 Good evening. This is Malo7, one of the most famous and recognizable faces to star on Valve's catalogue of video games. Across the last two decades, he's accumulated what amounts to a small cult following. And he's become more popular than some of Valve's actual characters. But who is he? And what is his story? Malo7, as an asset, was developed for Valve's game Half-Life 2 sometime in either late 2001 or early 2002. It's based on the likeness of a man named Michael S. Smith, of whom very little information is known about. There are leaked cut assets with him assuming the role of a lowly worker for the Combine, or as part of the crew for the Borealis ship. In the final game, his character can be regularly spotted as a generic citizen, even as one of the first faces you'll spot after G-Man finishes his opening monologue. But there are also some named citizen characters who use his model. The first and most memorable is Boxcar Joe, who first appears in the Root Canal chapter. Joe and his Vortigaunt friend take refuge in a red cargo railcard they've fitted with a carpet, a couple mattresses, a map of the canals, and a television. Joe explains that he's in charge of keeping a lookout for station one, which he lets Gordon pass through his outpost to get to. However, after leaving, Gordon quickly finds out that the main camp is already under Combine occupation, and sadly, we never hear from Boxcar Joe again. Interesting to note is that Joe and his Vort accomplice can both be seen watching a TV broadcast of G-Man, but they shut it off when they notice Gordon in the room with them. This casts some interesting questions about how much Joe knows about the G-Man, but I guess it doesn't really matter since he all but certainly gets slaughtered by civil protection moments after Gordon's departure, just like every other minor character in the game. Before we move on, I want to mention Ross Scott's rendition of this scene in Freeman's Mind 2, where his portrayal of Gordon gets trigger-happy on Joe's Vort friend as a result of PTSD from the events of the original Half-Life. It's a subversive, funny, and memorable highlight of the series. The second named character in Half-Life 2 utilizing Male 07 is Sandy, who appears in one of the most popular and often referenced scenes in the game. In the chapter's sand traps, Sandy is seen tending to his injured friend Laszlo, who gets tragically killed by Ant-Lion shortly after. Sandy is the one who famously dubs Laszlo as The finest mind of his generation. These bits are pretty memorable on their own, and you might imagine they're a pretty big contributing factor to the model's popularity, but it's actually after Half-Life 2 that Male 07's story starts picking up. For starters, you might not know that he appears in the Counter-Strike series. Indeed, his first appearance outside of Half-Life was as a dead guard on the Counter-Strike source map DE Train, which was added to the game on February 24th, 2005, and the same model was reused on DE Nuke a couple years later. I'd attribute the first driving factor for Male 07's popularity in the community, however, to Gordon Froman, the goofy protagonist of a popular early Garry's Mod webcomic called Concerned, that started in May of 2005. Concerned is a light-hearted, fan-made prequel to Half-Life 2, in which Froman traverses all the same areas from the game and constantly gets mistaken for Freeman, even running into characters like Alex. It's nothing groundbreaking, but it's cute, and well put together for its time. A trailblazer in Male 07 culture for sure. Of course, Male 07 briefly reprised his role as a generic citizen in Half-Life 2 Episode 1 and Half-Life 2 Episode 2, shortly after, in 2006 and 2007. And there was also going to be a Male 07 character in Episode 2 called Nigel, who would appear during the Hunter Chopper boss fight, but he was ultimately cut. Now, while Gordon Froman might have been the original wacky Male 07 fan character, Concerned will always live in the shadow of Half-Life. Full Life Consequences! On January 23rd, 2008, Male 07 debuted as Gordon Freeman's Blaker brother, John Freeman, in this massively viral Garry's Mod machinima series based on a notoriously bad fan fiction. I would give a full-out synopsis, but I don't want to spoil anything about it in case you haven't seen it. Full-Life Consequences was such a big hit that if you approach someone who's been in the G-Mod or Half-Life community for any meaningful length of time, there's a good chance they can belt the opening scene out to you by memory. Hey, do you remember Half-Life Full-Life Consequences? Yeah, absolutely. Do you by chance remember how that opened? Can you belt out as much of the intro as you remember? John Freeman was working in an apartment, no working in an office building. It was really one of the game's earliest viral inside jokes. Making its waves across the internet just a couple months after Episode 2's release. There was even a viral video called Furries in a Blender that remixed various clips from Full-Life Consequences into a techno track. But I'll warn you, watching it will instantly warp you back to 2009. Uh-uh, very stupid guy alert. I made a mistake. Apparently Furries in a Blender is the name of the artist that made this song, not the name of the song, so my bad. It was eventually discovered that the original fan fiction was a troll, and not the work of an eight-year-old child like a lot of people claimed. But that doesn't really have any impact on the videos themselves, nor their legacy. I have to kill vast and bullets too slow. Full-Life Consequences is a staple of Gary's mod history, and if I'm being honest here, I'd say John Freeman is the number one driving force behind Mellow 7's popularity. But we're not done here just yet. Another popular example of Mellow 7 was Stanley from the original 2011 Half-Life 2 mod, The Stanley Parable. This mod swept the internet due to its novel concept, that being a game in which all branching endings existed once rather than as separate timelines. And it was eventually remade as a standalone game that proceeded to go even more massively viral. With the release of the Stanley Parable HD remix in 2013, Mellow 7 was swapped out for a new original face, which also carried on to the ultra-deluxe version that released earlier this year. I still can't believe they retconned him out. Justice for Stanley 07. In either January or February of 2013, Mellow 7 became the mascot of popular quasi-retired Gmod animator Das Boshit, and he remained such to this day. I interviewed Das Boshit a couple months ago, by the way, so check that out if you want to know who he's been up to lately. From 2014 to 2017, Mellow 7 may not have had many memorable roles, but his face was certainly cemented in a lot of people's brains around then, since those were some of Gary's mods' most popular years. The latest blip I recall involving the old guy was the creepy Gmod guy getting off the floor video that went viral in 2021 on the cusp of the whole Gmod-era G era. You're up to the Gmod. By the way, if you didn't know, this video is made with the stop-motion helper add-on and a quick jump cut. You can tell by how the player's health changes. Anyway, what's the point of this video? Well, I suppose there's not much of one, other than, I guess, helping new Half-Life fans understand why this model is so popular. I also think it's pretty funny that there's an ongoing minor cult following around a random guy named Mike, who probably forgot about this gig 20 years ago. I hope you enjoyed the video. He went on the platform up to the roof and got on the motorcycle. Yeah, something like that. Uh, I can't give you my license. The pants were dead. The pants were dead. Yada, yada, yada. Zombie ghosts, you get the idea. You shouldn't come here. Oh, you shouldn't. How could I forget that part, dude?