Trivia / Hunt Down the Freeman

• Accidentally-Correct Writing: The specifics of G-Man's Reality Warper powers were still very vague by the time this game released, especially due to the franchise's relative dormancy in the 2010s, with this game suggesting that he can see through time. Half-Life: Alyx would reveal that he actually is capable of doing this, albeit to a lesser extent than what's shown here.
• Cast the Runner-Up: Vincent Fallow, who was initially cast as Mitchell in the 2016 demo before being replaced by Mick Lauer, voices Boris in the release version.
• Creator Backlash:
  • Shortly after the game's release, Alex of "I Hate Everything" fame made a video expressing his negative opinions of the game and its development, as well as explaining his regret for his own involvement as a voice actor. In fact, he regretted it the second he started working on it, explaining his This Is Gonna Suck reaction from his contact with the developers.
  • Several devs, both ones who had left the game and ones who had helped work on it, noted that they regretted their work experience and that they should have felt something was wrong when they didn't even get any builds to tinker with.
  • Inevitably Pyrocynical himself released a video showing that he doesn't exactly think fondly of his contribution to this game despite how small it was and ripping into the game for its many problems.
  • Mick "RicePirate" Lauer (the voice of Mitchell) would eventually break his silence on his role when he appeared on The First Podcast in February 2021, stating that he had a bad feeling regarding the project as early as the audition process and had lost optimism in the project entirely when the gameplay trailer dropped and the poor quality of the game was apparent. He ended up criticising (while admitting that he didn't hate) Berkan for his poor management and not being paid the money he was owed.
  • Valve themselves were reportedly more hesitant to provide Source Engine licenses to people after this game's release and terrible reception, especially for Half-Life games/mods, according to a developer working on the cancelled mod "Vance". Though supposedly things have changed for the better since then, but it seems even Valve regrets that they allowed this game to exist.
• Dueling Games: Hunt Down the Freeman came out within a few months of Red Alliance, another indie-budget homage to Half-Life 2. However, while HDTF was set in the Half-Life universe, made by a small team, and built on the Source engine, Red Alliance was a Serial Numbers Filed Off homage, made by a single man (with some additional help from asset creators), made on Unity from scratch. Overall, while HDTF does feel like it has a bigger budget (though much of this comes from the carryover systems and assets from HL2), Red Alliance feels like a more competently made game.
• Dummied Out: There are entire fully-scripted sections of the game that were gutted from the final build, along with a slew of unimplemented weapons seen in this video, giving a glimpse into What Could Have Been.
• Follow the Leader: Story and tone wise, the game takes many cues from Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, with the credits outright giving special thanks to Hideo Kojima. A developer has even stated that Berkan told the cutscene animators to watch cinematics from The Phantom Pain and "do that".
• Meme Acknowledgment: DeremixProductions, who worked on the game's cutscenes, commented on Half Life: Side Story: Gaiden: HUNT DOWN FREE MAN (a Half-Life: Full Life Consequences-style parody of Hunt Down The Freeman) and expressed his approval. He even made the intro for the sequel.

  DeremixProductions: Cutscene guy on HDTF here (intro, keemstar, ending, polished nick/cue/adam/roosevelt scenes). This is hilarious and I love it. Thank you.

• The Other Darrin
  • Goes without saying given that none of the actors from the original series returned to provide new lines for their characters. Granted, some do put up a reasonably good effort like the G-Man's voice actor, but others such as Dr. Breen and the Black Mesa VOX system sound nothing like their original counterparts.
  • The reason for the G-Man mispronouncing Black Mesa has to do with the actor not having been provided any context or any real idea how to say his lines. This shows with how lost he sounds in certain scenes. In truth, this is the case with the majority of the voice actors involved in the project, as they were only given scripts of the lines without even knowing those lines were to be used in Hunt Down the Freeman.
• Troubled Production:
  • Back in 2016, Berkan Denizyaran launched a crowdfunding campaign directed at Hunt Down the Freeman, requiring 100 000 dollars and promising a lot of bonuses, ranging from co-op and multiplayer to a "7 hour war" mode and a full CGI film. It didn't really do well with the release of initial trailer which gained a lot of detractors for its plot, janky cutscenes and mediocre graphics. As such, only twelve dollars had been donated by one person. The release of the playable demo only further buried the project under criticism as people called Royal Rudius Entertainment out on re-using assets from various Valve games and fan projects, as well as implementing third-person cutscenes which stood at odds with Unbroken First-Person Perspective the original Half-Life is known for. As such, the original plans had been thrown away and the project was put on hiatus for two more years, with the company behind it undergoing a full reformation. Berkan Denizyaran still stayed as the lead however, which led to the further development and subsequent release of the game in 2018... which somehow fared even worse than earlier.
  • Stories from people who helped work on the game, and corroborated by voice actors Pyrocynical and Alex of "I Hate Everything", stated that development was a mess, due to Berkan Denizyaran having little-to-no experience directing a game, resulting in lack of communication between the directors and the workers, and the little direction given being confusing due to his limited grasp of English. There were also a number of assets that were created but never used due to the constantly changing direction of the plot, and concerns from people working on the game were generally ignored.
  • Mick Lauer went into depth on the game's poor production when he appeared as a guest on The First Podcast. Berkan Denizyaran insisted on being hands-on for aspects of the game he had no experience in, such as voice direction. This resulted in entire monologues being repeatedly recorded in one take and Berkan spoon-feeding the pronunciation of each line despite his poor grasp of the English language. It didn't help that the scripts sent to the actors were so poorly written that it was unclear if paragraphs were lines of dialogue or scene directions. The script was constantly being rewritten and actors were frequently being called late into the game's development to record entire pages of new and lengthy dialogue. RicePirate himself would offer to rewrite Berkan's scripts himself just to make it legible, and had to remind him constantly that he was doing this, resulting in conversations like this:
    RicePirate: Is this [from a] character, or a scene description?
    Berkan: Yep!
  • Berkan had different units (level designers, audio engineers) working independently from each other, resulting in nobody on the team aside from Berkan himself having any idea of what he wanted the game to be like. On launch day the developers were still scrambling to rush out a day one patch (in an LA house that Lauer described as looking like Project Mayhem from Fight Club) while Berkan was handing out expensive cigars to his guests at the launch party and assuring everyone the game would be a huge success. After launch, the game had failed to turn a profit, refunds were hurting whatever money had been made from early sales and the lack of money meant that many of the developers and voice actors were not paid what they had been promised. The cutscenes were initially left out in the release version, leaving players with no clues at what the actual plot was, and they were only added two days later, but it did nothing to fix the numerous critical bugs that had become mocked by the fanbase. Berkan had a last ditch plan to try and make the game profitable; change the focus of the game's marketing to focus on Nick (I Hate Everything's Asian character) and market it to China!
• What Could Have Been
  • The game began life conceptually as a fan film using Source Filmmaker, which would eventually turn into a full-fledged game with SFM used for the cutscenes.
  • The 2016 demo has numerous features, cutscenes and plot elements that did not make it into the final product. What's particularly notable is that not only was Mitchell going to encounter Father Grigori at some point in the game, but he was also able to examine corpses and experience flashbacks from the perspective of whoever died. In doing this, he would slowly learn to empathize with Gordon's plight, as he witnesses acts of the former's altruism from the eyes of dead civilians that he helped at some point. The radical difference between the demo and the final release likely stemmed from an instance of Writing by the Seat of Your Pants, as mentioned below.
  • Gordon was originally not wearing a helmet in the original trailers and the demo, with his face clearly visible, but this was eventually changed to set up a plot twist where Mitchell's attacker is revealed to be Adam in disguise. Either the plot twist was a key element for the entirety of development (thus causing the marketing to flat-out lie about the plot), or an older draft of the story had the real Gordon as the perpetrator.
  • Mitchell's original arsenal included a rather spectacularly-modeled Saiga 12K shotgun, which the project lead had mistaken for an AA-12. Aside from being woefully lore-unfriendly given the setting of the game, the model also consisted of two billion polygons that almost murdered the hardware of the animator assigned to rig it.^note This high of a polycount is usually reserved for extremely detailed environments in a pre-rendered cutscene, not for individual models that have to be handled by the engine in real-time. Despite reducing the total polycount by a thousand times after the fact was made known, two million polys were still too much for most typical home-built workstations to handle. To put it into perspective, the model used for Godzilla in Godzilla (2014) has around five hundred thousand polygons.
  • According to his voice actor, Nick was originally intended to have an American accent, but in the finished game most of his lines are spoken with Alex's natural British accent. A few of the original lines he delivered with the fake American accent were left in the game, though, despite the devs telling him they'd been scrapped.
  • A boss fight against a Combine mothership was created for the Army Truck escort level, but ultimately scrapped.
  • If the top comment this "I Hate Everything" video is to be believed, Shoe0nHead was offered the role of Sasha, but was unable to accept due to not being able to fake a Russian accent. That being said, the issue ended up being moot as the character speaks like a natural American in the final release anyway.
  • A leaked draft of the game's script points to several elements that didn't make the final cut:
    • Mitchell would have rescued a trapped Vortigaunt during the prologue. Said Vortigaunt would come back later to heal his wounds after his run-in with Gordon, keeping him alive long enough for his squadmates to find him.
    • Some of Nick's lines in the final product were actually meant for the cut character Brad^note who was intended to be the other soldier encountered at the hospital but doesn't actually take that role, despite what Mitchell says to Colonel Cue, up to and including his tirade against Mitchell for being "cursed".
    • The President's speech originally made mention of Dr. Breen negotiating Earth's surrender.
    • Colonel Cue would have died on-screen, sacrificing himself to protect the others by jumping on top of an exploding Manhacks.
    • An extra scene was planned for the end of Act 2 involving Nick, Adam, and Joe arriving via helicopter at the Combine factory to pick up Mitchell and the child workers.
    • Cain, the member of Mitchell's crew who finds the crowbar signalling Gordon's return, would have been briefly interrogated by Mitchell about where and how he found it.
    • Another scrapped scene, mirroring one of the flashbacks from the demo, features a crew member and the very same Metrocop who told Gordon to "pick up that can", both apparently about to die, conversing about their last regrets. The crew member's story provides some extra context to the lives of Mitchell and his army: at first they got by with fishing for food after learning how to do so from an "elder" of the crew named Jonas (who might or might not have been Boston Joe), but after the Combine drained the oceans, they had to resort to raiding civilian dwellings and killing Civil Protection officers as well as any citizens who refused to part with their supplies. Jonas, horrified at these atrocities he committed on the crew's behalf, eventually hung himself out of guilt.
• Writer Revolt: In 2019, Achievement support was added to the game sometime after Berkan Deniryzan started working for Activision Blizzard, and all of the Achievements mock the game, with them being references to memes about the game (such as the "game SUCKS I go to bed" review) or giving one to the player for turning on cheats, blatantly stating that it was probably inevitable they would, and a later build in 2022, maintained by "Operation Whiskey Freedom" (a team composed of remaining Royal Rudius employees), also features graffiti in Albuquerque which directly asks "Where's our money, Berkan?". Given that Berkan was allegedly largely responsible for the poor production of the game and did not compensate his workers very well, what remains of the crew are very clearly venting about how frustrating he was to work with and warning people not to trust him.
• Writing by the Seat of Your Pants: According to Alex of "I Hate Everything" fame, this was very much the case.

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