Walter Bennet

Walter Bennett is a minor character in Half-Life: Blue Shift who is first introduced in Half-Life: Opposing Force. He is a scientist and, along with Simmons, an assistant to Doctor Rosenberg.

Half-Life: Opposing Force
While not seen in this game, Walter is first introduced when Adrian Shephard watches a hologram and learns that Walter worked on the Barnacle gun.

Half-Life: Blue Shift
When the Resonance Cascade took place at Black Mesa, Rosenberg and a colleague named Harold formulated a plan of escape: They would reach an abandoned area of Black Mesa and use an old prototype teleporter to teleport themselves to the surface and escape. Along with Simmons and Walter, they set out to accomplish this, but they did not count on the arrival of the HECU and their immediate hostility. Harold was killed and Rosenburg was captured, but Walter and Simmons escaped unscathed to the prototype and got it ready for the teleportation sequence.

Walter was traumatized by the death of Harold and worried about Rosenburg, and thus when Rosenburg returned with a security guard named Barney Calhoun, Walter was extremely relieved and briefed him on the situation. Barney had to be teleported to a different part of the facility, and to Xen, but he prepared the teleporter for its duties. Walter was the first one to go through the powered teleporter, and arrived in a parking lot. Simmons soon came through as well, and got a Black Mesa SUV ready for their escape while Walter used a crowbar to open a gate. Soon, Calhoun and Rosenburg teleported to the parking lot, and they escaped using the SUV.

"Walter's World"
Walter's origins prior to Opposing Force may lie in the fan-written "Walter's World" columns formerly published on Planet Half-Life, which were a satirical and humorous series of articles supposedly written by Walter himself detailing his attempts to escape employment at the Black Mesa facility. At the end of the Walter's World feature, Walter is determined to have escaped from Black Mesa and be living someplace in the outside world prior to the resonance cascade. None of the backstory presented in the Walter's World columns has been presented as or considered to be canonical to the Half-Life universe.

Trivia

 * Walter's name comes from the filename of the scientist's face, which is simply walter. Walter Bennett became a fan name for some scientists and so it was used in Opposing Force and Blue Shift.
 * Walter is the only NPC in the Half-Life series to ever use a crowbar, and the only character to use it for the purposes it was designed for.