Key Takeaways
- Lead writer Marc Laidlaw revealed in the newly-added Half-Life 2 developer commentary that Judith Mossman is based on a cut character from the first Half-Life.
- She was supposed to appear in the cut section that was repurposed into the Uplink demo.
Judith Mossman is a key figure throughout Half-Life 2, but as revealed in the newly-added developer commentary, she was supposed to appear in the first game.
“[Mossman is] based on a character we had planned for a section of Half-Life 1,” lead writer Marc Laidlaw explains (as pointed out by the Half-Life: Alyx NoVR team). That section was cut from the base game and reused in Uplink, but without the character.
Uplink is the 1999 Half-Life demo featuring cut chapters.
It’s unclear what her role would have been, but in all likelihood, it wouldn’t have been a major one. Generic scientists appear all throughout Half-Life to help you put the Nihilanth and his portal incursion back in the bottle — it wouldn’t be until the expansions that we got more fleshed out characters in Rosenberg and Richard Keller.
Half-Life 2 does give us some clues about her past, however. Eli Vance tells us that “She was up for your job at Black Mesa, but you edged her out with your Innsbruck experience”. There was a slim chance then that Mossman could’ve been the one gunning down HECU grunts and fending off alien tyrants in Xen, but instead she became Dr. Breen’s right-hand in the wake of the Combine’s swift victory and domination of Earth.
Half-Life 2 Characters Who Appeared In Half-Life
There are a few characters from Half-Life 2 who we now know were in the first game, although most are retroactive reveals you wouldn’t know just from playing the original.
Eli Vance is implied to be the scientist who helps open the door after the Resonance Cascade, but Isaac Kleiner has always been up for debate. He’s clearly based on the “scientist 01” model (the balding egghead with glasses), but we don’t have a concrete answer which one exactly is him.
The community has long speculated that he was the scientist who we find sitting next to Eli, an interpretation that the fan-made remake Black Mesa even ran with.
Barney Calhoun also makes an appearance. Half-Life 2 references dialogue you can hear from all of the security personnel (“about that beer I owe ‘ya”), but the guard banging on the door towards the end of the tram ride is specifically Barney. We can even play as him in the Gearbox-developed spin-off Blue Shift.
Finally, we have Magnusson. We know he was somewhere nearby at the start of the game because he references us destroying his casserole, which we can do by pressing the use key on the microwave too many times in the second chapter. The Episode 2 commentary gives us more to go off however, implying that he was based on the “Gordon doesn’t need to hear all this” scientist who lets us into the test chamber.
Interesting then that Mossman was very nearly counted among these four. Nonetheless, she went on to play a major role in Half-Life 2 and its episodes.
Half-Life 2 is a critically acclaimed FPS from Valve. It continues the story of Gordon Freeman, a theoretical physicist formerly with Black Mesa. This time, he must fight the alien Combine empire.