The blade is black end to end and matte, with only a faint layering showing across the flat where the light catches it, and the crossguard is black as well; the grip is banded in pale and dark stripes that show behind the guard and at the butt. The M9 was adopted by the US Army in 1986: it mounts on a rifle, and paired with its scabbard it works as a wire cutter.

The view model holds 2,818 polygons against the stock knife’s 1,040, on 40 bones, under fourteen textures: ten pieces of the knife, with 200×989 and 204×1001 strips for the two faces of the blade, the stock hand maps at their game sizes, and a 64×64 chrome map, which is how GoldSrc fakes a mirrored sheen on metal. The idle runs 360 frames, the draw 30 and every attack 36. What other players see was rebuilt at 1,512 polygons where the stock third-person knife has 112, and nine knife sounds are in the archive. There is no dropped-knife model, so on the ground it stays standard.