 Good evening. If you're active in the Half-Life community, then there's a good chance that over the last couple of months you've seen this video. An animation of Dr. Kleiner and Eli Vance from Half-Life, lip-syncing to the song In the End by Linkin Park, as they pass through various locations from the series. Now this video has been floating around for more than a couple of years at this point, but it's recently picked up a ton of steam as a meme on Discord, Twitter, Reddit, and elsewhere. The original upload is also skyrocketed from less than 200,000 views to over a million in just a couple of weeks. It's actually, weirdly enough, one of the biggest cultural phenomenons to spawn out of the Half-Life community in a good while. Yielding fan art and GMod workshop mods and Lord knows what else. So what the hell is this video? Why was it made? And why is it suddenly becoming so huge? The answer to these questions is a lot simpler than you probably think, but answering them is unfortunately going to cost you some of your sanity. It's a long story. And it starts with Breaking Benjamin, ah, it starts with Breaking Benjamin, not Linkin Park. In November 2004, Valve finally released one of the most heavily anticipated sequels in video game history, Half-Life 2, after a lengthy and torturous development cycle that saw many delays and even a full source code leak that nearly sank the entire project. But thankfully, when the final product shipped, it was received very well, in no small part due to its facial animation system that was considered highly impressive and realistic for its time. Valve was also praised for releasing their advanced tools to the public in the form of an SDK, or software development kit, in order to help modders create their own games using Half-Life 2 as a base. But people quickly realized that these tools had use outside of game development, namely in the creation of fan movies and shorts. This was the birth of the Half-Life 2 machinima community. If you somehow don't know what a machinima is, it's basically a movie made using game tools. And once they started to get popular in the 2000s, a company began calling themselves Machinima and hosting that form of content on their now defunct website. Some of the most notable early pioneers of Half-Life Machinima were Ross Scott of Accursed Farms, who gained a following from a series Freeman's Mind and Civil Protection and still commands a loyal audience to this day, and J.S. Zanatos, who created Counter-Strike for Kids in the G-Man Squad, and after the self-destruction of Machinima, well, however, long before these guys made a name for themselves on the internet, a young animator named Paul Marino became one of the first people to use Valve's tools to create a Half-Life 2 machinima. According to Paul, his music video I'm Still Seeing Breen was created in November 2004, the same month of Half-Life 2's release. Now, the Source SDK based with FacePoser doesn't seem to have been published online until 2006, so I'm not entirely sure how Paul got his hands on it. But once he did, he created this I'm Still Seeing Breen video starring G-Man singing Breaking Benjamin's 2004 classic, So Cold. With a quick watch, you will notice it bears a striking resemblance to In The Virtual End, both being tribute music videos to Half-Life 2's plotline, starring pivotal characters lip-syncing early 2000s rock music. However, I'm Still Seeing Breen has a bit of a cultural legacy of its own. It's a popular point of trivia in the community that it actually played on live television after a journalist from Kotaku put its creator in contact with an MTV producer. Once they had the signal of approval from Valve and Universal Music Group, the video aired as an installment of the ill-fated MTV Video Mods show in March of 2005. But to get back to the story at hand, I'm Still Seeing Breen was the first popular video to show the capabilities of the FacePoser tool, especially for music videos, and was responsible for ushering in an early era of lip-sync machinima. Once Gary's Mod began making Waves Online as a great Half-Life 2 sandbox tool, creating Source Engine Machinima was made much more accessible and became an even bigger phenomenon. You can find hundreds, even thousands, of early machinima music videos built from the Source SDK and Dora Gmod. And in 2007, an obscure Californian rock band called Strayta caught wind of this Half-Life 2 machinima phenomenon and sponsored a video contest on machinima.com, offering a cash prize to whoever made the best machinima video for one of their songs. That competition would lead aspiring video maker Ray Kofed to create his submission, The Flight of Kleiner, learning and applying techniques like stop-motion animation and green screen effects along the way to give his video a competitive edge. Though he had tinkered with the SDK before, it was this Flight of Kleiner video that ignited Ray's flame for creating machinima music video content, even if his submission only landed in third place. A sidebar in post-production, this video was fucking deranged, I didn't realize why it was called Flight of Kleiner, it's cause Kleiner climbs onto a rocket, flies through like 7 different levels from Half-Life 2, and then Kamikaze pops the fucking green cast monitor from the start of the game. By now, Half-Life 2's community had grown a pretty sizable amount, and people were starting to get very attached to its characters. Fans were eagerly awaiting the next installment of the series, and when Half-Life 2 Episode 2 released, its ending shocked millions. In this heart-wrenching scene, one of the most pivotal characters in the series, the Resistance leader Eli Vance, gets killed by an alien advisor in front of his helpless daughter Alex, and the player. The closing shot of the game is of Alex, crying as she clutches her father's lifeless body before the screen fades to black. It is one of the most infamous cliffhangers of all time, one that still hasn't properly been followed up on, and its Fallout-inspired machinima.com to host another machinima competition, this time for a tribute to Eli. I think you know where this is going. Ray Co-Fed, now itching to make more use of his newfound tools and experience, but of course apply, taking inspiration from Paul Marino's I'm Still Seeing Breen video to create a music video recalling the events of Half-Life 2 and the episodes to the tune of Linkin Park's In the End. Of course, before it was quite the infamous cliche track it is now. The casting of Dr. Kleiner as Chester Bennington and Eli Vance as Mike Shinoda was and still is undeniably comical, but the machinima was of very impressive quality, especially for its time. The fucked up thing is that, apparently, despite his best efforts, Ray's video, dubbed In the Virtual End, was disqualified from the competition because the judges didn't like his use of copyrighted music, this being around the time YouTube had implemented content ID and began their mission to eliminate unauthorized use of copyrighted music. This was undeniably upsetting, but because Ray loved making music videos so much, he refused to let the new copyright system stand in his way. So instead of making videos for other people's songs, he would instead start creating his own music in FL Studio 8 and make SDK videos for those. Now, if you've been around the block in the Valve community, there's actually a good chance you've heard his first original song, an ode to Portal 1 called Taste the Cake. On Machinima's YouTube channel, Taste the Cake raked in about 3 million views prior to its deletion, and it even has its own dedicated page on the Combine Overwiki. It's definitely a blast from the past. Apparently, Ray tried to use this video's success as leverage to land a gig working on Portal 2's soundtrack, though he had no such luck. Indeed, in spite of In the Virtual End getting snubbed, Ray continued to chase his passion and make a lot of even more really weird and eccentric Machinima videos. Some were music videos, like of Japanese girls singing Britney Spears songs on Dust 2, and some were skits, like G-Man soliciting Alex Vance for crowbar services in Ravenhole. I find it funny that if you take a greater look at Ray's video catalogue, you'll find that In the Virtual End is not anywhere near the weirdest thing he's done. In fact, it's not even the weirdest music video he's made of Kleiner and Eli. That award, at least in my opinion, goes to Reign of the Destructors, an electronic hip-hop song starring Kleiner and Eli's thugged-out alter egos, K-Dog and Mac Daddy Eli. Unfortunately, just like a ton of other early-source creators, a lot of Ray's original videos got wiped when Machinima's YouTube was taken down in 2019, with only a few archived on his personal channel, which I implore you to check out after this video. But sometime in the last year, the In the Virtual End video began appearing in a lot of bait-and-switch memes, as an irony-laden ode to a game series so many hold dear. In the modern day, many people will find what Ray Kofed got up to in the late 2000s super cringey, regardless of how serious or ironic his videos might have been. But there will also be many that find his efforts admirable and nostalgic. In an era where caring about absolutely anything will get you nerd-emojied and soy-jacked, there's a quiet audience of normal people who miss feeling free to pursue self-expression, even in the most insane and deranged of ways. Additionally, Ray's use of SDK tools reminds of the era in which game developers felt it valuable to connect with and help their communities, not shun them and sue them. So hey, to keep the spirit alive, maybe take some time out of your day to put some effort into something silly. Make that cringy Gmod music video or comic. Have some fun, and exert some effort and passion into something you enjoy, even if other people might laugh. One, two, three, that's the sound of my deep. I got three bitches at my house just last week. And now I'm hanging with your sister, she's the freak of the week. She wants to really help me study, but she ain't no geek. I go crazy in bananas like a donkey, I split, ain't security, cameras caught me swanging my dick. Do the hustle now, everybody really wants to kick it with me, cause my D is so big that it can't aim from a tree, yeah. Oh, you're still here. Well, I hope you enjoyed the video. And while I've got you between the tantalizing imagery in Ray's videos and all the copyrighted music, I've actually got no idea if this video will be monetized or not. So if you'd like to support my channel, the best way to do that is through my Patreon, just like these beautiful people on your screen have done. Anyway, thanks for watching, have a good day.