The Consul

"They call him the Consul now. It worked fine for him. He speaks for the Combine; he shares in their power. As for the rest of us..."

- Eli Maxwell

The Consul is a character cut from Half-Life 2. He is the predecessor to Wallace Breen.

Overview

 * In the early stages of the game's production, Breen was not known as the "Administrator", but rather as the "Consul", who was a different character, more in the vein of Big Brother from the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.


 * In the leaked files, no Consul model can be found, apart from a giant statue, a prototype of his Citadel's office based on concept art by Viktor Antonov, where screens were to be seen turning around his chair, sound clips for the early Breencasts, all starting with "The true Citizen..." (in the folder /sound/C17/), and sound clips for the final Citadel confrontation (in the folder "/temp/alyx/"), where Alyx Vance lectures the Consul about him being "just another cog in the Combine machinery" and not part of the humanity anymore, while sound clips from other characters are missing.


 * During the course of the game, the Consul was to become immortal through Combine artificial life-support technology, and the player would not discover this fact before the end of the game, seeing only Breen's face on the monitors, while his body was more and more transformed. The concept might have merely delayed, as theories made after Half-Life 2: Episode One support the fact that Breen's "mind" was moved into a Combine Advisor body or any other Combine vessel.


 * The Consul was to be seen in Eli Maxwell's slideshow, at the foot of a radio tower, wearing a headset, hands raised high to dropships as he proclaimed Earth's surrender.