Trivia / Half-Life but the AI is Self-Aware

• Acting for Two: Benrey and Forzen are both played by Scorpy.
• All There in the Manual: According to Wayne's Tumblr, the series is a playthrough of Half-Life using a build of the game featuring voice recognition and machine learning-powered AI for NPCs^note Despite the fact it's obviously Garry's Mod.
• Corpsing: While the players remain mostly in-character throughout the playthrough, they will sometimes drop character to chuckle at a joke, Gordon especially. This can be heard most notably when Dr. Coomer (due to some sort of error with the fist SWEP) sends Benry flying with a punch - both Scorpy and Wayne start cracking up instantly, and Holly is clearly struggling to maintain her composure when she gives her next line.
• Cross-Dressing Voices: Dr. Coomer is voiced by Holly from hollow_tones.
• Deleted Scenes: Due to being an hours-long live-recorded performance, a lot of clips didn't make it into the final YouTube cut, some of them were compiled into a video for each act, and can be watched in this playlist.
• DVD Commentary: After the completion of the series, it was followed up by a series of Cast Commentary streams, one for each act, each consisting of some commentary given alongside the YouTube uploads, behind-the-scenes footage, and a Q&A segment in which the cast took pertinent questions from viewers. Each one is several times longer than the episodes they highlight, but they provide a wealth of information on the improv and design process behind the series.
• Enforced Method Acting:
  • Gordon sounds genuinely in distress and woozy after his arm gets cut off in ACT 3 due to Wayne having a panic attack from anxiety about messing up the betrayal scene and the chat debacle. (See Why Fandom Can't Have Nice Things below.)
  • Coomer constantly cutting himself off mid-sentence was something Holly did both because she thought it was funny, but also because it helped mask her poor internet that would actually cut her off at times. This led to moments when Coomer would suddenly stop where everyone else wasn't sure if she was doing a bit or if she was having connection issues.
• Meme Acknowledgement: The Sunkist official Twitter account acknowledged the series by dedicating the National Dog Day to Tommy's dog, who is named after the drink.
• Official Fan-Submitted Content: The three custom made songs in the series (Coomer's boss theme, Benrey's boss theme and the Chuck E Cheese's party remix) were made by two fans of the series, Aquacycle and its30e, that Wayne liked so much that he included them in the edited YouTube episodes.
• Shrug of God: During the Act 3 commentary, the crew brings up the fan theory that the Dr. Coomer who tried to possess Gordon wasn't the original, but one of the clones; they mentioned liking the theory but not wanting to confirm one way or the other, and Holly in particular mentioned that she has no intention of revealing her own perspective on the scene in order to allow fans to continue speculating.
• Sleeper Hit: Wayne and the rest of the cast admitted that they didn't expect the series to become as big as it did. What was just a funny improv session between friends now has its own fandom, with fans creating dozens of content on sites like Tumblr and the edited episodes garnering millions of views with the first part currently surpassing 3 million.
• They Also Did:
  • Gir and Scorpy were also part of motdef's Moonbase Alpha videos.
  • Wayne briefly gained notoriety after posting a faked screenshot to his blog claiming that Snopes confirmed that Joe Biden buried a dog in bricks live on camera. Despite the post being obviously a joke, Snopes felt the need to fact-check him anyway, calling him a "purveyor of misinformation", a title he now wears proudly on Twitter.
• Reality Subtext: The AI Crushes All Banks stream, featuring the team in PAYDAY 2 fighting against legions of hostile police, was held to raise relief money for protests surrounding real-world Police Brutality triggered by the death of George Floyd.
• Throw It In!: As is the nature of anything heavily involving improv, but the most notable example is: in Episode 1 of the Commentary Video, Wayne asks Scorpy what made him come up with the very first mentioning of the Passport, because it "set the tone going forward for everything", Scorpy admits that he was trying to come up with a reason to stop him as a security guard, and because he had to pick something quick and on the spot, "passport" was the first thing that popped into his mind, and everyone just decided to run away with it and never look back.
  • The "Helicopter Heap" was a complete accident caused by a glitch when the map spawned too many helicopters in the same place at the same time. The team's surprise and horror at seeing it is entirely genuine.
  • In another example, the original plan was for the whole Science Team to use names from the in-game locker room, but this backfired when more than one of them wanted to use "Dr. Coomer". Dr. Coomer's player, obviously, was quicker, and Gir had no plans for a backup name. When Gordon asks him for his name, Gir blurted out literally the first thing that popped into his head, which was "Bubby".
  • While viewers could still request music for the streams after Act 1, most of it was cut from the highlight videos so that Wayne could score them the way he wanted. Even so, some tracks proved such a perfect fit that he left them in as is. The most notable example is in Act 2, where someone requested a track from Portal 2 and it reached an ominious swell right after the intercom demanded Gordon come in for "passport inspection", since in his eyes, it was what made the scene.
  • Darnold was originally meant to be the head of the cybernetics department, but when Log started talking about mixology and potions, the scene went another direction.
  • In the Act 2 commentary, Holly admits that the reason why Dr. Coomer is always running around at full speed, even during downtime, is just because she didn't know how to slow to a walk in GMod until Act 4.
• Wag the Director: In a way. All the scientists and Mike, who's no-clipping around and spawning stuff, are in a Discord chat in the background throughout the improv sessions. One of Mike's main duties is to try and figure out where they're supposed to go so the scientists can try to nudge Wayne in the right direction, since most of the cast don't really know Half-Life.
• Why Fandom Can't Have Nice Things:
  • The Twitch chat was blurred in Part 1 of ACT 3 after an argument over transphobia broke out, which Wayne did not want present in the video. It was removed entirely partway through the stream, and so is not present in Part 2 onward. Wayne later admitted that he had no idea the machinima was going to be as popular as it ended up being, so by the time Act 3 rolled around the chat didn't have enough moderation to be effective.
  • On a more minor note, the Wikipedia article for All Dogs Go to Heaven 2 has been semi-protected for some time because people keep trying to edit Gordon Freeman's death into it.
• What Could Have Been: Being 95% pure improv between at least 4 different people at any given moment, this happens a lot.
  • The original plan was for the whole Science Team to use names taken from the locker room, but this fell apart because both Gir and Holly tried to go with "Coomer". This left Gir's scientist without a name, and when Gordon put him on the spot he was forced to say the first thing that came to mind, which is how we ended up with "Bubby".
  • Speaking of Bubby, Gir was going to have him act just as confused by Benry's whole passport bit as Gordon, but decided it would be funnier to go along with it instead. Wayne notes that while this probably wouldn't have stopped the passports from becoming an integral part of the series as Scorpy would be stubborn enough to keep it going himself, it likely would have resulted in Bubby being less antagonistic towards Gordon, while getting caught in Benry's crosshairs himself. Holly states that this would be the alternate universe in which Coomer and Tommy were the villains.
  • One idea Scorpy came up with was to keep disappearing, then show up as a different security guard who happens to look and act exactly like Benry, but doesn't recognize Gordon. Nothing came of this besides a scene in Act 1: Part 2 where Benry claims his name is Stong and acts like he doesn't know Gordon.
  • The original plan for the series was to try and stay with the idea that everything was happening within Half-Life 1, keeping the "GMod shit" to a minimum. This got thrown out the window almost immediately because nobody could stop playing with the Wowozela, which became the Sweet Voice.
  • After the Skeleton's first appearance the team actually managed to get a version of the model with jawbones so it could actually talk like the others. Scorpy never talked as the skeleton again.
  • Tommy's last name was originally going to be "Bahama", but Baaulp thought the name sounded too cool for Tommy, leading him to change it to the similar-sounding but more ridiculous "Coolatta" at the last moment.
  • During Act 4's planning, Darnold was intended to be a member of the cybernetics department who would set Gordon up with his Arm Cannon by grafting it onto his body. However, Logmore decided it would be funnier to play him as a potion-brewing mixologist instead, catching Wayne, who didn't know about this last-minute change, completely off guard.
  • Log's original reason to have Darnold leave the group was that he had an irrational fear of leaving his lab and would panic the moment he set foot outside of it. Once they reached this point in the stream, however, the Science Team ended up getting into a firefight with the military right outside his door, which made his fears and decision to stay behind seem a lot more rational.
  • The Bubby prototypes were originally going to be regular Scientist NPCs made hostile, where they would use their default attack of stabbing with a syringe. This never came to fruition and instead the model was placed onto Fast Zombie Torsos.
  • Scorpy had created a PAC (Player Appearance Customiser) for use during Benrey's encounters with the Science Team in Xen that would've made him look even more eldritch and frightening than he appeared in the Act 4 stream. However, the PAC actually caused technical difficulties for the other cast members, freezing the image on their screens and causing audio distortions (which was especially bad Wayne, who found it extremely nauseating). Scorpy was asked to tone it down while the cast was planning the stream.
  • Wayne had originally planned for Tommy's final attack to be a giant Beyblade, given how much of the gag centered around the latter. They didn't have enough time to finish it, and Sunkist was already present and had a much bigger tie to Tommy, so the pooch was used instead.
• Word of God: Wayne and the cast answered a few questions in the series commentary and Q&A stream after ACT 4, as well as other social media...
  • Coomer and Bubby's full names are Harold Pontiff Coomer and... Bubby.
  • In terms of sexualities: Coomer is bisexual, Bubby is straight^* but he FUCKS, Tommy is asexual and Benrey is "thirsty" for Gordon.
    • Relatedly, Gir has said that Bubby probably does not have a gender.
  • Bubby was the result of Black Mesa scientists slapping chemicals together until they made a human being.
  • The Black Mesa Announcer is a self-aware AI of its own, similar to the Science Team, but it has "the intelligence of a five year old."
  • Holly stated on her Tumblr page that Coomer and his ex-wife are still friends, and that they enjoy making jokes about their divorce.

---