With the release of Epistle 3, every major Half-Life-related mystery has been revealed - except for one: the G-man...

With the release of Epistle 3, every major Half-Life-related mystery has been revealed - except for one: the G-man. After spending a drunken evening with Marc Laidlaw, I now know the answer. G-man is an Imperial Combine intergalactic scientist capable of shapeshifting that conducts mass-scale experiments on colonized planets as per the will of the highest paying bidders of the Combine aristocracy.

Other urls found in this thread:

youtu.be/OjHOmV0p5zc?t=1m4s
youtube.com/watch?v=6Iu4GXUHfU0
youtube.com/watch?v=up4GNYBCByM&t=75
youtube.com/watch?v=RV9ooD5rx1o
youtube.com/watch?v=9jO-P3kXlCI
youtube.com/watch?v=Z8_R2OMgNUY
youtube.com/watch?v=YfoTP0Yyidk&t=217s
youtube.com/watch?v=sbb9YYkag94
youtube.com/watch?v=1tvz0WVaQGg
twitter.com/NSFWRedditGif

This... actually makes sense

wtf bump

wrong

Jesus Christ OP wait up I'm writing a post here no need to get all samefaggy. Nothing that wasn't already guessed by the way, maybe with the artistic liberty of making him Gordon in the far off future with time traveling gimmicks.

If that spoiler's true, then I guess it's settled.

5 words of cryptic meme code commentary written in 1996 means nothing.

that's just a reference to the actual meaning of the term g man.

hmm.
someone screencap this.

Government man literally means "servant of the people" you dolt. He's misunderstood because he's actually serving/part of the Combine.

"I wish I could do more than keep an eye on you, but I have agreed to abide by certain... restrictions."

Also, to clarify, when I said that the Gman was a "shapeshifter", that doesn't necessarily mean that he can literally change his physical form at will. Laidlaw played with the idea of making the Gman a small Combine slug with extraordinary mind-manipulation abilities that allow him to change others' perception of him. Ultimately, he said that he would explain G-man's human physical appearance either through this mind control stuff or through the Combine's unimaginably advanced technology, but that he was primarily leaning towards the mind control explanation.

On some real af shit my dudes, half life sucks bruh

Give us valid reasons as to why and we'll listen to you.

>us
>we
Kys

i'd rather know if he's good or bad, he does claim that he wishes he could help gordon

rip hl

Well there are multiple people in this thread senpai

Marc would've spilled the beans in Epistle 3 if he knew what Gman is.

He doesn't.

Gman is a plot device. His purpose is to both figuratively and literally move or guide the main character from one place to another.

HAPPENING

nice headcanon i don't believ it but i like to see u fags argue about dumb shit

THIS
the whole point is he's mysterious and you probably couldn't even fathom his intentions if he told you.

If epistle 3 didn't remind you how Lovecraftian some of the lore is you're a fucking idiot.

It's just a dumb underage acting black and being a contrarian. Don't give it yous

THE COMBINE TURNED ME INTO A GRUB GORDON
IM GRUB BREEN

>they probably put Eli into a grub as well to torture endlessly on the Dyson Sphere

FOREVERIALLY HAM AND CHEESE GRUBBED AND LOVING IT

He's whatever they choose to use him as during each game's plot.

And since he didn't reveal much else, it's likely he would've kept it that way for whoever would've taken over after he was done in Episode 3.

>i'd rather know if he's good or bad, he does claim that he wishes he could help gordon

He "helps" Gordon by focusing the Combine's interest on him which decreases the chance of them just outright killing him. And they certainly could the moment they'd feel like it.

Ultimately he's bad because he serves the Combine, which are Imperial space slugs who have technology so advanced that they can harness the energy outputs of entire stars with Dyson spheres and are the most powerful known things in the HL universe. The Combine have created technology that has practically reached the singularity, and they have been physically conjoined and dependent on that technology.

Sidenote: it became mainstream amongst the Combine to be intensely interested in Gordon Freeman after he defeated the Nihilanth, who seemed to pose the last kind of potentially viable opposition to the Combine. The Nihilanth had psychic powers that served to defend Xen from Combine influence or invasion, which is why we never see the Gman in Xen before the Nihilanth is killed by Freeman. The resonance cascade was simply a means to the end of invading Xen through a proxy with a population that was capable enough to defeat the Nihilanth: Earth. The Vortiguants, along with the Alien Grunts, Headcrabs, and all other indigenous Xen aliens were immediately colonized by the Combine after the death of the Nihilanth and the sentient ones accepted defeat; cementing the Combine's total domination of the known universe. Freeman didn't free the Vortiguants, he merely changed their master for an even worse one, and the Vortiguants are smart enough to follow along with every experiment that the G-man orchestrates on behalf of his "employers".

Laughed harder than I should've.

No, the Gman is a Combine agent

>Combine civil wars

I'd play the shit out of that.

This also leaves room for the possibility of less malevolent, or perhaps even benevolent, overseers.

...

>he's mysterious and you probably couldn't even fathom his intentions if he told you.

This combined with his perception control is starting to sound MIND HACK-ey

Pretty sure Xen is not the home planet of the Vorigaunts.

it is you idiot!!!!!!!

I googled it and apparently you're right, my mistake.

fuck, this shit is the only explanation I've seen that fits all the pieces of the half life puzzle
If this was canon it would satisfy me.

NIHILANTH DID NOTHING WRONG

but you did, nigger.

There's still the mystery of how Breen was involved with the resonance cascade.
Although we can assume he knew everything that would happen, and his role in the Combine had already been decided long before he "negotiated peace."

That doesn't fit very well with his quips about surviving against all odds.

two questions i still have:
>where the fuck does alyx fit into this?
and why does gman 1) care about her and 2) according to epistle 3 save her and leave gordon to die (and for that matter why did the vorts save him if they're helping the gman)
>why cant the combine figure out teleportation?
it just doesnt make sense to me that the combine can make technology on the scale of fucking dyson spheres, terraforming, and inter dimensional colonization, but lowly earth-bound humans are able to make better teleportation than them from scratch when the combine already had their own imperfect "wormhole-boring" teleportation or whatever to act as a baseline. for something that is supposedly so important to the combine its just odd they have so little progress in it.

OP is probably just talking out of his ass but since i havent found any better explanations ill just suspend my disbelief and accept it as headcannon at the least.

Fake OP. But yes, the hiding Nihilanth was the last hope for the universe.

Another sidenote: the Nihilanth only sent Xenians to attack earth in an attempt to kill Gordon or any other Earthlings before they got to him. He sent them out of self defense. Also, he knew that even if Gordon succeeded in closing the portal to Xen in HL1 with the rocket, the Gman would just re-open it for Gordon, which is why he kept it open; hoping to flood earth with enough fighting Xenians to fend the humans off.

The whole reason humanity was able to develope superior teleportation technology at all was because Gman gave the Black Mesa staff that weird stone that kicks off the Resonance Cascade in HL1, which also invalidates OP's spoiler since it wouldn't make sense for the Gman to have access to that tech if he worked for the Combine and they don't even have it yet.

OP obvious lying aside. Too many loopholes, Combine clearly did not have the tech to pull off the shit that black mesa did with the resonance cascade, as noted by their lack of efficient teleportation and reliance on wormholes, whereas G man provides the xen crystal for the scientists to make the cascade happen, which predictably comes from xen, which most likely the combine knew not where it existed as they didn't wipe it off the face of the universe until Gordon killed the Nihilath.

>oh shit I forgot to take off my name before samefaging
>I'll just put on a tripcode and pretend somebody was pretending to be me

P.S. If he was going to go with shapeshifter the obvious route would be the advisor grubs given how the @breengrub tweets mention how they can metamorphose into whatever they want when they reach adulthood, at least know the basic shit about the lore before making your shitty thread to lie to idiots, I don't expect you to know stuff from Raising the Bar before you lie to people seeing as it hasn't been in print in ages and it's pretty expensive last I checked but it's free and would take like less than an hour to read every single tweet Laidlaw made on that account.

>There's still the mystery of how Breen was involved with the resonance cascade.
He was at Black Mesa.

>''their slaves...we are their slaves...we are...''

>where the fuck does alyx fit into this?
>and why does gman 1) care about her
>and 2) according to epistle 3 save her and leave gordon to die (and for that matter why did the vorts save him if they're helping the gman)

Alyx was a blank-slate baby present at ground zero at the time of the resonance cascade and thus a valuable control variable for the G-man, additionally she was the child of one of the Gman's associates (Eli) and creators of the link to Xen. Later on in life her active, well known role in the resistance to the Combine sparked even further interest on the part of the philosophical, cold, calculating, data-hungry Gman.

>why cant the combine figure out teleportation?

The Combine have figured out teleportation, and have developed it much more than humans have. Gman was instrumental in the development of all of mankinds portals and the technology behind them. The Combine simply detected earth through the portal experiments being conducted on it, and immediately sent their scientific emissary to see if he could solve the Xen problem (first and foremost) and then continue his never-ending quest of gathering knowledge for the Combine Empire.

Again, the Combine have reached the singularity, or virtually the closest possible thing to it. They are running circles around humanity in HL, they are light years ahead. They conquered all of earth in seven hours effortlessly. They are practically gods and the Gman is one of their esteemed Imperial puppeteers/scientists. One of their only known enigmas was the Nihilanth's psychic defenses to them, and Freeman was the tool they used to bypass it.

youtu.be/OjHOmV0p5zc?t=1m4s

Lol hivemind.

Btw, everything I've told you could've been deduced logically with the knowledge of Epistle 3.

>The Combine have figured out teleportation, and have developed it much more than humans have
The Combine are only capable of punching a massive hole through dimensions while a man on earth discovered the secrets of localized teleportation after tripping on some shower curtains. Their entire reason for being there is because humans were capable of something that they were not.

>G man provides the xen crystal for the scientists to make the cascade happen

The Gman advised the scientists how to create teleporters to Xen and procure the crystals (Breen, "the administrator" that the scientists constantly refer to in hl1 was in contact with Gman before the the resonance cascade), and the scientists created teleporters to Xen in Black Mesa BEFORE the resonance cascade. The resonance cascade was the way to cause a war between Earth (under Gman's guidance) and Nihilanth, which the Combine correctly waged that Nihilanth would lose.

So many fucking brainlets ITT. Try putting 2 and 2 together on your own ffs

>''the border world then is in our control thanks to you''

who was in the wrong here?

Virgin Localized teleportation so u can suck ur own dick

Gordon. What he did was literal genocide, and Nihilanth was the best resistance to the Combine.

This. And the Combine could do both. With the death of the Nihilanth the universe was the Combine's plaything. Gman could teleport more efficiently than any portal gun.

...

Here the Gman is being manipulative and playing deep mind games with Freeman. He's guilt-tripping Gordon for doing exactly what Gman wanted of him.

Bullshit fanfic. Gman is independent of the combine, an independent contractor to a different species - he's the only thing that can save humanity, he just doesn't care to since there's no "money" in it for him.

G-Man helped enslave the vorts as one of his earlier contracts, which is why they hate him and don't trust him.

>inb4 g-man falls in love with alyx and saves humanity out of pity for her kind in HL4

>If he was going to go with shapeshifter the obvious route would be the advisor grubs

I said he didn't go with shapeshifter you illiterate brainlet.

I didn't say he did you stupid cunt.

gman is actually gman and alyx's son

Gman's actions have always benefited the Combine above all else. He caused the resonance Cascade in the first place, thus expanding the Combine Empire and eliminating their only opposition; the Nihilanth. He's humanity's gravedigger, not its savior. He's not in it for "money" lmfao. If Gman "enslaved" the Vorts to the Nihilanth, they would've liked him because the Nihilanth defended and saved them from destruction when the Combine attacked them earlier. Gman was just as instrumental in "freeing" the Vorts as Freeman was. Read the entire thread before posting another Kanye-tier reply you brainlet.

Nobody knows who or what G-Man is because Half-Life was never a fully planned out series.

He's just a generic mysterious X-Files-esque character in an arcadey 90's videogame that barely had a plot.

Yes, you implied that I meant that by going off on such an autistic tangent telling me how Laidlaw's old tweet disproved what I didn't claim (but you thought I did because you're illiterate). Btw, I read Raising the Bar 10 years ago while you were still swimming around in your alcoholic father's nuts.

>
>Gman's actions have always benefited the Combine above all else.
You mean besides everything you do in HL2?

Epistle 3 pans it out greatly, and you can deduce the rest logically, which is what I've spent this entire thread explaining. If unironically you think that the half life series can be summarized as "an arcadey 90's videogame that barely had a plot", it's time to dig yourself a deep grave in your backyard, get on a heroin binge, and take a long nap in there while a non-brainlet drowns you in dirt so that you can serve some purpose for the first and only time in your life: as a cheaper alternative to cow manure.

I implied that if Laidlaw had ever intended for GMAN to be a shapeshifter the route he would have taken was the advisor grubs metamorphosis, contrary to your idiotic assertion that if that had been the route he went with he was thinking about making it a psychic slug that only impacts perceptions you fucking fetus.

The cascade hardly expanded the combine empire. they harvested oceans and got a few new slaves, but didn't benefit much more than that.

i would argue that g-man brought the Combine to Earth so he could study their technologies and methods of conquering. it was a useful data-mining mission for his employers.

The Vorts obviously oppose him and his goals, why else would they interrupt his missions? How can you say he freed them??? They are fucking enemies

And stop acting like a agro-nigger, just have a regular conversation without the CS:GO style insults

it could be the combine equivalent of abandoning a squad of soldiers in Vietnam.

Isn't it commonly accepted that G-MAN is the final form of the slugs? And that the slugs are fetal forms of an enslaved race that has had their evolutionary process repressed by the Combine?

Everything you did in HL2 was just an experiment for the Combine. You were their plaything. They were trying to learn something from their inferior colonized subjects. By blowing up the Citadel, you didn't put a dent into the Combine at all.

LEL LETS SEE HOW THESE IDIOTS DESTROY OUR STUFF TEHEHEHE SET UP THE OBSTACLE COURSE

...

he didnt lie with that "it will take a while"

If he's an alien then how does he know English?

>making up a story so people will fall for your fanfic

At least I'm not that pathetic

In the end was it really worth the weight?

people can learn other languages kurwa

I guess OP is MIA

Insults everyone who tries to conversate and runs away when good points are made. Great thread, "brainlet"

>combine suck at teleporting
>the one thing Gman does is teleport all over the place
nice theory OP

even the vortigaunts know english

>tfw that poor kid is now 22 years old and still doesn't have a proper answer

valve is a fucking joke, this shit is revolting

agreed. disgusting company should feel fucking ashamed for their money grubbing bullshit

Open it up and replace the switches.

We also don't know about the Combine and the Advisors, in regards to the pic.

But I'm pretty sure he's not a Combine agent, because he's actively working against them in Episode 2. Don't get me wrong, the idea of him setting the stage for the Combine invasion in HL1 then testing their performance and abilities against powerful opposition to better serve them and improve themselves, but in Episode 2 the Advisors are getting desperate enough to come in face-to-face and fight. If they're G-Man's bosses, then he would know it's time to stop fucking around, since without him the Resistance and even Gordon himself would be dead without much of a fighting chance.

I think he's an alternate-dimensional Gordon. Maybe it'd explain why everyone's nice to him and doesn't act odded out that there's a dude in a suit randomly teleporting around. He appears as Gordon to everyone else - explaining why so many people outside of the Black Mesa crew recognize him - but appears out of place only to one man, Gordon himself. His efforts to stop the Combine resulted in a success, but at the cost of all of humanity. He got power from the Advisors or other extradimensional powers, and now seeks to right the past's wrongs while having lost most of his personality.

>He appears as Gordon to everyone else
>when you forget about freeman so hard you'd rather leap into a chopper and fly away while he's literal meters from you with his back turned

>screencap this
Why? It's a popular and prevalent theory. You think OP made it up?

A far more likely theory is that G-man is using Gordon as a proxy fighter to cripple the Combine's teleportation technology before they can access his dimension. Why G-man can't act directly is reminiscent to how, say, a Kurdish militia fighter might feel about the U.S. government giving them weapons to fight ISIS but not actually sending troops themselves. The reason being realpolitiks. G-man is probably a fairly weak entity in his realm that must obey the arbitrary, even petty laws in place by other inhabitants.

G-man is a mystery with an answer, but it's an answer we're not powerful enough to get.

Just wondering: is there actually any indication that Nihilinth wants to rule the Earth? Or was that just largely assumed by gamers?

Also, Marc mentioned that his chains and surgical scars were not from the Combine. If the Combine didn't do it (and they love doing that shit), then who did? Or are the chains and scars just there to make him look cool with no lore justifications?

It's hard to tell where the gameplay compliments the story and where it intercepts the story.

but opposing force isn't canon

>isn't it commonly accepted that
No.

youtube.com/watch?v=6Iu4GXUHfU0

>genocide
A personal holocaust if you will
youtube.com/watch?v=up4GNYBCByM&t=75

>every major mystery
Nuh uh. What exactly were the alien grunts? They were made in a factory, but that only opens up more questions.

>when you attack vorts in half life 1, they run away and will eventually stop attacking you
>you can technically play the whole game without ever killing them

I wonder if there's something like that for the nihilanth that nobody ever discovered up to now.

>bullshit
>open up a quick half life save
>it's real
no fucking way

>all this time we were killing these enslaved vorts when we didn't need to

HOLY SHIT

>already knew that the vortigaunts were slaves
>thought I had no choice
>I did have a choice

Why is it that older games always had these little things in them? I love it.

RIGHT MAN
IN THE WRONG PLACE
CAN MAKE ALL THE DIFFERENCE IN THE WORLD

You think that's neat? Check this out

youtube.com/watch?v=RV9ooD5rx1o
youtube.com/watch?v=9jO-P3kXlCI
youtube.com/watch?v=Z8_R2OMgNUY
youtube.com/watch?v=YfoTP0Yyidk&t=217s
youtube.com/watch?v=sbb9YYkag94
youtube.com/watch?v=1tvz0WVaQGg

its the little things

Fuck off alien sympathisers, as soon as you turn your back on the "surrendering vorts" they'll just see it as an opportunity to strike you down again.

Fuck you, g-man, and your speech impediment