Half-Life 2: Fans discover that Valve used the image of a real corpse

In recent days the fans of Half-Life 2 have confirmed a macabre discovery with one of the discarded models from the Valve game, Corpse01.mdl, also present in Garry’s Mod and other mods in Source: its appearance belongs to a real corpse published in a medical book.

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“corpse01.mdl” from Half-Life 2 and GMod is textured using real photos of a dead, burnt body

The original picture is from a medical book, and will be in the replies (NSFW warning) pic.twitter.com/iDe3Ia65Id— Richter Overtime (@richterovertime) December 19, 2022

Valve made major changes to Half-Life 2 during development -something common in most productions-, discarding entire areas and softening the tone of the first versions, darker and more explicit. One of the remains of those prototypes is Corpse01a quite realistic burned body that gave nightmares to many young people in his time.

An image of the real body, which appeared in a medical book, was published in Reddit and there it was recognized. Richter Overtime echoed the information: an artist from Valve used this image with minimal changes, something that is not entirely strange; during the creation of Mortal Kombat 11 some artists showed their complaints regarding the traumatic development of the Fatalityin which material from deaths and murders was used as a reference for these final movements.

There is already a mod that eliminates this corpse

If until now Corpse01.mdl used to be used in many mods, following the news there are players who reject its use because it is a disturbing image that belongs to a deceased. There is already some mod like Removed Real Corpse from Hobo Texture which replaces this model with another fictitious, bloody but less realistic. “I have not used the original image other than for the description of a partially charred body with teeth visible. I think the texture ended up looking more rotten than charred, but in the context in which it’s used in GMod this doesn’t matter.