Trivia / Gadget: Past as Future

• Follow the Leader: According to Marc Laidlaw, who wrote the tie-in novel "The Third Force", the G-Man, Alyx, and the Combine were partly influenced by Gadget.
• Word of God: In an interview from 2009, Haruhiko Shono discussed how the game's prominent usage of inexpressive characters with doll-like rigidity was, besides a result of technical limitations, a stylistic choice that was intentionally leaned in to in order to show that the people within The Empire were constantly under threat of judgement from any perceived deviations.

---