8 Bits Of Science You Didn’t Know Ruin Iconic Video Game Scenes

When the Gravity-gun first made its appearance in Valve’s seminal Half-Life 2, such was the impact of this Swiss Army knife of video game tools that it instantly divided gaming into pre Gravity-Gun and post Gravity-Gun eras. Add in the emotional pay off of playing a game of catch with everyone’s favourite robot companion, Dog, and both scene and tool became instant classics.

However, in reality our game of catch would have been stupidly annoying.

According to Isaac Newton’s third law of motion, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. So, yeet an oil drum with enough force to instantly kill a Combine soldier, for instance, and the third law demands that you be thrown backwards with similarly bone-cracking force.

And yet protagonist Gordon Freeman remains resolutely rooted to the spot (though strangely sidekick Alyx, in Episode 2, does not). Let Newton have his way, however, and far from being a fun game of catch the scene with Dog should have been an infuriatingly finicky bout of repeated repositioning coupled with the need for a medkit or two.

To be fair a third law-enabled Gravity-gun would be such a nuisance nobody would use it. Still, you have to feel that Valve missed a golden opportunity: depending on the mass of the object you could have used the Gravity-gun...to rocket jump.