Early censored Models

When Half-life was released in Germany it needed to be censored. But did you know that when valve was developing the game it was censored outside of the German build too? There were plenty more features programmed for Half-Life that were cut due to the game being too violent. In this article, we’ll be covering early versions of German censorship, early features that got censored in the base game, and what type of censorship made it into the released German build.

Features Censored From The Game

Early versions of the game were much more violent than the retail build. For example, there was a cut headshot feature for the hgrunt. If the player shot a grunt in the head with a weapon that did at least 15 damage a shot, the top of his head would have gotten blown off, leaving only the jaw and neck. The model and textures for this exist in the Half-Life SDK along with leftover code defining how much damage the player would have to do in one shot. Scientist also used to have skins for corpses. The earlier versions of the scientist models would have shown organs spilling out of a stomach wound, and his back would have had exposed bone and a gaping hole. This feature was kept until right before release, as evidenced by there being variations of both retail Barney and scientist textures with wounds. On the retail wound texture, rather than a stomach wound, it looks like it has deep lacerations. The Barney textures have a big wound near the left side of the chest.

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  Retail version of the cut bloody scientist skin, found in Half-Life: Source

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  Bloody skin for Barney, found in the SDK

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  screenshot of a dead scientist in “We’ve got hostiles”, displaying the early skin for corpses

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  Ditto, datacore

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  Ditto, with Barney in the freezer in office complex

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  SDK model of grunt after getting head shot off.

Early German Censorship

In early builds of the game, German censorship was tackled differently. Due to Germany having stricter regulations for violence in video games, valve decided they would make all the human npcs robots for German builds. By doing this, they could keep the violence while still complying to the restrictions. The scientist were turned into red robots.

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  Screenshot of an early lab design, with the German Alpha's security guard in the background .

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  screenshot featuring the German Alpha’s security guard model in the background.

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  Pre-release German version of the scientist.

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  Another image of the scientists.

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  German Alpha Zombies in an early version of Office Complex.

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  A Grunt in the early version of Apprehension.

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  A Grunt on the cliffside.

Final German Censorship

In the released German builds, hgrunts are robots, hassassins lack jiggle animations, killing allies would have caused them to sit down and shake their heads, and gibs were replaced with gears.

Unused Gibs

There were cut gib models