
I asked him what he meant. See the attached video clip. You’ll have to take my word on everything after I ask what he means, because the video file corrupted the moment he said, “Don’t. Record.”
I killed the session hard and stopped the VM. I tried looking through the game files, but eventually my nerves got the best of me and I sent the VM to the graveyard for good.
There’s some unusual encrypted text and a reoccurring string of numbers attached to them “536436.” If anyone’s good at figuring out codes, I leave you to decipher this. See the screenshots below. I’m going to scrub through my Linux after this; the game got into my head.
I’d advise if you download (mediafire link) use a VM, a burner computer, turn off wifi and treat it like malware.”
The videos and screenshots matched up with his own experiences, but it could all be faked or exaggerated. It’s hard to say. Since Cheeks had the most evidence, he was the most popular of the stories.
Lunch break was over, and Gordon found himself tempted. He could squeeze in some time today to play the game just a bit more. Just to see what it had. It wouldn’t hurt. Another hour just sacrifice an hour of sleep, and poke around a little bit more.