The right man in the wrong place can make all the difference … in the world. So, wake up, Mister Freeman. Wake up and … smell the ashes.

First off, I’d like to say a big thanks to SLiD3, who motivated me to continue working on this idea and helped a bit on creating this design.
I had this concept for a long time, even maybe if it's a simple idea, I find this contest a perfect time for it.

As many of us know - Half-Life game gave birth to Counter-Strike, so I feel like it's a great theme for this contest.

It took me about a month to get this idea to look as I wanted it to look. My biggest goal on this submission was to bring the nostalgic feeling and ingame atmosphere of Half-Life to CS:GO.
I also really wanted old school Half-Life fans to feel closer to the HL game.

I decided to study everything well and contacted a few admins on the official discord Half-Life servers to know their thoughts about my design, and at the final stage, their feedback helped me to set my design well to the lore of the game.

I wanted the audience to get the feel of a Black Mesa corporation weapon that has been owned by a Gordon Freeman, from "Lambda" section.

All the Half-Life logos was re-created by me.
I spent some time re-creating the exact same canonic orange painting with some tear/wear, but still adapted it to look like a Factory New one.
I also added many easter eggs to a Battle-Scarred version, since I think that it’s important for such a design to bring a many historical and a meme items for players to remember or learn.

- From the start, it was a really interesting to break all of the shapes on the different color variations and build a concept. I wanted to make rather retro color decisions, to have that “old school” feeling, but bring some modern shapes to make it look a bit more fresh.
- It was pretty fun for me to work on the HEV charger and adapt it to the FPV area of the AK-47 shape;
- The mag area was a bit hard, but it was fun to design it. At first, I wasn’t sure about what I wanted to bring to it. I made many attempts on it. You can see some of them on the verification sheet.
- I’m glad that I managed how to put my favorite easter eggs, such as a crowbar or a snark lovely creature to work naturally on the design. Or a famous “3” meme, as part of a wear effect, that I couldn’t really pass away on such a design.

I hope you enjoy this design, and that people who played Half-Life game find it familiar~