Gordon Freeman

Gordon Freeman
Half-Life character
Gordon Freeman with a Franchi SPAS-12, as he appears in official Half-Life 2 art.
First game	Half-Life (1998)
Created by	Gabe Newell
Designed by	Gabe Newell, Marc Laidlaw

Dr. Gordon Freeman is a fictional character and the main protagonist of the Half-Life video game series, created by Gabe Newell and designed by Newell and Marc Laidlaw of Valve Corporation. His first appearance is in Half-Life. Gordon Freeman is an American man from Seattle, who graduated from MIT with a PhD in Theoretical Physics. He was an employee at Black Mesa Research Facility. Controlled by the player, Gordon is often tasked with using a wide range of weapons and tools to fight alien creatures such as headcrabs, as well as Combine machines and soldiers.

Gordon Freeman's character has been well received by critics, and various gaming websites often consider him to be one of the greatest video game characters of all time, including UGO and GameSpot.

Half-Life director Gabe Newell coined the name "Gordon Freeman" during a conversation with the game's writer Marc Laidlaw in his car. It included a homage to the physicist and philosopher Freeman Dyson. Newell disliked Laidlaw's proposed name, "Dyson Poincaré", which also included the surname of Henri Poincaré. The texture for Gordon's head was "too big of a job for just one person", so Valve designers combined references from four people. An earlier model of Gordon, known as "Ivan the Space Biker", had a full beard that was subsequently trimmed. Other iterations of Gordon's concept featured different glasses, a ponytail, and a helmet.