The five year anniversary of the death of one of the most beloved Bills in the history of video games went by unnoticed this year, so rather than try and make it up to him next year or five years from now, I thought I’d get this loving tribute out of the way with a piece I like to call Killing Bill: The Story of the Bill Who Killed the Unkillable Bill, or for SEO purposes, Kill Bill: An Anti-Smoking PSA.
William “Bill” Overbeck was so much more to the Left 4 Dead community than just a wrinkly advertisement for Big Tobacco. Like an onion, all it took was being around him to make a lot of people cry. Also, he had layers. I know it sounds like I’m legit insane when I say there was more to him than the stoic exterior that would often get him mistaken for the stone carving of a man you might expect to see perched outside a neglected veteran’s memorial or AA clinic, but that’s my version of the truth.
Many thought him to be immortal, but few know what he did to inspire such rumors.
It happened before the passing of the years that would lead to his passing in The Passing. After getting separated from his fellow survivors, Bill sought shelter in an abandoned department store. He spent a month in that store with a coven of Witches as roommates. He spent the first few days observing the Witches as a mannequin before he was able to make out words in their sobbing. When he felt he had learned enough, Bill used their language to turn them against each other.
To this day, no one knows if Bill has ever cried. Even those who saw his tears in person can’t say for sure that he wasn’t just speaking Witch.
When he wasn’t cry-talking gibberish like a damn Witch, Bill preferred silence, especially from those around him. He once asked me to join him over a fire he had started with half a corpse and an extinguished cigarette butt. I was nervous he was going to force another of his war stories on me, but neither of us spoke a word, and that was the only conversation either of us needed.
The layers that made up that smokey specter of a man run deeper even than the unlikable nature of his personality, the extent of which psychologists claim they’ve only seen in an individual who endured literally the worst childhood.
I met with one of these experts while researching this timely tribute to a devoted father, friend, brother and lover of violence. When I asked her what Bill had to endure as a kid in order to become so comically gruff, she asked me to construct the worst possible setting for a child to grow up in, then bury it under enough soul-crushing events — missed birthdays, disappointing Christmases, dead family pets, etc. — to bring that child right to the edge, just short of creating another Michael Myers. Only then would I have an idea of what it was like.
I tried this for hours and I never got past the nightmarish image of Bill’s head on a child’s body. Incidentally, this chimera recently started haunting my dreams and now I’m paying the same psychologist more money than I have so she can free me from his dead eyes.
Anyway, back to Bill.
Those would’ve been the years that would come to define him, had he not forced the first twenty years of memories in grow a persona of his own design using the only thing he ever really understood: war. It was in Vietnam that Bill would truly become Bill. In movie terms, this chapter would have Rises or Rising in its title.
I won’t bother exploring this critical decade in Bill’s life, mostly because the only thing I know about the Vietnam War was taught to me by Apocalypse Now, but also because anyone who spent any significant amount of time with him before his agonizing demise will have almost certainly heard them all by now.
All we need to know about Bill to make him a man who’s worth honoring is that he was an old dude who earned the respect of his peers by firing more guns than Milla Jovovich has across all of her movies. When respect wasn’t available, he would demand fear. He never bothered being friendly because no one ever told him what the word meant.
He saved countless lives, and he did it while struggling to save his own from the lifelong inner war that is a legitimately hardcore smoking addiction. Remember kids, smoking kills.
Actually, so do Tanks. It’s not the slow death of cancer, but it can be a surprisingly slow way to die. Bill could clarify for me if he hadn’t met a cruel end as a Tank’s stressball.
The reason why I’m honoring Bill with words, which we all know he hated in life even if he could never gather enough of them to adequately explain why, is so I can finally talk about him in a way he would’ve hated enough to justify murdering me if he wasn’t super dead right now. I should be okay, so long as Google wasn’t lying when it told me ghosts aren’t capable of punching the living no matter how powerful they were in life.
Remembering Bill for his jam-like consistency or the puddle of man pulp we found him as would do him a disservice. Bill was a dusty old pervert who took about as much pleasure in popping Boomers from afar as he did ensuring his beret was always tastefully angled. He didn’t smoke for the bonus it gave to his already incalculable badass quotient, he smoked because it was his only defense against the most terrifying monster of all. Withdrawal.
Nobody survives forever indeed.
Wait! Did I mention that time he anger-yelled at a charging waddling Boomer causing it to prematurely explode, or later that day, when he beat a Witch in a thumb wrestling match, and that’s why they cry now.
Oh, and give us Left 4 Dead 3.
