Although the baby in the picture is Harry Teasley and Yatsze Mark's daughter Isabel, and the picture was officially explained as being an Easter egg placed by the level designer, Marc Laidlaw offered the idea that it could be an infant relative of Gordon's, such as a niece.
In Half-Life, the picture of a baby with beside an adult hand making a "thumb's up" can be found in Freeman's locker. Barney then goes on to joke that Gordon's MIT education "really pays for itself". Barney Calhoun pokes fun at this in the beginning portion of Half-Life 2, when Freeman performs similar "technical" assistance (pushing a switch and attaching a fallen plug back into a socket). from the prestigious MIT, the laboratory work that the player actually does as Freeman (pressing a button and pushing a cart) does not require any intellectual expertise at all. He is assigned to the Anomalous Materials department doing nuclear, subatomic, and quantum research. He is accommodated in the Level 3 Dormitories in the Black Mesa South Wing, alone in room 309. He is working at the Black Mesa facility, where he holds a Level 3 Research Associate position. Īt the start of Half-Life on May 16, 200-, the day of the Black Mesa Incident, Gordon Freeman is 27 years old and has no dependents.
Considering the source and amount of funds available to the Black Mesa labs, Gordon suspected that he would be involved in some sort of weapons research, but in the hopes that practical civilian applications would arise in areas of quantum computing and astrophysics, he accepted Kleiner's offer. He was looking for a few bright associates, and Gordon was his first choice, although Judith Mossman also applied for the position. Incidentally, Kleiner had taken charge of a research project being conducted at the Black Mesa Research Facility, located somewhere in the New Mexico desert. Working at Black Mesa ĭisappointed with the slow pace and poor funding of academic research (and with potential tenure a distant dream), Freeman looked for a job in the private sector. In 1999, he received his doctorate ( Ph.D.) from MIT with a thesis paper entitled Observation of Einstein- Podolsky- Rosen Entanglement on Supraquantum Structures by Induction through Nonlinear Transuranic Crystal of Extremely Long Wavelength (ELW) Pulse from Mode-Locked Source Array (essentially about the teleportation of matter through extremely dense elements). Practical applications for teleportation became his obsession, and he eventually attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in which Isaac Kleiner became his mentor.
While visiting the University of Innsbruck in the late 1990s, Freeman observed a series of seminal teleportation experiments conducted by the Institute for Experimental Physics. At age 6, he even constructed a butane-powered tennis ball cannon. His earliest heroes were Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking and Richard Feynman. Early life and MIT Ī native of Seattle, Washington, Freeman showed great interest and aptitude in the areas of quantum physics and relativity at a young age.
Well, he would be working.Freeman's letter of acceptance to Black Mesa, signed “ L.M.”, written May 5, 200-, as it appears in the instruction manual of the PlayStation 2 version of Half-Life. Your first steps into the lab, after the monorail journey, take you past a Barney working at a computer. "The Blue Screen of Death caused the Black Mesa disaster" He's quite strong for someone with arms like pipe-cleaners, don't you think?
Such as the inside of the G-Man's case, which contains three pencils, two sheets of paper, a handgun, his identity card and a portable computer. Using the 'no-clip' cheat, your able geek can discover many things otherwise left unseen. "The G-Man carries three pencils around in his briefcase"
And a number is just visible, 247, echoing the fateful room number in The Shining's haunted hotel. A scientist lies dead in a smear of blood. That's right, Stephen King's masterpiece is aptly referenced in the original Half-Life - aptly because Half-Life's narrativeitself was reportedly inspired by King's style. "Did you know there's a reference to The Shining?"