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Mr. Friendly General information Type Wildlife Affiliation Xen Individual information Attacks / Weapons Spurs (to knock down the player) [1] [2]

Vomit [1]

Fatal copulation[2] Game information Designed by Ted Backman[2]

Mr. Friendly[2] is an alien enemy cut from Half-Life. It can be found in the game files.

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Overview

Mr. Friendly's model is the size of a small horse. It was to be a crawling creature walking on hoofed legs on its back and spurs on its front, moving in a very awkward, shuffling manner and making a noise resembling "fingernails on a chalkboard".[1][2] It would act as a scavenger that ate the corpses of dead enemies. This behavior would serve as a logical explanation for the disappearance of bodies that was done to improve the performance of the game.[3]

One of its proposed attacks was to pound the ground and knock the player's weapon out of his hand. It was even suggested that Gordon's glasses fly off and leave the player stuck in combat with blurry vision, a feature that would have been challenging to implement considering the game technology available at the time.[2] Its most recent attacks in the game's development are shown in the model animations. They show it standing on its rear legs and slapping the player with its front arms (one being a double whip), as well as vomiting.[1]

Behind the scenes

According to the book Raising the Bar, Valve's Ken Birdwell had a friend whose 12-year-old brother, Ted Backman, used to draw. Ken had always liked his work, so while searching for a concept artist several years later, he asked Backman to provide a couple of sketches for possible monsters. He presented sketches of several very sexual-oriented monsters to him and Gabe Newell, managing director, the kind of material Birdwell did not expect. Among them was "Mr. Friendly" displaying an obvious penis. When questioned about it, Backman described that the creature would use its tentacled arms to pull the player towards itself until the point of fatal copulation. Birdwell was worried that Newell wouldn't approve of this material, but it turned out that was exactly what he was looking for. Newell and Backman then began a discussion about possible psycho-sexual alien behaviors and clinical descriptions of disturbed adolescent sexual fantasies. The sexual themes of some of these enemies were intended to elicit a response from the innate homophobia of 14-year-old boys, a significant portion of the targeted audience for the game.[2]

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