Dear Bradley,

I don't really need to see or comment on comments or opinions of this sort...there's just too much of it out there to get involved in. However, as I've said in the past, Gearbox got its initial concept for OpFor from us (Gabe suggested the parallel story as a way to prevent them from having to build new resources, and because there's something cool about the Rashomon approach). Gearbox disagreed with us on some major elements (for instance, it felt important that they make Adrian and his squad "good guys" by forcing a confrontation early on with the "bad guy" soldiers who've been killing everyone in HL). Randy felt this was unnecessary. So they really took over the story for themselves, while hitting on a few key moments that seemed like a good idea at the time. (Nuking Black Mesa for instance.) By the time they got to Blue Shift, we trusted them enough to have a freer hand with the materials and we waited to see what they came up with--I remember being thoroughly delighted with it. Decay was another one where they just played around, and the only conversation I had with Randy about it was whether it would be okay to show the trash compactor sequence. As I recall, they wanted to do this as an homage, and I was a bit worried they were wearing out people's interest by reworking on HL material, but as long as they didn't introduce any outright conflicts, then I didn't object. Basically, we trusted them to be good game designers, and gave them a lot of freedom without worrying about how we were going to make sense of this later. We did not have anything like the final version of HL2 worked out in our minds at the time, so we couldn't exactly say "You can't do that because that makes no sense to the Combine timeline we have planned." We didn't have a Combine timeline. Finally, there was to have been yet another parallel story told from the point of view of a "Junior G-Man," which was partly prototyped by a crew that later formed the core of Infinity Ward. This turned into a game where you went through Black Mesa with the Team Fortress characters as sidekicks. The fact that we treated this idea seriously should give you a pretty good sense of how little we worried about canon or consistency at the time. It does not make sense to try and retrofit any kind of consistency on those older games except insofar as they give us interesting fodder for making new games.

For what it's worth, the only thing I wrote in OpFor (insisted on writing) is the G-Man's dialog.

I wish this would end it here, but I'm sure I will get an almost identical email tomorrow from someone who did not read your post!

Well, it's all fun. I'm happy people can still get worked up about these completely fabricated characters and events.

Yours,
Marc