Manhack Arcade

The Manhack Arcade is a City 17 area cut from Half-Life 2 that was to be visited in the first chapters of the game in a business/entertainment area, between the Trainstation Plaza and Kleiner's Lab.

Overview


In this entertainment place, the player was to see citizens playing video games consisting in controlling Manhacks into the streets and killing fugitive citizens, ignoring that the Manhacks they were controlling were real and actually killing on the streets. Although it sounded good on paper, it was considered not actually very fun by the team and was therefore cut.

In the existing maps, the game is only shown at a prototype stage and does not work. The Citizens are all the male Citizen 01 and are distracted by the player and tend to follow him while they should be concentrated on the game or the queue and mostly ignoring the player. Their attitude script was obviously not completed at this stage and has likely never been.

Maps
The very first Manhack Arcade map, " ", was last edited September 2002, before being replaced by " " (" " and " " contain an alternate facade (present in " ") and an alternate inside building respectively), more faithful to the original concept art, with the facade based on Macy's facade in Seattle. " " was to follow " ", a street map containing Metrocops and the early Breencast, which was afterwards enlarged to be followed more or less by " ", and then " ", right before Kleiner's Lab, the very first Arcade being completely scrapped. The most recent version of the Arcade, " ", was last edited on December 2002, which likely indicates when the Manhack Arcade was truly dropped.

Trivia
In the film Toys, a similar idea shows teenagers unknowingly controlling, in a vast arcade, remote-controlled military robots that actually kill in real-life.

List of appearances

 * Half-Life 2: Raising the Bar