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The character has the appearance of a middle-aged, light-skinned male with a tall and thin physique, pale/chalky skin, dark brown hair shaped in a military-style crew cut with a prominent widow's peak, blue-green eyes, a purple tie and usually holding a briefcase. The G-Man appears throughout the series either in monologue scenes that occur at key points in the story or in live gameplay, where he can be seen briefly in far-off background areas or locations that the player cannot access until later in the level where he has disappeared. Doug Wood, who designed the facial expressions of the Half-Life 2 G-Man model, wanted the player to never quite know what side the G-Man was on by giving him ambiguous facial expressions. It was chosen for the G-Man's appearance after Bill Van Buren created a modified image of Sheldon, with chopped-off hair and a scaled-down face shape. This title was later retconned to refer to Wallace Breen.įrank Sheldon, the person on whom the G-Man's Half-Life 2 model is based, was originally slated to be the model for Dr. His name has been confirmed and referred to in documentaries featuring Valve employees, as well as in the voice-actor credits for Half-Life 2 and in the book about game development: Raising the Bar.Ī description of the G-Man's nature is given in the comment section of the file "npc_G-Man.cpp" in the Source SDK file "sourcesdk.gcf": "// Purpose: The G-Man, misunderstood servant of the people." In the official Half-Life audio script, the G-Man is referred to as "Administrator", suggesting he is the one overseeing experiments. His name is derived from his Half-Life model and entity name and has since been reused in subsequent games of the series. However, within the Half-Life games, he is identified by this name only in the program code and the multiplayer profile menu as a default name option, not within the story itself.
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The G-Man's name comes from " G-Man", an American colloquialism meaning "government man".
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