When I was 15 or 16, I volunteered on a Half-Life 2 modding project that’ll remain unnamed, since the creator was a shitty weirdo who warrants zero attention if they’re even still around. Given their rarity, I wish amateur sleuths luck in finding an ill-advised Half-Life 2 modding project that was run by a shitty weirdo. Anyway!
The mod was basically an alternate universe Half-Life 2 thing where the main plot of the game got remixed around to be worse, which tends to happen often. Having recently joined, I was reading over something that had been planned out on paper: a chapter wherein you shut down a “suppression” machine that’s preventing human reproduction from occurring. Anyone who’s played Half-Life 2 already knows about this element of the plot; they call it a “suppression field,” which is an invisible thing being generated by the Combine that prevents everyone from having children. The particularities of this field are irrelevant, save that it’s clearly pretty technical in its function – one character says it prevents certain “embryonic chains” from developing – and moreover, you never directly encounter its source. The beginning of Episode One makes it clear that blowing up the Citadel took it out, so we can extrapolate that it was probably either the Citadel itself or some random gizmo within it. Matter settled!
With this in mind, the draft I was reading had me pretty puzzled. Here, the device suppressing human pregnancy had been pushed into the forefront and imagined outright: it was on the roof of a random building, rather than anywhere near the Citadel, and it thwarted your attempts to shut it down by launching bombs at you. While I’ve grown to appreciate the surreal image this conveys now – a 2-in-1 Howitzer and Pregnancy Prevention Device – I was confused enough at the time to flag the writer and question what he’d meant to accomplish by inventing such a machine.
I learned something immediately, then realized another thing later. We’ll start with the former.
While Half-Life 2 occasionally mentions a suppression field, there’s also a sequence later in the game wherein you shut off something referred to as a suppression device. This title is given quickly, and without much weight. The following level clearly demonstrates that it’s basically a Combine mortar launcher that’s killing people on the street; your objective to shut it off has virtually nothing to do with the slow extinction of the human race, since it happens to be killing people quite quickly. When you succeed in deactivating it, resistance fighters move to retake the surrounding area, and it’s not really a major deal beyond that.
This is where the writer got confused. At some point, either while playing the game or reading a fan wiki, he saw the words “suppression device” and assumed they were simpatico with the suppression field, and that one was responsible for generating the other. Being a dork working on a piece of fanfiction, I corrected his mistake, proud to be learn’d in the rich densities of Half-Life 2 lore. Coincidentally, being dorks working on a piece of fanfiction, none of this ever got made and it never amounted to anything one way or the other, so we all continued goofing around until the owner did something racist and sent most of us migrating to a nicer goof-around zone.
Years later, I realized what the script had obliquely implied, and what my reflexive dork bullshit had completely looked over. It wasn’t just that it assumed a mortar launcher was simultaneously administering invisible contraception to the entire human race; the writer’s actual mistake was in assuming that said mortar launcher was the suppression field, and that the function implied by the device – shooting explosive projectiles at things – was actually its singular motive.
What he’d imagined via this cataclysmic misunderstanding was a Combine device that, while capable of defending its immediate area, held the primary purpose of automatically detecting and firing explosive shells at pregnant women, possibly at a continental scale. This was preventing every fetus in the world from being born by obliterating them with a global howitzer – for twenty years – and our Half-Life 2 mod was going to allow players to triumphantly put a stop to it.
Now you, like me, can imagine what could’ve been.