The mystery of the obsolete guy is solved!

My email to Gabe said:

Hi Gabe!
After scouring the web and being unable to find an answer, I turn to you. Whose face is on the obsolete entity icon? http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Image:Obsolete.png The body is obviously The Fonz: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Fonz_Pic.PNG but it appears that someone else had their face pasted on. Is there a story to go with all this?

Click to expand...

Gabe Newell said:

Jay Stelly. Someone was picking on Jay the week the icon was made. Probably David Speyrer.

Click to expand...

Jay Stelly said:

Dhabih did this early during the development of the source engine. We needed a placeholder default particle texture so Dhabih made all particle systems without textures use a tiny image of my head. The joke was that they were generally too small to make out, so it took a while for me to notice what the image was. Unless you zoomed in on them it just looked like a reddish splotch. Eventually it became terminology around the office: "What did I do wrong with this particle effect? I've got Jay heads." After we got more things running the particle systems got real art and that texture went away so Dhabih found a new home for it in the Hammer icons. Since Dhabih is an avid collector of Fonzie pictures he decided to paste my head on one of those.

Several years later one of the new programmers we hired asked me if I still had my Fonzie leather jacket. "You know, the one you were wearing in that picture of you in Hammer."

Jay

Click to expand...