Half-Life VR But the AI Is Self-Aware

Submission 9,463

Part of a series on Half-Life. [View Related Entries]

About

Half-Life VR But the AI Is Self-Aware is a Twitch and YouTube web series run by wayneradioTV in which he roleplays through Half-Life as Gordon Freeman with a team of eccentric NPCs, voiced by various other actors, working to get through the game. The series is nearly completely improvised and was created using Garry's Mod.

History

On March 5th, 2020, wayneradioTV streamed on Twitch^[1] "Half-Life: VR with Immersive Machine Learning NPC's," the first episode in a series in which he and a group of improv actors role-played through Half-Life VR using Garry's Mod. The premise of the show is that the NPCs (voiced by various actors) are actually self-aware AI and thus can be profoundly silly and nonsensical. The NPC cast is:^[4]

- Dr. Coomer (played by hp_hollowtones), a babbling and cheery scientist
- Bubby (MasterGur), a suffering particle physicist
- Tommy (Baluup), a childlike scientist
- Benrey (Socpens), a security officer following Gordon around because Gordon hasn't shown him his passport.

An edit of the first episode was posted to YouTube on March 9th, gaining over 1.5 million views (shown below).

The series ran for nine episodes, concluding on April 9th, 2020,^[2] with the YouTube edit of the finale published on April 19th.^[3]

Online Presence

The series generated praise and popularity over its run. All episodes of the series on YouTube have gained over 400,000 views as of May 7th, 2020. A Twitter account dedicated to posting moments from the series, @HalfLifeOOC,^[6] has over 28,000 followers. The series also has its own Wiki^[4] and TV Tropes^[7] pages. It was praised by Kotaku^[5] on April 19th, 2020.

Sunkist the Perfect Dog

Sunkist, the Perfect Dog refers to a character who briefly appears in the series. The character is a jpeg of a golden retriever, similar to the Ace Combat JPEG Dog. After its appearance, its picture was spammed by fans of the series beneath tweets of the fruit product brand Sunkist.

On April 28th, 2020, the fruit juice and product brand Sunkist posted a tweet that was spammed by fans of the series who replied to the tweet with pictures of Sunkist the dog (shown below). The spammed thread was inquired about in a thread on /r/OutOfTheLoop.