Mr. Friendly

The content of this article has been cut.The subject matter of this article was removed from the final version of an official / canonical source.

Mr. Friendly
General information
Type	Wildlife
Affiliation	Xen
Individual information
Attacks / Weapons	Spurs (to knock down the player) Vomit Rape
Game information
Designed by	Ted Backman

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

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" as it moved around.

Behavior and skills

Concept art.

• 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.

• Its most recent attacks in the game's development are shown in the model animations. They show it standing on its rear legs and spanking the player with its front arms (one being a double whip), as well as vomiting, probably in the vein of the Bullsquid or other spitting enemy.

• The concept art image shows it originally was to have bigger eyes, while its model has really small almost unnoticable eyes.

Behind the scenes

According to the book Raising the Bar, Valve's Ken Birdwell had a friend whose 12-year-old brother used to draw. Ken had always liked his work so he asked him, several years later, to do a couple of sketches of 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 this "Mr. Friendly", with something that looked like a penis. The creature was to literally "rape" the player, holding them with its tentacled arms until the point of fatal copulation. Birdwell was quite disturbed by the concept and wondered if Newell would like it; it turns out he did. They then chatted about possible psycho-sexual alien behaviors and their relation with disturbed teenager sexual fantasies. The sexual themes of some of the enemies were intended to appeal to the innate homophobia of 12 year old boys, the targeted audience for the game.

The reason this was cut from the final release of the game is most likely that adding a monster that rapes the player would have bumped the game's rating up to Mature (though there is no animations of him trying to attempt to rape somebody or just grab with his tentacles, suggesting that idea about "rape" was scrapped), thus limiting the potential audience. Another possibility is that this monster proved unpopular with test groups.

Gallery

Mr. Friendly doing its "doublewhip" attack.

Mr. Friendly's front texture, signed by Ted Backman.

List of appearances

• Half-Life (First appearance) (Game files only) (Non-canonical appearance)
• Half-Life 2: Raising the Bar (Non-canonical appearance)