Trivia / Freeman's Mind

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• Follow the Leader: Nearly every First-Person Shooter has a [Protagonist's] Mind series now. It's considered to be a hybrid between a Fan Fiction or The Abridged Series and a Let's Play.
• Magnum Opus Dissonance: Ross Scott preferred working on his more complex Machinima series Civil Protection, but the difficulty of filming and coding it led him to focus on the more popular and easier-to-make Freeman's Mind.
• Mythology Gag: Freeman attempted to "listen to" what one of the Houndeye enemies had to say thinking it was an ambassador. This may be a reference to beta Half-Life where Houndeyes were originally neutral or even friendly, but players shot them regardless due to being unused to friendly non-human NPC's.
• The Other Darrin: If you consider Barney's Mind canon, Barney sounds noticeably different from IRAMightyPirate.
• Referenced by...: Zero Punctuation, wherein Yahtzee mentions that, due to his Heroic Mime status, you could interpret Gordon as a guy just trying to survive, or a Comedic Sociopath Mad Scientist who was just waiting to go on a killing/looting spree.
• Schedule Slip:
  • After making a new video about once a month Scott didn't upload anything for the last four months of 2010^note not entirely his fault, since Machinima seemed to have taken a while to put his videos up.
  • Then he had the legal problems with Machinima which knocked him out of commission for months.
  • Then he managed to get picked up by Channel Awesome, (then) known for not screwing over their contributors at every opportunity, and allowing regular updates... and then he accidentally dumped water into his computer. Oy...
  • Ross managed to invert this in late November and December 2014; in late October he promised to finish the series by the end of the year, and just made it: in a period of six weeks he released episodes 61.5 through the final episode, 68, on December 31, an average of one episode every 5 days.
  • For Freeman's Mind 2, another hiatus hit after Episode 7 while Ross settled his living situation, as his apartment got struck by so much mold growth he joked it would be ground zero for the Cordyceps infection, and barred him from his recording room. He announced a hiatus while he spent some time finding another place to settle as soon as he could manage, and would try to maintain more easily-made content like Ross's Game Dungeon episodes.
  • Furthermore, Scott has stated that Freeman's Mind 2 will be going on another hiatus for the length of the COVID-19 pandemic, as he and his neighbors have all been quarantined to their apartments and he doesn't want to bother his now-permanently-at-home neighbors with him shouting into his microphone as Gordon.
• Screwed by the Network:
  • Yes, this trope can even apply to web-only content. The extremely long hiatus after episode 44 was due to contract disputes between Ross and Machinima. This got so bad that Ross left Machinima for good and released all further episodes in affiliation with Channel Awesome. Ross went and added annotations on every single episode telling viewers to visit another website to see actual machinima content.
  • During a live chat, Ross revealed that he had problems logging into his account back at Channel Awesome and was forced to have someone else at the site upload his videos to his account. While Ross admits that his eventual dismissal from Channel Awesome was his fault due to him missing deadlines, he received no advanced warning that he was being let go because no one ever got around to fixing his login information.
• Shown Their Work: In Episode 3 when a computer explodes, Freeman comments, "Damn Cyrix Processors. You go with the lowest bidder and this is what happens." Half-Life was released in 1998, and Cyrix pulled out of the market as an independent manufacturer of Central Processing Units in 1997. As such, it's feasible that such CPUs would be a bargain and ripe for a government contract such as the Black Mesa project. Otherwise, that could be a period-accurate jab at Cyrix.
• Throw It In!:
  • A glitch in the Houndeye's ragdoll in Half-Life: Source may sometimes send it careening away through the air upon death. This happens once, in episode 15, and Gordon lampshades the situation.
    Gordon: [laughs] Today's lesson is on muzzle energy and momentum!
  • You know that bit where Gordon shoots down the helicopter in episode 42? According to Ross's blog entry about it, the encounter wasn't supposed to go that way. Lampshaded somewhat in 43, when Gordon comments that he'd somehow turned the trick with rounds that were only 9mm in caliber.
  • Episode 61 has the "power up the portal to the Xen sequence". The volume was balanced in a way that it was impossible for the scientist's voice to be heard over the din, and Ross decided it was funnier if Gordon legitimately couldn't hear what the scientist was saying. Ross also decided to leave in Gordon accidentally falling down in that sequence for similar reasons.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Ross originally considered switching over to Black Mesa after getting knocked out by the guards. However, by the time he reached that point in Freeman's Mind, Black Mesa still hadn't been released. In hindsight, it's probably for the best, as most of the comedy of Freeman's Mind stemmed from the aspects of Half-Life that didn't make sense in the real world, which the Black Mesa team did their best to fix.
  • Ross originally planned not to do Half-Life 2 in full, instead just having a sort of Abridged Series/highlight reel of all the best jokes he had thought of. However, the Beg-A-Thon video brought in so many donations that he felt like he pretty much had to do the whole thing for the fans' sake, comparing it to how Mark Hamill felt about appearing in The Force Awakens as Luke Skywalker.

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