I always had been doing since my childhood a bit of urban exploration. So I love to like break through a window of an abandoned factory or building or train station. So that's one of my hobbies used to be.
What's on the roofs of buildings? What's in an abandoned building cellar in a factory? We did a lot of work on this. The time when I did my first photo shoot at the Osterlitz station, it was under construction.
But then there was no security guards, no fences, even you can just walk and see the broken textures and layers of paint and brick and history. And it was just so cool that I can get and get this information before it got overbuilt with a new neighborhood. I went to check it out last night. And it happens to be completely destroyed and under construction again.
And it just goes back, coincidentally, to the exact same state where I shot it 25 years ago, actually. One of the big challenges with Half-Life was just establishing the company and sort of determining whether or not we could actually make video games at all. Like my background was operating systems and spreadsheets.
Mike Harrington, who was the co-founder, had a similar background. He had a little more game experience than I did. But with Half-Life, you know, we were pretty sure we were going to fail. And then Half-Life was successful.
It was like a lot more successful than we had any reason to expect. And now we had to follow it up, right? We didn't want to have a sophomore slump.
We didn't want to be a, you know, a one and... and done kind of company. So now we had the terrifying obligation to our customers and to our fans to somehow advance our game design skills, our technology, all needed to level up for the second game. I think a bunch of us were really shocked by the success of Half-Life 1. We were this young, unproven company.
I don't think any of us really knew what to expect when we finished the game. I remember when we started working on Half-Life 2, we had already set the bar pretty high for ourselves. So during Half-Life 2, what we were really trying to do is take advantage of the visibility that Half-Life had created for us in the industry to continue to hire the best people that we could find in the world. It just got easier.
The bar didn't get any lower, but the fact that we had, you know, it went from, hey, this weird dude who worked on operating systems wants to convince you he can run a game company, to, oh, Half-Life won a bunch of awards, and now they're working on a sequel to that. He was using my first week or my first day. was actually the going away party for Mike Harrington, the co-founder. Yeah, I came to Valve when it was just tiny.
We had, I think, or maybe 10 or so people. Dave and I grew up together in Louisiana, so he and I had always talked about maybe starting a game company at some point. And during Half-Life, that kind of changed to a maybe instead of that, the dream could be you come and work here at this one with me.
Yeah, and I interviewed the day that Half-Life... Life went gold and I took the team photo of... Yeah, there's like an old photo of us. We broke a paper mache headcrab and everything. Yeah, I was freaking out.
Yeah. I was actually working on a video game concept in high school and I was seeking a mentor and I got in touch with Mark Laidlaw at Valve. I guess it was the right time and right place and quite a bit of luck and I ended up getting an internship that way. I guess I was 17 at the time.
So you've got a whole company that's familiar with tools and a whole process and then we just started over. We rebuilt the tools and we rebuilt the engine. So we had this long period of time where we could sort of take our time on design.
And so we spent a lot of time working on story and just trying to figure out how to make this thing bigger, like somehow more epic. Those discussions eventually led to this idea that, so in Half-Life 1 you open this portal, some strange rift to another dimension, and we thought, well what if that broadcasts the signal to the universe that's like, oh there's this planet there, it's free air and water. And so then we sort of came up with this idea of, well there's this mega organization that's resource starved.
And they're just gonna come and take it if they can. How many years passed between? Six?
Yeah. So I would say the first two years we tried a lot of things. And a lot of those story arcs that we had initially didn't have really any carryover from Black Mesa or any of that.
There was originally going to be three different alien races, like the bugs, the religious ones. And the antlions actually came out of that bug. race that was supposed to be a much bigger part of the game.
It had three alien races, the warrior aliens, the insect aliens, and the spy aliens. And it had like a Prague-like city, which ended up being the closest thing to City 17. In a lot of ways it reminds me of writing music. You know, everyone was sort of riffing ideas on, well, what if we did this or tried that?
I remember we were really ambitious at the beginning. I remember we designed, what, four cities at one point? Prague. Jerusalem, Chicago, Los Angeles, I believe.
We had an Arctic base, an underwater base, an icebreaker ship, an airplane sequence that crashed into a high rise, which we cut right after 9-11. We had several combine bases in the wasteland. We had the air exchange, which is where they were taking the atmosphere from Earth.
We had a train depot and so on. So we really obviously had to scale back what we were trying to do. But, you know, that's okay to go a little bit nuts at the beginning.
I saw it almost as like sophomore anxiety, maybe, you know, like, oh, wow, we have to like, we have to surpass Half-Life. And Half-Life was important, you know, and so it was like this like unbounded ambition. And we kept asking ourselves and Gabe kept asking.
well, how is this Half-Life? You know, when you have a silent first-person narrator, you could tell people this is Gordon and throw that character into literally any environment and say, yeah, this is Half-Life. But unless the environment is telling you that that's the case, you're not, it's very arbitrary. So we've wrestled with that a long time. Slowly, the sort of grab bag of characters we had, we started to feel like there was connections between them.
And then at some point we realized, oh, this is, we could make this out of the science team, the survivors from Black Mesa. And suddenly that, for me, it was the idea of it's the science team. That suddenly, you could put those guys anywhere. And because they have like a familial interconnectedness and they recognize Gordon, that will make you feel like it's a continuation of the story.
Like obviously Alex was totally new to that universe, but. She had a father who had been at Black Mesa, and he and the other scientists were friends, and they had extended their relationship into this new world that you were in. That was kind of the click with the science team, and that was a while until we got there. You know, much like the first one where all the contributors were really collectively deciding on the direction, is we were really making a push to grow the team and hire new artists. You know, Zabi Ng.
was an influential early contributor. I think he and I were doing character designs for Gordon and for... Alex and for some of the antagonist combine characters. At the time I was looking at a lot of, I mean really the helmets, which I think are kind of one of their defining features, was based off some gas masks from Europe that I had seen in some reference. I remember doing early concepts of the new HEV suit, like what's Gordon gonna be now, and I had kind of just started and so I was like I'm gonna make this my own.
It looked I guess kind of like the still suits in Dune, but black and a lot more belt buckles and latex. And Gabe was just kind of like, what's this? Like, it's Gordon. I was like really proud and excited. It's like, why is it not orange?
You know, it's like, or some something to that effect of essentially like, why are you giving up this iconic part of the character? Yeah. People love that. So what are you doing?
And it's like, you know, I kind of, I was like. Yeah, I guess he's right. So we kind of went back to the drawing board and ended up with what shipped.
And we had like, I don't know, so many creatures that we tried and abandoned. You know, not because they were bad, because we had better things to pursue. You know, like there were the Sactics, the Cremator, the Crab Synth, the Stalkers as an enemy. And even something like the Stalkers we had a little bit in the game. Yeah, we shipped the Stalkers, but not as an adversary that you fought.
Yeah, there was... There was definitely an evolution of how biological versus how synthetic a lot of the creatures in Half-Life 2 were and I was always hoping to get to a space where it was ambiguous. You know, where you couldn't quite tell if this was created or if it had grown or if it was natural or synthetic. There was some synths I did that never shipped. Actually we did ship them.
They were at the end of the game when you're going through the Citadel. I had designed these synths that... No animator could figure out how to actually move because they weren't built to move.
And much like some of the environments that we've seen released in the leak that were very dark, some of the early Half-Life stuff was also very dark. But at the time, video games were very dark. In the interim, before we hired Fletcher, and before Victor was there, because it was the old environments, right? I don't remember how it came about that they built this level, but the idea was there was some looting going on. And...
The idea was you're in this little alley and you see a citizen. You hear a voice saying, TV! Like they just got into the TV store.
And there's the citizens and the cops are fighting. And you see a citizen run past you holding a TV set. And he goes, get one, get a TV, get yourself a TV. And then he runs off down the thing and you go in another courtyard and there's a cop with a nightstick and a citizen. And they're like having a fist fight.
And then... It's interesting because the NPCs are negotiating their bounding boxes and there's some animation like that how difficult it is to contact. We captured everything. We took pictures of whiteboard design sessions.
There were really crude drawings and ideas. Some of the stuff from the very beginning made it all the way to the end. You know, Ravenholm, antlions, dog, Kleiner's pet headcrab and... You know, those things were just so fun in the moment that how could they not survive, right?
The other thing that was really memorable is I remember we started making the world really dystopian, really dark at the beginning, and some of the concept art shows that. We didn't think players would enjoy spending 20 to 40 hours in such a dark and kind of oppressive setting, so the game lightened up considerably over time, but you know, still maintained the feeling of a security state. So I was trying to like.
Get all these cool ideas that the team had already when I arrived and streamline them. You know, instantly I think we were friends with Mark Laidlaw. We had a common sort of vision and fantasy to create a Orwell-like city and then slowly, you know, I brought context behind that.
The idea that we can place this in an anonymous central Eastern European city. Which is a perfect setting because, you know, in these countries there were so many waves of invasions. You know, we had the Ottoman Empire, we had the Russians, and now why not the aliens?
And one of the first maps I remember working on was called Test Room Standards. On Half-Life, every level designer kind of had their own idea of how big stairs were, or how big steps were going to be, or how big a button was. Make sure we had some consistency. Another thing...
That was sort of important was just getting more people to go on field trips and going to do research because I think a lot of the level designers on Half-Life 1 you know just we're building very abstractly and so we wanted to have some more grounding in reality and have more realistic proportions and also just get Textures were going from hand-painted to more photographic and so we would go out and collect a lot of the pictures for those textures to start building for our new library. I joined Half-Life 2 probably a year after it had started. I know that it was at least a year because I was put on Borealis which was like everybody else had disowned but then I came along and said oh I guess this is now your problem so I started on Borealis and Of course I failed at that too.
I eventually got cut. Yeah, so I came in having had experience doing game AI. I was at Looking Glass Studios. Probably the biggest thing I did there was a lead program on Thief, the dark project, the AI for that too. And actually my first thing is they handed Borealis to me to do the-After I'd finished?
Yeah, to do the AI for the guy that you're supposed to walk through the Borealis ship with. There was a bunch of work put into it. We even went on an icebreaker ship to get reference.
As soon as we started to put it together, we realized how unbelievably tight the space was, and you could never make any kind of really interesting combat in it. And so it just withered on the vine right there. I mean, when I started, there was that document that was the tech wish list. It was just this very bare bones bullet list of tech features. And I mean, I think it was like six years of work to build that.
tech list and then realize it into a product and leverage all the implications of it, you know. So this was a main feature that the light felt very very realistic and intuitive because of the source engine and the work the collaboration between artists and engineers. Ken Birdwell and he was a fan about photography and getting the the lighting right. The math that we were using was wrong and not only that the math at every was using was wrong. And then as I started to correct it and I realized just how bad it was and then I fixed it and suddenly everything looked great.
I need to go tell the hardware guys, the people who made hardware accelerators, that fundamentally the math was wrong on their cards. That took about two and a half years. I could not convince the guys. Finally we hired Gary McTaggart and Charlie Brown and those guys had enough pull and enough I have a fine arts major.
Nobody's going to listen to me. Charlie and I met at college at the University of Florida. We were both getting computer science degrees. Yes.
I ended up dropping out to go work at 3DFX as employee 11 there. And then, I think, Charlie, you actually graduated, didn't you? I graduated and then followed you, and I was 17 there.
Yeah, yeah. I was 17. There were three kind of principles. One was to make something that...
It was immersive, visually really rich and appealing, something more like you would see in a film. And the art direction and the technology to make that happen. Second one was to have characters that you cared about. So basically that could react, emote, that mattered in the world instead of just being signposts.
Third was to have a responsive environment with physics that mattered. I think that I, maybe more than other people, realized just how... Big of a task we were setting for ourselves, like, so I was a little bit daunted by that. We felt the pressure from Gabe actually to to double down and make something even grander than Half-Life 1. Therein lies the sort of little bit of the trap of Half-Life 2's development story which went from being a pretty quick like let's figure out how to do this to like a six-year you know slog.
Yeah and it was like you know six seven days a week you know 10 to 14 hours a day. Yeah we're gonna cut your feature sorry it's just not worth it. So I ended up being really the point person working with the FBI. I remember coming in that morning and figuring it out, and it just felt like someone had just punched me in the gut.
What's this mean? Like, can we still keep working on the game? Like, is someone just going to release the whole game tomorrow?
I definitely was not shielded from that. You know, I remember one conversation with Gabe, which is like, he was like, so how fucked are we? Yeah, we're kind of screwed.
The company was pretty close to going bankrupt. I was pretty close to going personally bankrupt. It's like... there was no money left.
I can't think of another case when that happened. Yeah. A real bullshit move. I really had to cry in this documentary.
That's what I want to know. Remember we shipped Half-Life 1 and you know the world loved it and we're just super happy like yeah we did this thing and we had a big meeting and Gabe looks at me and goes like so all the animations are terrible How are you going to make Half-Life 2 better? In Half-Life 1 we made what were at the time significant improvements, but still they were fairly robotic and mechanical.
And so we had to go and do a huge amount of work on the animation system and on the facial animation system and coming up with authoring tools that allowed you to do it. Well, end of the line. A lot of this was level designer design, like figuring out how to build atmosphere. We knew that we wanted to start you off seeing the Citadel right away, and we wanted to introduce you to the city with this great voice acting from Robert Kolb.
We wanted to finally do real characters. We knew that from Half-Life 1, the way that players would respond to having any character talk to them was like way beyond. The reaction that we expected, like when we figured this out in playtesting, like if Barney would follow you around and shoot things, suddenly you just love this guy and you love the scientists, you love these characters.
So we knew we wanted to just bring that like way up to the next level, like levels beyond what we could imagine. And the theory was if we could make a character who could act realistically That that would help the player make an emotional connection to the other characters in the game. And at the time we decided we were going to do that, not only did none of the technology work, but I would go talk to industry professionals and they would tell me not to bother because you couldn't do it. Luckily, we found a research work done in the 70s by Dr. Paul Ekman. And he had just broken down how the face works and how humans make expressions.
And he had this incredibly wonderful formal clinical description of what a face does and the sorts of things that normal people do with their face. I tried this experiment with putting a grid on Scott Lynch's face and shooting him from the front and the side so that we could get points from this grid and three space for the geometry and we got shots of his texture and we found a good way to Model a reasonable head of his geometry and then project the texture onto it and then abstract it or stylize it enough so that it didn't look totally photographic but it looked like kind of a real person. Occasionally when somebody hears the history, it will generate a light bulb, but no, no, I don't get accosted. No one's asking you for beers or anything? No, no, or buying me beers.
We added Ken's eye tech to that, which was amazing because he really modeled and he went deep into the research of how eyes work. Eyeballs was about nine months, just on eyeballs. But you have to do each step.
You have to get the shape of the eye right. You have to get how the eyelid gets pushed by the cornea and the ball of the eye. So as your eyes move around...
All, you know, your lower lid, your upper lid, all of those get shifted slightly and it's all automatic. It was wonderful. The day I got it working, the characters went from looking like interesting dolls to Alex just looked at me. Oh my God, this is working.
They would ask for surprising things at times. Like they wanted really fine control over looking at named objects in the 3D world, no matter what direction the actor is facing. So you had to... figure out things about, oh, maybe the upper body needs to turn, and the head needs to turn, and the eyes need to turn. So we're in the elevator coming back from Starbucks to get morning coffee, and we saw this face, and it's like, that's him.
That's the scientist. And he was an accountant in the firm below ours in Kirkland. Yeah, nothing kind of blows your mind when you've been working all day on this character in your game, and all of a sudden you get on the elevator, and you're like, holy crap, it's him. I once ran into him at the airport.
So we cast people that were real change vendors in front of supermarkets. We cast waiters in restaurants. When I was in junior high school, I took karate classes, and that was my old karate instructor. Randy Lundeen said, hey, there is a guy holding a sign for work at this exit on 520 every day who has this great face, and he took a picture of his face, and he stopped and asked if he could.
And so it's like, oh, this is great. I think this guy's Eli. You know, we brought him in and, you know, paid him a couple hundred dollars, which is what we were paying people back then.
And so that's where he came from. Erdin Grisic was a Bosnian friend that I knew from school. He was like, we want the East European contingent and stuff too.
So it was pretty interesting. We wanted anybody to feel a part of the world when they're playing it as a player. And so... You know, we found people from pretty much every skin color, different ages, male and female, equal numbers of males and females.
Sadly for them, they all had to share the same voice actor. Sadly for us, too. We dropped a crate of rockets coming across the plaza. We hoped for one more fighter to help storm that barricade. We never dreamed it would be you.
The Kleiner's Lab was the first prototype that we did of how characters could work together in a scene. Yeah, it was like a proof of concept. We kind of had to make that work, you know, and put everything we could into it at the time to test all the technology and then know from there what else can we do with this. Turning it into a performance that would be engaging rather than just audio, radio play kind of thing.
Yeah, I mean, that was the point where that scene was where it all started to come together, all our theories and hopes for what the experience might be. In a lot of ways. completely smoothly, out of the box, it was amazing.
The most difficult technical aspects are really kind of boring. They're the, okay, the character is running through AI and now they need to jump in and do, you know, hug another character. Now they need to pick up something from the desk and that thing on the desk can move and where the character is can move and where the player is can move and everything about this whole scene can move dynamically.
And to get to that stage where it just looks right? It's this huge technical challenge and artistic challenge, but once it's done, it's just amazing. Snap out of it. You're staring at me again. Nicely.
Are you sure you don't want me to swap out the polarizer? I remember when we got Fletcher on, and he would kind of... Teach us about how they did things at Disney and they would bring in acting coaches for the animators.
What does sarcasm look like? Certain expressions and there's a timing to those expressions. When you have a scene with multiple characters, it's not always the person talking that's doing the acting. Everybody's acting. Even though you may be looking at Kleiner because he's the one talking, every character in that scene around you, behind you, they're all doing stuff.
because not everybody's going to be looking at the same place. Yeah, I remember even just like when Alex teleports and then you see her show up on the screen, right? Oh, that was incredible.
Heads over, gives him a quick kiss. It tells you so much about the relationship without having to say, Hi, Dad, I love you. And all this extra heavy-handed stuff.
Jake was a random demo reel that was sent in. It was incredible. Jake was incredible.
Jake was... incredible. Like, miss that guy.
One of a kind. Yeah, miss that guy. Amazing technical animator.
Yeah, I mean, Jake was one of those guys that, you know, whatever needed to be done, he would figure it out and just make it happen, you know. It'll just get done correctly. I think also the context of when all this was taking place, like the problems that he was helping solve were just things that weren't being done.
Even something as simple as passing someone an object between two characters sounds super simple but actually really complex, especially back then. And so he really helped push like how do we even do this in collaboration with the programmers. Zobby wanted to do a goo thing, so I worked on the shader for that. I did the stuff for rendering that and all the little monitors everywhere that that showed other scenes.
We did the refraction shaders and the code, the supporting code for that. The shaders didn't really have conditionals or loops or anything like that so we would unroll it all and compile a bazillion shaders. It got to the point where it was so many shaders and it took so long to compile that we, I think Mike Dessault implemented a distributed building system.
Everyone's machine in the company was running something that could sit there and compile shaders all the time or... do lighting for the levels or whatever. It's all like any opportunity to kind of add to the visual storytelling I think was...
Yeah, I think we hid the first G-man sighting there. He was one, that's right, he was one of the monitor. It would flip to him.
And then he'd just walk out of frame. The moment where you see him makes you realize there must be a lot of moments where you didn't know he was watching you. He's not big brother. That doesn't make sense to me that he would be a big brother because that's sort of industrial and bureaucratic. And this is much more intimate.
He's always over your shoulder, watching, waiting. for the moment to speak. That's where I think he lives. My name is Mike Shapiro and I am G-Man. I am also Barney and you know Barney's not he's he's not that far from you know G-Gordon like he's not that far from where I live you know he's so fallible and and and you know he's always tripping over himself and that he's just such a good guy you know not necessarily the most capable but just really there for you get that thing away from me yeah my pet hop up i think early on i had a sense that g-man knew a lot and was taking care of a lot that we didn't quite understand was kind of enjoying fucking with people and massaging reality in a way that he had a unique capacity to do There were also aspects to him that I knew pretty early on, like his relationship to time is very different than you or I would think.
In my mind, he could literally be in two places at once, and so sometimes there was a kind of an implied hitch in his timing. Or he's experiencing two or three different moments at once, and that might be funny for a reason that you don't know, because you're only in one time with him at a moment. The right man in the wrong place can make all the difference in the world. I think as we realized how well she worked, coming out of stuff like the Kleiner's Lab experience, we started looking for more and more ways.
to include her in stuff. And of course she really came to life when we found Merle Dandridge. Yeah. We could feel her already as a partner in creating this character, I think, coming out of that.
She's just got a creative relationship with this character and she's going to bring a lot to it. I feel like she was really able to bring a warmth and humor into her deliveries too, that other people, it was more like Soldier in a game a little bit. I mean, she did this great job of bringing a character warmth into it.
And now we're sitting ducks unless we can get this thing running. Come on, Dr. Kleiner, is it going to work or not? Now, now, there's nothing to be nervous about.
Let's see, a massless field flux should self-limit and I've clamped the... My name is Harry Robbins. I'm known as Hal Robbins.
I have a stage name. of Dr. Hal. My only doctorate is in theology from the Church of the Subgenius, which I'm involved in.
Well, I think perhaps Mark was familiar with the things I do on the radio, and he thought my voice would be good for it. I have a monthly Ask Dr. Hal show on Twitch and Zoom, and I'm also on a couple of radio shows. Well, I'm a graphic artist.
I've worked for DC Comics for their Paradox Press line. Well, I have some patrons who I do painting for. I've painted many things for them. I played Dr. Isaac Kleiner after I did the voice of a number of different scientists. I try to pronounce all the words.
I make sure to aspirate to consonants. For example, I don't say didn't the way most people do, even newscasters today. I always make sure to say didn't.
Perhaps it sounds archaic that way. Mark wrote archaic expressions into my dialogue and I would say things like, oh, fi, and so forth. No, not up there.
No, no. Careful, Lamar. Those are quite fragile. Oh, fie!
It'll be another week before I can coax her out of there. Yeah, longer if we're lucky. Barney, you're not an animal person.
It was always pleasant. I was always well treated. They were always patient. Even if I mispronounced something which was obvious, they would correct me and I would pay attention. And I always try to be as close as possible to a one-take wonder so they don't have to do it again.
But that enabled them to do it many times. and so they had a lot of things which arose from that and some of these are the things I'm asked to say by fans which are inexplicable to people who don't know the game. Like you want this guy to say, have you seen my coffee cup? Why do we all have to wear these ridiculous ties?
So in the same way that we thought it was important in Half-Life 1 that when you shot a wall... That, you know, we put decals on the wall to indicate that you shot it. We wanted to say, okay, what happens when you throw a grenade at a bunch of boxes, right?
The world itself needed to be more reactive to everything you did. We used some third-party code, but Jay Stelly was the one who really... wrote the wrapper on that that integrated it.
And physics was even early in the project was pretty successful. Once we got over the initial thing of like things falling over and we started adding breakable objects, things you could script and hammer. We added vehicles, sound cues from all the objects and the AIs. You could drop things on them and crush them, things like that. All of those behaviors, once we got just a few of those things in, that was really fertile.
For everyone who worked on Half-Life 2, masses got broken down into a set of scales that I assume someone's already talked about. No? Okay.
Well, you see. So, yeah. All right. So, the question is whether it's bigger than a bread box or smaller than a space station.
Yeah, right like that's her when you when you went to debug something and the text says oh This thing weighs as much as I racehorse. Yeah, you knew it was more than a bread boy You're like not as much as a space day. I think so, but I don't know in this scale Yeah, this all came from at some point I think it was David Spira Yeah, so you could look at any entity in the game and Turned on a bunch of debugging text about it.
And one of the most important things to get right in every object in the game that was physically simulated was its mass, because that dictated an enormous amount of things. Like the amount of force it would apply to something else when it hit them, its response when it's hit by something else, all that stuff. Had to get it right. But of course, mass is just a number. What does this mean to anyone?
So I think it was David Spira who found online some list of masses and objects, and he just... You just brought that into the game so that when you looked at an object, it'd say like a hundred, bracket, racehorse or something. So over time like you'll just got that locked in and because it was like an you know a logarithmic scale It went from things like you know bread box, paint can or something up to like space station. The moon! The moon!
You're like what? What do I do with this? At this point it's just keyframe at that point. Yeah, so there would be many like conversations where we'd say like I don't know do you think that's more like a racehorse or a... on the space station.
The very first physics puzzle that we put in the game, you know, from a development calendar standpoint, was the washing machine puzzle, where you push the washing machine into the hopper and raise the ramp for the airboat to jump over. We developed that because we felt like we had this section of relentless pressure with the attack. helicopter.
Watching players playtest we felt like they needed relief from it. You see the very first training of it in the on foot canals with the teeter-totter that you have to put the cinder blocks on which came which was added to the game later and it's sort of training of like hey you can interact with levers and balance and you know create paths for yourself and then yeah later the buoyancy puzzle we added that one after the washing machine puzzle. And it was just kind of like, oh, you can connect masses with invisible pulley systems and then build little machines that way. I guess at first, right, the gravity gun was kind of this, we weren't even sure we were going to ship it in the game. It was like a development tool.
And so it was like this beam, you could reach out and grab things and pull them toward you or reposition them, you know, drop them, grab them from another point. But then we talked about simplifying it and just making it to where it was just pushing on things and pulling on things. And where could we go with that?
And the first draft of Ravenholm wasn't really about physics so deeply, right? We ended up... reorganizing the game to put Ravenholm after you get the gravity gun. Originally it was before you would park the airboat at the dock of Ravenholm and then get out and go explore Ravenholm. We wanted like a horror area since in a lot of ways Half-Life was a horror game and the horror was kind of leeching out of Half-Life 2. So we at least wanted one environment that was just scary.
And then we had a design meeting where Doug Woods said you know, Preacher with a shotgun and I was like oh yes! The important thing to know is like we didn't sit down and design Ravenholm as like the tutorial for all those things. China kept getting things over time and then after we got more physics working we had this idea that there would be traps for the zombies in there that were physics and there were a bunch of them and they didn't all make it. into the final game. And then some of them did work though.
And we had to build a system for cutting the zombies in half once we added the propeller traps and we had to make them the right height so you could crawl under them or the zombies could crawl under them. and someone had the idea, well what if the top half can keep going and it can get you under there? You know, we tried that and that was great. Someone had the idea of a saw blade and Ravenholm already existed.
And we ended up, based on this behavior happening in another level, built the saw blade and went and put it back in Ravenholm. Ravenholm was probably some of the most fun I had working on Half-Life 2. The whole idea behind Ravenholm and that we were going to star view of ammo, sort of forced them in a position where they have to rely on physics and the context of the objects. around them. It's like, oh, wouldn't it be awesome if the zombie who, it's going to take him 30 more seconds to get to me, but he's got like a barrel right there.
Like, what if he could swat that at me? So that was definitely something that was just like, we have physics now. This would be a cool thing to do with it. And it'd be a thing that would make sense and a thing that would be scary and fun. One of the things that John was like extremely strong at was little touches.
Like, I think we called them puzzlets. We did call them puzzlets. Like, they weren't puzzles, they were puzzlets.
Yeah, it's this little thing that takes you between five and 60. 60 seconds to resolve and at the end you either get something or you feel a certain way and It was really a big part of making sure that like minute-to-minute gameplay as we called it was was interesting. Yeah, he was good at that We actually did this as an exercise of like okay take you know all the elements in the game and have a grid of you know rows and columns of all those elements and make sure that there's a meaningful thing at each intersection of those cells so that everything has a meaningful interaction with everything else. And where we saw empty cells, we would actually design a thing.
Yeah, is there something we could do there? Yeah, barnacles plus grenades or whatever, you know. Okay, we need to make sure that they'll eat the grenade and then blow up.
Like the reason we build these scripting level design tools, you know, it's just, it makes it accessible for all the people on the team if you can't write code. to like put something together, try out an idea, you know, see what we can do with this. And the entity system's no different, right? A lot of things, a lot of designers just wanna like have this idea for something that could happen.
Is that fun? Look to your own salvation. Yeah, I was on TF2 at that time and I don't remember exactly. I think it was during 2000 maybe?
Someone else has probably told you this and got the dates actually right. But at some point we all jumped from TF2 over to Half-Life 2. I feel like that marks the sort of, in some ways in retrospect, like the end of like pre-production really on Half-Life 2 and it becomes now, like let's build this thing and ship it. Actually the first thing I got told to work on was a jet ski and I spent three weeks trying to figure out how to do it. to figure out a jet ski in first person.
I was like, okay, none of this is working. I can't, I don't see how, how do you do this without making people sick? So I remember one weekend out of frustration, I just made the airboat.
I don't know, maybe it's the Florida bit in me. So Charlie Brown had worked on the airboat and then we picked it up a different group. We started working on the canals and we had this idea that was going to be kind of like a lot of tricks under pressure where you know you're doing like skateboarding type moves. I think it was Kelly Bailey who basically said you know I'm playing the canals and I'm trying to do these tricks and I'm failing and then I'm getting shot. And he's like, I want to be like Smokey and the Bandit.
I just want to be smashing my way out. We did this whole other pass of the canals where we dialed down the consequences for failing the tricks. And we dialed up the feeling of, you know, power. Some players...
absolutely refused to really stay in their airboats. They wanted to get out and look under every rock, behind every tree. For those players, we had to craft enough density through the lengths of the canals to keep them entertained and happy. And then there were people who just wanted to smash through everything and treat it like a racing sim.
And so the game had to be fun and interesting for them. And sometimes that would clash. If you stop here, we're gonna give you a reward. basically either a narrative reward or like an actual like in-game Like reward. The lambda caches, the lambda signs, we use them away a lot more in the canals.
And part of that is literally because we did it afterwards. I mean, I had worked on coast maps and we didn't have that yet. You know, the canals are restrictive because we want you to drive this airboat through them.
And we've got all these fun things to do. Like you could jump over things, you could smash through things. The worst case scenario is you're trapped with people who have guns and they're shooting at you.
And you don't necessarily have a way of shooting back. So, you know, that led to, well, we need to add a weapon. to the vehicles.
Well, part of it was the helicopter was such a persistent pain in your ass that we really wanted to put a bow on that whole experience and give you some vindication, some vengeance, where you get to now hunt them. helicopter. So as soon as we attach it, one thing we intentionally, really intentionally did is you start to drive down the tunnel and the helicopter pops down in your face and it's blocking you and you have no choice but to just shoot it if you want it to go away and then you see it flee. And so it's like, oh, okay, the players could connect the dots, right?
Now it's my turn. So the next sequence is all about chasing the helicopter down to that final battle at the dam. I remember we worked pretty intentionally to make it the ultimate showdown between you and the helicopter, and some of it was by accident.
I remember Brian Jacobson, who did a lot of the code for that, at one point it accidentally did this thing where it just spit out. out a ton of bombs and we're like that is awesome keep that make that part of the fight you know we we tried to make it as action-intensive as we could within reason right That battle was actually, in a way, we designed it to be a final exam. We unraveled those elements into the levels beforehand, right? You learned how to dodge bombs, you learned how to shoot at it, and you learned how to shoot while driving. And then we throw those things together at you with a little bit of a twist.
Canals was sort of like a crucible because a lot of good things came out of it because it was such a difficult design problem. The easy thing to do is to make a punishing design where you just say you can't go here and we're going to shoot you and force you to fail and fail and fail until you get to see the next part of the game. It's much harder to create something where the player feels there's an evolution, they have some power and some agency, so their skill is being rewarded and they can be creative in that restrictive environment. until you got a feel for the car.
When you're doing it, you're in for the slow, you're in for the water. So basically, I had a whole car engine down to through transmission, down into gearing and differentials and turning the tires. But then it turned out like, oh, we can really only go 15, 20 miles an hour.
Otherwise, you would blast through the extents of the map in about 10 seconds, which wasn't going to do anybody any good. People made jumps, they made all these things. Nothing was working.
So I was like, oh, you must be doing a jump. I'm just going to turn off gravity on the car for a little while and let it just go and then gradually ramp it back in so that it actually felt like you were jumping. It was interesting how the dynamics of the buggy was so much about the perceived experience versus how it actually... like perform. It just sounds like it's going faster than it is.
So Jay and I worked really hard on these engine sounds and this fake transmission and doing all this stuff. But you're really going like 30 miles an hour maybe. So it's like someone just driving around in first gear. Got pulled into Coast one because I was interested in working on more game stuff.
But two it was the biggest I guess group of people utilizing the displacement tech since it was more of a terrain-y thing and outdoors. And we were trying to figure out how we wanted to use the displacements. Meaning we knew we wanted the things to look more natural.
There was a lot more geometry in those maps than our previous ones, given just displacements in general. We were always struggling with performance and trying to figure out how to make things a little bit faster, easier, or where we could make things do what we wanted them to do, but not necessarily cost as much as they cost. It's much faster than walking speed, so you just signed up for building a huge... amount of game.
People can just stop and get out anywhere. So now you have this trade-off of density versus distance. We've got a vehicle we want to drive for a while, so make those levels long. But from Half-Life 1, we still had the the philosophy of there should be something cool around every corner.
Not like a monster popping out of you, but different reasons to be engaged in the world. So they would dot the coastline with little towns and you knew if you went exploring you'd always get some kind of reward for that. It might be a health pack and ammo or it might be a character interaction. So that would let the player set their own pace and feel like they get to explore the world and they're always rewarded for that, but if they wanted to drive straight through, they could. I worked on like the area where there's the roller mines first come in and you know you're going along a curving path and then there's like a, they blow up all the rocks and drop stuff in front of your path to try and slow you down and then you've got like a little house fight.
There were cases early on where people would just try to drive past everything and be like, why would I stop at this if I've got a car? And so we really wanted them to be fairly unavoidable, and so you'd have to get out and deal with taking them off your car, and then you'd be in the space. So it's really fun just jumping in there with the Combine soldiers and crafting little fight scenarios.
What makes AI fights interesting is not that they're the smartest or the best or anything. It's easy to make AI that can just perfectly shoot the player and kill them. That's not what makes them smart. It's putting on a show that makes them feel interesting. So like in that fight in particular, you go up inside of a building and you get to the second floor and you're fighting guys in there and they kind of pull you up there.
There's guys up in there. And as you go up and fight them, that happens. But then more guys spawn outside. Like there's a bunch of windows up in that top section and there's a crate sort of near the window. And when you go over to get that crate, they start shooting through the window at you.
And it's not that the AI actually knows that you're there and starts shooting at the window the moment they see you. There's actually, we have these things called... bullseyes that you could place in spots and they basically would act like a target that the AI wanted to shoot.
You know a lot of that isn't actually the AI being you know doing this carefully crafted thing it's more of us thinking like what makes this like a neat presentation for the player and gives them that sense that they're kind of they need to hunker down. Like later on in the same coastline there's a sequence where you're fighting a gunship and you're in the lighthouse and as you go up the lighthouse It's like sort of predicting where you are and shooting through the windows right in front of you and giving you that same sort of show. And that's all like bullseyes and things. Almost every game you play, you're developing a sense of mastery and that actual sense of progress and mastery is the fun. Piecing it all together is like very core to what makes it fun.
The car's all ready. Hop in and I'll lower you down to the beach. We did the player drivable crane first, I think, right? Yes. And then we went back and used it again, you know, at the start.
That's a perfect tutorial. Like, perfect training. This is how that thing works. Don't forget, because it's about to happen later, and you have to do it.
We did actually get very close to the base of a crane. You know, obviously, you want to be in the crane, you want to be driving and all these things. But, yeah, we did get up very close to this crane. And, again, I think it was asking somebody. We were just...
Wanting to take some pictures for a video game because you just let us in, try to act as like nice and non-threatening as possible. We need the buggy to get into a state where it was flipped so you could have to learn to recover and all that sort of stuff. Like, oh, we're going to flip it over and then you have to proceed, you have to use the gravity.
We're just trying to wrap that in some sort of narrative instead of just spitting some text that tells you if this happens, you know. That was, you know, I mean, the crane was a hard physics problem because like one of the worst case scenarios for physics is really, you know. high mass objects moving around because they're going to apply an enormous amount of force to anything they touch and we have a rigid body physics system so in the real world when giant heavy mass touches something usually it crushes them we can't really crush anything so already we're in like a tricky place the good news was we had a fixed space it could operate right you can't we could control how far you could extend the thing and so as the level designers could look at and be like these are the only things that the crane will ever really be able to interact with and so we could be pretty careful around what are the things that this magnet is going to touch and let's make sure that at least the physics works pretty well for that.
So I worked on the bridge as one of the really early things I worked on there, which was great. Sawyer had already built the bridge. It's actually based on Deception Pass.
So Deception Pass is nearby here in Washington. Coincidentally, I actually proposed to my wife there. But anyway, it's this really nice bridge that like if you go there you'll be like, oh, yeah, this is the Half-Life 2 bridge. The fight against the gunship and everything wasn't really all put together.
It was definitely had that like scary you know, fear of heights scenario of going under the bridge. But we hadn't fully fleshed it all out yet. One of the first things I did was like, what if this was a train bridge and you had to do this, you know, play chicken against the train?
And getting the timing quite right was, took a little bit of work. But hearing the like train horn come in and The moment of realization that players would have of like, probably some people die, a lot of people probably die the first time there, but you have this like, do I go faster or do I turn around? Like, what do I do? I don't know, it was just a fun moment to create.
All credit to Sawyer on coming up with the going underneath the bridge scenario. People to this day still are like, that freaked them the hell out. Like, a lot of people just, it's sort of seared in their memory, which is just, you know, it's what we want to do when we're creating levels.
Trying to like, capture the sense of height and playing with the ambient sounds to get the... You know, just to capture the sense of being precarious and high above the ground was just a fun little design challenge. David came up with that, and we playtested it, and the first time we playtested it, I think the person who was playtesting, their knuckles were white.
And it was really tense. And of course, then someone had the brilliant idea of like, oh, they finally made it, they felt great, now we're going to make them go back. And the gunship, yeah, that came in, yeah.
So that was always fun. There's this thing we call edge friction. So when you're moving, you have a friction that just reduces your normal movement rate by an amount.
But what we would do is whenever players would get close to edges, we would increase that friction a lot so that people wouldn't accidentally fall off things. It's just not fun for the player. So there was definitely a bit of friction play involved there. Gordon Freeman!
Hurry, get in the basement! We're expecting gunships at any moment! He became iconic for reasons I don't totally understand except the performance.
We were calling that town Little Odessa or Little Old Nude Odessa. And then I got spam email from Odessa Cubbage or something like that. It was definitely a name that came out of an email spam.
And I'm like, this name. is amazing. So it went straight into the game and then John Lowry came in and acted him with his fake British accent. Damn! Let me just send a warning to Lighthouse Point and then I'll come right up and lend a hand.
So Dessa Cubbage had this whole problem of like training the rocket launcher. That was a real pain. The laser guiding aspect was just a nightmare to train because training in combat is always a nightmare by itself because people are under duress.
They're trying not to die. They're focusing on some other thing. that's threatening them.
It's hard to observe what's going on rationally and draw lessons from it cleanly. So you always know it's gonna be hard if you're trying to teach something you know you're trying to teach in combat. We watch a playtester you know they step out and they fire a rocket at the gunship and then they duck behind cover so the laser doc goes onto the fence in front of them.
We all hear the rocket turn around and start coming back and so you're like... It's basically, here we go, five, four, three... And then the player looks out again at the gunship.
and the rocket goes whoosh, it loops around back at the crank gun chip and we're like ahhh! And then he ducks back again and we're like oh my god we hear the rocket getting louder and louder and he peeks out again and it whips off again. An integrated part that I think has really always been important, something that Gabe introduced in Half-Life 1 was the way that we playtest and then iterate really rapidly on the playtest results. So you have dozens and dozens of people come through one section of the game and you sit there painfully, silently taking notes while they struggle and get frustrated and totally misunderstand your brilliant design.
And then you go and you fix that over and over and over again. If your title is game designer and your design sucks, then it can be threatening, right? Like maybe I'm bad at my job and I should get fired, right? And so a lot of the games industry never did any testing at all with this play testing process.
That's what basically taught me design in a lot of ways. We would just, you know, we'd come up with an idea for the helicopter and then we'd... be like, okay, let's put it in front of somebody and watch it happen. And then we'd very quickly start realizing that our mental model of like how people are reacting to this stuff is wildly different than what we expected. I joined the team in January 2000. I had met Gabe when he was starting Valve and I was at Sierra Online.
But pretty much the first thing was, you know, Gabe was like, so when you're at Sierra, we did this deal with you for Half-Life and Half-Life 2. You need to go fix that because we don't like the deal that we did. You know, the intellectual property for Half-Life was owned by Vivendi. The Team Fortress IP was owned by Vivendi. So it was get back our IP, get a better royalty rate, and then have the ability to experiment with online distribution. We knew we were going to grow the team.
And then part of the deal was also that we were going to take on all of the funding responsibility for Half-Life 2, TF2, all those things. There was cash flow from Half-Life. We were figuring out how to do things here and there like expansion packs.
A large part of it was Gabe tapping into... His assets, he had done fairly well at Microsoft, not crazy well, but things started to get a little thin. So I assume you guys have talked to...
Scott or Eric or something about sort of the context of the whole. Yes, we talked to Scott, Eric and Gabe about it. Sierra, by that point, had become acquired by Vivendi, had worldwide distribution rights, but only for retail package product.
Vivendi was licensing Counter-Strike to cyber cafes. We went to Vivendi and said, hey, this is not a big deal, just... just agree that this is outside of your license.
And, you know, we've spent a little bit on attorney's fees, just cover, you know, some tens of thousands, just cover us for that. And we'll move on and just keep going. And they wouldn't do it.
I think some people at Vivendi did not like the new deal that they ended up signing. And I think there were some hurt feelings in some quarters about that deal. When we said, hey, the cyber cafe thing, you know, you really can't do that.
Coming on top of, you know, a year of negotiations and torturous negotiations, I think that just struck an angry court. We ended up filing the lawsuit, but really just on this narrow thing of like, hey, court, you know, will you go just read this language and say, are they outside the license or not? And Vivendi...
decided to go World War III. We filed our case in Seattle, federal court in Seattle, and they hired a law firm to defend it, of course. There was some initial skirmishing about discovery. There were some disputes and motions that had to be decided by the judge and those went all valves away.
And then suddenly the law firm disappeared. They hired a big scary law firm from San Francisco. They thought okay.
you know, Valve's had some success in this case. And so we need to change their mindset from, we think we're going to be successful to, we're going to be destroyed. The next thing we knew, here comes this big stack of counterclaims, everything from canceling the 2001 agreement, to obtaining ownership of all the Half-Life IP, to keeping us from doing Steam, to you name it, where they included... Scott and Julie Lynch and Gabe and Lisa Newell, his wife at that time, personally, as defendants.
And so it was kind of like, well, we're going to put Valve out of business and then we're going to bankrupt the two of you. I think that was a lot of what they felt like was their path towards winning this fight. They decided that it would have more effect and be scarier if process servers showed up at everybody's house in the night and handed, I mean...
So, yeah, a real bullshit move. It's not a legal strategy. It's basically trying to intimidate you. In other words, they're saying, not only are we going to take all this money from the company, but we're going to take money from you personally as well. I can't think of another case when that happened.
They were certainly a lot bigger than we were. Vivendi was a multinational conglomerate. As compared to us, their funding was infinite.
It felt very David versus Goliath. Publishers at that time in the industry were used to being able to bully developers, right? And so this was really about an assertion of power as much as it was... Optimizing for our financial outcome. The tactics that they were using were trying to just run us out of money, right?
So they knew how much money we were making because they were doing retail distribution of our games. And so they were just trying to crank up our legal costs as just another way of draining resources from the company. We were protected from that a lot internally, so we didn't have to think about it. They did a pretty good job of letting the team concentrate on what the team could do without worrying about the future of the company so much.
I mean, that was my perspective. So yeah, I definitely was not shielded from that. The lawsuit was something where it's like created all this uncertainty around whether the game's going to come out.
Vivendi was definitely trying to use that as leverage. And so even if we finish the game, they're not going to let us release it. There came a point where Gabe had pretty much used up his Liquid assets.
He was like, you know, should I put the house on the market? And I was like... Yeah, I think it's the time where you put the house on the market if we want to keep going. The company was pretty close to going bankrupt. I was pretty close to going personally bankrupt.
We went all in. It's like there was no money left. How anxious was that for you personally?
I don't know. There's certain things that I just, I'm kind of a weird person in a number of dimensions. Like I don't... really think, oh, this is super scary. Like I don't have an emotional response to it.
I just say, well, this is, this is what we're doing. This is how, and you know, we'll see how it, how it plays out. So I don't think it was super stressful to me.
Right. I mean, it didn't really bother me. Like I was diving in South Africa recently and a shark tried to bite me a couple of times and the people around me were way more freaked out than I was.
I was like, oh, a shark's trying to bite me. I should get away from the shark. Whereas other people were having like, oh, a shark, it's trying to bite somebody.
You know, and I just think that's how I'm wired. I don't think it's anything that speaks to my character or anything. It's like I just seem to not get particularly agitated around risk, which probably means I take on more risk than at times than most sane people would, which can be a positive or you can wreck a bunch of other people's lives being in the neighborhood of your risk indifference.
They're this rigidly structured, you know, organization. Of course they're going to have this really terse language for everything they do. You know, there's sort of an announcer voice in that follows you around and kind of comments status, essentially, like how alert the world is to you.
I sat down and just basically wrote a language for that so that the soldiers and the Metro cops would have jargon that they would use. Then I just used that to kind of encode. So that's where like anti-citizen won. and things like that came from, rather than saying, the guy with the orange suit is causing trouble. It would be anti-citizen one breach, scalpel something, sector something.
So I basically just had this little dictionary. Then I overdid it on the vocal processing, because they're all wearing these masks, and I wanted it to sound like they're in a mask. And it was very deliberate to never have to shoot somebody, that you can see their face.
Like we didn't want you killing humans. I mean the MetroCops are humans, but we covered all the faces up. I think it was all part of this calculated and deliberate way of saying like look, games don't just have to be a certain way.
There's so much room in what we can do here. Well the Metro Police and the Combine soldiers share a lot of AI and so there's an internal communication among them and one of the things we did both for the sake of difficulty and exposition was limit the number of squad members that could be firing at the player at any given time. I think it's two.
So if you have a squad of four, a guy who has an opportunity to shoot at the player grabs one of those slots, if it's available, and starts to shoot. And if someone else, another squad member, wants to attack the player but no slots are available, they have to find the next best thing to do, which is I'll get out of the scene for a second or I'll go reload or I'll throw a grenade and that was all stuff that we learned Building Half-Life 1 and I think got a lot better at Half-Life 2 used a node graph system, you know hand placed nodes by developers and the levels would describe a really super low Fidelity version of the environment for the AI to use. It enabled the level designers to sort of inject and puppeteer a little bit the AIs in ways that were just easier for them to sort of be in control as opposed to having to grab an animator or a programmer to be able to get really cool things into the game. Floor is Lava is like a really obvious piece of gameplay.
Physics is really fun to manipulate. We just thought like, hey, you know, you could build your own path. You know, we'd already seen players who enjoyed moving stuff around, like building bridges and stuff, and we're like, we don't have enough moments where like, I just pick up a plank and lay it across a gap and walk across it.
Like, obvious stuff, we've barely done that in the whole game. And the fact that you're laying stuff down on the floor means that the finesse required to do like Precise placement wasn't necessary, right? You're like, I just want to place it here.
And it doesn't matter the orientation, you just kind of jump on it, you do the next one and so on, right? And also, like, training was free. Like, we didn't have to train. It was like, stay off the sand.
Everyone got it immediately. And I was like, oh, it's Florida's last one. Lazlo, the finest mind of his generation.
I couldn't figure that one out. He tells you exactly how to do it. Someone's coming. You there! Stop where you are!
Stay on the rocks! Don't step on the sand, it makes the antlions crazy! Lazlo, don't move. No.
HELP! Dear God! Poor Laszlo! The finest mind of his generation! To come to such an end!
We were heading for the Vortigaunt camp, hoping to pick up some bug baits of these damn things and leave us alone! Without Laszlo... What's the point?
You just give these NPCs a name at the moment they die and let the fans fill in their whole life story and give them something to play with. The free man will have needs of these feral pirates on the path to the head. gather them now.
Nova Prospect and the antlions with the pheromone balls were really fun because it lets you experience them in a different way. And it was another classic example of getting the most value out of technology investments that people could. I remember the beach thing, the design intention was definitely to make it feel like a sort of D-Day beach landing. You didn't come from the water but you're storming up towards these old gun emplacements, if I remember right, with combine in them and you're like invading the bunkers and you're bringing your horde with you, you're overwhelming these emplaced defenses.
It was surprising how much chaos you could get away with. Like we, I remember we did a lot of tuning to make sure the the antlion spawned. We had difficulties from time to time with like design some choke point or challenge or whatever and the antlion flow rate wasn't enough to make it feel... chaotic enough.
Like we had an atmospheric goal too. It wasn't just about like mechanically can you overcome this. You wanted to feel like your forces have stormed the walls, they're everywhere, there's chaos all around you.
And so a lot of the tuning was about achieving that feeling, not just about mechanically getting past the enemies that we'd set. Nova Prospect was different than a lot of the maps that I worked on at least, is that in that we had some early art prototypes. that were done.
We have this whole concept of like zoo maps we call them, which are basically like little art test scenes, how they would fit together and some basic lighting. But by the time our cabal got to Nova Prospect, we knew we were coming in with antlions and with bug bait. And so we already knew that a bunch of stuff was going to change. because we had to support you and your army of antlions fighting Combined Soldiers. Antlions looked great whenever they were being shot by anyone.
Particle flex firing off and they just did, they always looked great. And so setting them up against Combined Soldiers looked great, setting them up against turrets looked great. Those were super fun scenarios to work on though because having these antlions that you could just use in any way you wanted was really fun.
And coming from the coast, just the contrast of shrinking everything down. and then just piling it full of stuff was a lot of fun. The first time I saw one of those, it was, I think it was Ted's, Ted Backman's concept.
I just thought, I can't believe that I get to use a creature this cool in level design. Like these guys are really, really, really fun to use. I remember Kelly Bailey hit, created a short list things like he wanted flocking flyers and he wanted a moving guard tower which was the first description of the Strider was a mobile guard tower so I saw that and immediately understood that you know kind of orchestrating the enemies in that way trying to get the most variety The most breadth of shape and movement and experience was the correct way to move forward. The design for that first Strider map was something I came up with and I was really passionate about. It was all about like running across and just getting like one shot in your tush right just as you made it through.
Even just hearing the the sound the thump thump thump of them walking like you know okay there's like a boss nearby you just see the legs walking by but you can't see the body like there are so many things you can do with these guys. Honestly, there were still people on the team I think that were still thinking that we were gonna bomb. That people are just gonna not be impressed.
When did you know it was gonna be good? E3. Yep. E3. Yeah, I'd say the same thing.
Yeah, it seems like at some point there was an E3 demo that we got together that we didn't end up showing, but at least at that point it just felt like, oh wow, we actually have made something here. We went through and made a bunch of demos for 2002 and everybody looked at them and was like... we're still not confident about this and we don't think we've hit the bar so we're not going to go at all.
They had totally planned to go. And then when 2003 rolled around, I just remember everyone was still terrified. We were like, okay, how are we going to craft everything we've had into a number of messages about what this product is?
And we came up with the core theme of each one of these movies. Oh, do be careful. We didn't really understand at the time, I think, the embarrassment of riches that we had.
We looked at it from two angles. One was a set of technical features, a sort of conceptual listing of things that we thought were important, you know, like physics and things like that. And then the other side was content based.
What areas of the game were innovative? What areas of the story we thought were compelling? Which characters we thought were worth people paying attention to? And so it was an interesting sort of marriage of... Which features and which content are the best showcase for all those things.
A lot of what was in the demos was rendering technology, but I think the stuff that felt the strongest to most of us at the time was really physics based. Music If something looks like wood, then it sounds like wood, scrapes like wood, floats like it, and if you shoot it, it'll fragment like wood. To people at that time, it was pretty mind-blowing just to watch the thing, be able to pick things up, knock other things over, use things in a way that felt true to a three-dimensional reality. Maybe it's on those videos, I don't remember, but people were gasping and, you know, hitting the people next to them.
because they couldn't really believe what they were seeing on the screen. There's no limitation on the complexity of those interactions. So it's this level of believable and consistent interactivity that opens the door to a wide variety of new gameplay mechanics. This will run on my 486. You know, that person who was talking about a 486, like it, obviously it's just about, like...
You must have a supercomputer behind like how are you how are you even doing this? What what is going on? The lines outside the booth became enormous and it was the thing that it really distorted the rest of E3 because so many people were anxious to come see our demo.
And I remember seeing this absolutely enormous line with like some pretty well-known people in there, right? Miyamoto was in line for this stuff. Will Wright, I think.
Yeah, Will Wright. There was a bunch. And so then, like, yeah, after that was all done, like, people on the team were just like, okay, we are ready. We can ship this game. We know we've got something good.
It was really easy at that point. Like, it felt like we were rolling the ball downhill after that. Until it leaked.
Until it leaked. When something like this happens, there's not like a big sign saying you've been hacked and somebody has access. Like you start off with something that just doesn't make a whole lot of sense and you start pulling on that sweater thread.
Gabe's brother had a company called Tangis and they made wearable computer stuff. So he was kind of winding it down and he had one or two Unix servers that hosted the tangis.com domain name. Unfortunately, they were put inside the firewall and didn't have the latest Linux or whatever security updates on them.
And so this kid from Germany was able to sort of exploit his way into that. He sat there for months, I think. He was able to sync the build, all the source code. I was riffing ideas for, I think in particular, Counter-Strike. That information ended up on one of the internet chat rooms.
And only two people knew the contents of that email. I, of course, gave it myself. And I went.
to ITG and said, this could only have come from a leaked email. We got to figure out how that got out there. But I remember at some point Gabe walking around, you know, like one of those moments, like turn your computer off, something just happened. Like I remember the video on my desk and he called me like, turn your computer off.
I think we're being hacked. And I was, what? Like, I didn't know what to do.
I actually did not know what to do. I remember coming in that morning and figuring it out. And I just felt like someone had just punched me in the gut.
You know, it's like the bit in movies where like after an explosion now. have a scene where someone's like staggering around the street and everyone's like yeah uh what's this mean like can we still keep working on the game like is someone just gonna release the whole game tomorrow and i don't know if the guy who hacked it intended to i think yeah he showed it to friends he intended the wide distribution he showed it to friends and then one of his friends posted it somewhere yeah uh unfortunate yeah One of the things I think that's pretty interesting is how much the leak of the game, the hack of our network and the leak of the game, how much that kind of shattered that confidence. It was like, you know, having a movie that you're working on be spoiled for the world. That's how it felt.
Because we knew it would be hard for people to know that that existed and not go look at it all. It looked all broken to us and it just felt really demoralizing. Oh man, I was seriously affected by that. I was pretty angry, so I don't know. It kind of affected me for a while.
You know, having it called the beta when it was not even close to being a beta. Work in progress, you know. I wasn't really ready to be seen yet.
Normally the office is pretty vibrant and loud and people are riding scooters in the hallway and doing all sorts of stuff, Gabe's tube and throat singing, and it got very still and very quiet. I remember that, that was very eerie. That was the game that was gonna make or break the company. We didn't know if we were gonna have to go find jobs. Not only did it show everybody that we were not anywhere near where we said we would be, but all the work that we had in progress, all the plans that we were making were just laid out bare.
And so a lot of us just thought, oh, we're toast. We've worked so hard. Are we going to go bankrupt? And then all that while Scott Lynch and Gabe were being sued by Sierra, their wives being delivered subpoenas. And so it was this super dark time.
So there were two interesting threads going on. One was traditional law enforcement intelligence agencies, and they were doing their thing and issuing subpoenas and seizing devices. And then we asked our community to help us out. And I think Axel Gembe started to realize that he, you know, he was being tracked down by the community, right?
Everything was being, essentially, it was an open-sourced investigation. So you could see that they were getting closer, and that's when he reached out to me. Of course, I was insanely furious with him, but we ended up running this sort of scheme with him where I was like, oh, wow, you must be really good at security issues.
We should have you come out and interview. And the FBI was going to arrest him when he got off the plane. And then apparently the German police sweep in right as he's about to leave because it turns out he's also guilty of a bunch of bank fraud and bank hacking and all that kind of stuff.
He had hacked into a bunch of huge, huge companies over there as well, and so they were already well aware of him. How much it harmed us financially or how much the success of the game was harmed by that, very debatable. You know, so it was hard for us to go through internally, but in the end, I wouldn't have wanted to have it be a whole law enforcement debacle. After that, it just wouldn't have really helped anyone.
And I don't say we should ever be lax about security, but if we could survive that, maybe we'll survive anything. Because at the end of the day, the special sauce was everything that happened between the moment of that leak and when we actually shipped. And if you look at that version of the game, it's just so not what the final game ended up being. And so even if our competition had all the source code and that executable, they're still not able to produce Half-Life 2 from it. Because the company kept moving forward and the company was the interesting special sauce.
Gabe in particular, he had kind of a pencil sketch of an idea in his head of what would become Steam. But it was clear that Team Fortress Classic and then later Counter-Strike, it was fundamentally the thing that we were really attracted to was our ability to ship content directly to our customers. I mean there was a set of business goals that ended up being part of Steam, but fundamentally there was it was a bunch of game development goals that it was servicing that were so attractive to us. It was a very weird time like I don't think people understand how many times we would go to people and say no you will be able to distribute software over the internet and have people just say no you never it will never happen. I'm not talking about one or two people.
I mean, like 99% of the companies we talked to said it will never happen. Your retail sales force will never let it happen. But also people would say users aren't going to want this, right? People want physical copy. Like there were so many bad faith arguments that were being made.
Retail sales is not the goal, right? It's actually an impediment that it's somebody who sits between you and the customer. And we ended up going out to the finance company called Applied Microsystems.
So we ended up hiring most of the original Steam team from that other company to build initially this sort of in-game advertising streaming model, but then there was the epiphany that, hey, it's just bits, why don't we just download whole games this way, you guys go off and do it. The decision to not only use Steam to ship Half-Life 2, but actually to require Steam, even in the versions that were purchased at retail in a box, was the most interesting decision of all those because it turned out to be an incredibly important decision for the future of the company. And a lot of us were nervous, and a lot of the people who had been at Valve for a long time, since the very beginning, were the most nervous about that decision. And so it was one of the rare exceptions to our decision-making process usually, and Gabe had to really step in and say, no, actually we're doing it this way.
I remember Coming to work in the morning, working at a half-life 2, which meant that, you know, by the time you go home at night, me being 24, a 24-year-old idiot, all I wanted to do was keep working on the game. And, you know, I started just making the game work on multiplayer, right? You know, mostly just working on prediction, like, what would it feel like to have a gravity gun?
On a multiplayer setting, right? Getting physics objects to work. You know, it was just curiosity.
Scott Dalton saw me working on it. And he's like, I'll make a map, and then we play. Put the map up, we started playing in the office in between builds of Half-Life 2, like playtest. And I remember Gabe walking by my desk.
And I remember him going like, what's that? And I said, oh, it's Half-Life multiplayer. And he's like, show it to me tomorrow.
And he just walked away. I think that is one of the advantages of the general cost we always pay to keep our code in a single code base. So when we're working on TF2 and Half-Life 2 at the same time, at that point, we're paying this continuous cost in Half-Life 2 for the fact that it's built upon an engine that's designed to do multiplayer, but it means that when you get to this level, later point where you start asking, well, can we build multiplayer deathmatch out of this? Like the code's all sort of built upon a fundamentally a client server sort of foundation. Definitely the most entertaining thing that you could throw at somebody that happened to be scattered around the world was picking up a toilet and hurling it at someone's head.
And then having that show up in the upper right corner of your screen with name, toilet name, was very satisfying. I was also selfishly trying to get the game ported to multiplayer so then we can release the tools, the SDK, ready to go. Like it meant mod makers could just immediately start making multiplayer game mods, rather than waiting for us to do it or someone else to pick it up.
We were so heads down working on what we were working on, we didn't really get a chance to play the train station. I remember that that was one of the lessons that came away from Half-Life 1 is like... We need to be building these games backwards in a sense.
The first thing we're going to put in front of people is the thing we built when we're as good as we can be at it. You know, we know our tools and things like that. And a lot of the anxiety over are we building a good game was behind us.
And I felt really confident, yeah, we're building a really good game. We're entering the Garde d'Osterlitz. This train station is very important because it's one of the main inspirations for the train station of City 17 where the player starts. The reason why I'm using a Parisian station produced by Eiffel, who did the Eiffel Tower, is that there's an identical station in Budapest. Train Station's the last bit we worked on, right?
And we always want to build the start of the game as late as we can, because we understand our game at that point. In general, the Train Station was a really interesting problem because it was basically one big choreo sequence intended to deliver atmosphere and story and background. and sort of set your expectations for the world. We let the level designers who were really good at this stuff figure out what was a good experience.
And then we were kind of always there to provide dialogue, acting, stuff like this guy. I think it was pretty clear, too, that we wanted to provide incentive to the player at this point. About how people were being mistreated, about how bad the situation was here and kind of start to trigger that righteous indignation early.
All this stuff is fun to look at but you just assume it doesn't move and you can't interact with it, you can't pick it up. Because all the stuff we're gonna do later, the gravity gun and everything, like first we got to start just mundane stuff like that food, you know, that little... empty bit of food.
I mean, it happens like the moment you leave the train, wind comes and blows all the trash away. Yeah, they're just doing it everywhere. You can see the vortigaunts sweeping. So like, guy pushing it on the cases.
Yeah, and all those things fall off. You can pick those up. Or like, if it doesn't have to be bolted down, just make sure it gets knocked off.
It can move. You citizen, come with me. This guy looks vaguely chameleon.
Something about the way he walks. The way he walks. He's like a beer drinker.
Who would have thought Barney has the capacity to go undercover? Right? Like that, that is that seemed to be you know, above his pay grade, above his intelligence pay grade from the get-go.
Look at that beautiful animation. But where does that go? It's gone. Something is not right here. Magical combine tech.
We were trying to figure out how to get people to figure out how to pick up things and do things. And we were all just sitting around because we've been having this problem for weeks, racking our brains. And I think Robin had a Coke can on his desk. And at some point I got frustrated and I smacked it off his desk. I'm like, well, you pick that up then.
And everyone kind of sat around. I was like. I just found it just an immensely satisfying piece of like a storytelling and world setting.
You know, we got to use our physics tools and the choreo tools and all. And all of those things blended together into this very simple, clean moment. Like the can cup is perfect also because while it's teaching you how to manipulate objects, it's also telling you something about the combine themselves and the MetroCops.
And your relationship. Yeah, so like it was a twofer, right? We got those two at the same time.
Physics is going to be a big part. of our game. By the time you left Train Station as a player, you understood that and you'd come to appreciate it.
Because we couldn't wait until you got to Ravenholm before you found out how awesome physics is. If you'd had any kind of weapon, I think they would have had to kill you. And we found the longer we sort of held that away from ourselves, the more we were forced to come up with stuff that was still entertaining that you could do. Like the raid is a whole, you know, in the tenements, there's a whole thing that could work because the player could only run. We don't very often force the player into a very specific set of actions.
That's one of the few times that we had to learn to really corral the player. And I think we ended up being pretty successful. Like I think the consequences for sort of not following on the clear path were quick and efficient.
Get in here, quick! Get moving, head for the roof! So, when you build the world, I start with the infrastructure.
What's really interesting for me is what is not visible to the tourist, which is the courtyard, the backyard, the shafts, and the smokestacks, and the wires. And every city has this whole existence. And, you know, people... are usually blind to it and they we tend to look at storefronts right yeah i mean a lot of it came down art direction i mean victor was very very familiar with all that the look and feel you know there was certain patterns and certain um yeah iconic shapes that anybody who lived there could could pick up on you know they're like oh My grandmother had that dresser or whatever.
And my parents are from Argentina, and so they have that kind of sensibility. But a lot of it came down to the reference gathering, which was from Bulgaria, from Paris. We have these buildings that, again, have back courtyards.
They have big staircases. They have cellars, attic spaces, cellar spaces. And the apartments have big windows and thick walls. So this was providing already a lot of context for people who can hide in these apartments.
Help! Stop! We didn't do it!
For you now. You'd better run. I remember that we wanted to have the player see proof that the Combine were evil people, not that they were grey in any way, that they were objectively the bad guys. And then we had it to where you go upstairs and then we really carefully and intentionally framed the reveal of the world to Where you see the Citadel front and center and it's clearly in an alert state the four of us the city 17 cabal We've done city 17, which is a bunch of hard problems.
We've done Raven home, which is a different set of heart problems We were like, I don't know four months from trying to lock down the game or something I mean it was really late. I may have the dates wrong, but it was really late And there was a bunch of gameplay that was in there that hadn't really received a lot of development. We were coming from working with pretty much every tool in the game in C17 to going back to basically have a pistol and MetroCops.
Not much really. So John and I, John Guthrie and I absolutely love exploding barrels. So we just used them absolutely everywhere we could. We set them up, we loved ragdoll magnets and physics.
It's just one of my favorite tools. It's basically, you have a point in space that when a character dies, they turn into a ragdoll. And then you have a ragdoll magnet that says, OK, if there is any ragdoll in this radius, pull towards me, and then you can give it a strength. And so if somebody dies in an especially dramatic location, you can have an especially dramatic death. And we just use that absolutely everywhere.
I mean, you can use it to pull someone directly down. And so in that bridge, the train bridge, I put... Magnets directly beneath their feet so it looks like they just like the planks beneath their feet broken, they just fell directly down.
I mean they died from a broken plank which doesn't make any sense but they looked pretty cool. It was so orchestrated I guess because we don't want it to like we don't really have a lot of time to have like a lot of bugs come out of it. Our team was the one that did the Citadel.
You know how I said that there was multiple passes on the product over the course of the thing? Well, Citadel had almost no pass. And we were thinking about Street War, and we were like, we just had this incredibly intense Strider fight.
How are we going to outdo that, especially when we only got a month to do this thing? We then came up with the idea of like, well, what if we made this just be your god, and this is the reward? You've won the game. Enjoy, we're gonna like break all the rules and let you be God for a little bit. Picking up, you know, the enemies as ragdolls and throwing them around really came out of that development tool because you could pick them up and move them around and people are like, I don't know, that's pretty fun.
Why can't we do that in the game? It was either a week or a day. It was incredibly quick. I had every single mechanic of the Citadel mocked up. The combine ball was actually a very, very heavy watermelon that would bounce around and eventually break up.
I had spikes in the wall that you could skewer them on. We had electric fields that you can throw them in. We had the zero-g fields that they would get stuck in. And we had ripping off the machines off the walls.
All that stuff all came together within an incredibly short period of time, just a couple days. Very shortly after that, people were like, like, eh, you know, we were having a real hard time with the AR2's alt fire, so maybe we'll just steal this because it's kind of cool and we'll bring it earlier in the game. Game development never does this. It never just materializes out of nothing in that short a time and is just something that everybody's excited and happy about. And it just, it felt really good to be a part of that.
I started working on trying to find another source of funding to keep Valve going. I started working on a deal with a big publisher that was for Counter-Strike 2. So we're right there ready to sign. We're really kind of running on fumes at that point and then get a phone call and they're like yeah we changed our mind we're not doing this.
You know, I remember one conversation with Gabe, which is like, he was like, so how fucked are we? And I was like, well, yeah, we're kind of screwed. We could probably reformat everything that we're doing, but it means we lay off people. And we still had the huge uncertainty of what is going to happen in the lawsuit. Media at least started chasing another publisher and were able to get a deal done with another publisher for Counter-Strike 2. When we got the deal done, Gabe at that point was super into knives.
And as the deal gift for the parties, he built a knife that was inscribed Counter-Strike 2. And so the deal structure was after we ship Half-Life 2, if you decide that you don't want to keep moving forward, then you can just decide to terminate the deal and we'll pay the money back. That ended up happening. So maybe a good choice because it took us a long time to ship Counter-Strike 2. So that we got done in probably May of 2003. And then through some more depositions, Lavendi figured out that we had gotten this new infusion of capital and kind of lost their mind trying to figure out how did that happen?
Because it was clearly part of their strategy was running us out of money. But what we decided was, hey, let's focus on the real nub of this and the thing that's going to lead. to a resolution.
Getting the judge to decide that we were right about the cyber cafe business and also to decide that we were right that if you were distributing these properties without a license that that's copyright infringement. You know we had asked for the information about what they were doing in Asia including Korea and they I think to try to make our lives more difficult produce a big chunk of documents. In Korean, they were in Korean.
I mean, everything from email to contracts to you name it. And one of the things they were doing is just dumping huge amounts of discovery on it to force us to go and just have somebody go and look through it. It's like, oh, look, they ordered sandwiches again, right?
It has nothing to do with the lawsuit. It's just an attempt to overwhelm us with tens of millions of pages of documents on the assumption that there's nothing in it that will be particularly problematic for their case. They will eventually just give up, will either spend a bunch of money which plays into their hands or will just eventually give up because it's finding a needle in the haystack. And then we found the needle in the haystack and that changed things quite dramatically.
It just so happened that there was an intern, Summer Associate, who was a native Korean speaker and I said, Andrew, hey can you look at this pile here and just can you just tell me what what's in there? I would guess that that particular intern probably went through a couple thousand documents that day and only one was consequential. And then they said, well, there's these other emails between these vice presidents where one says something like, hey, we destroyed those valve documents like you asked.
And I said, are you sure it says that? And. I said, yeah, that's what it says.
And so, of course, that led to a conversation between me and the lawyer for the other side about, hey, it looks like your guys are destroying evidence. What's up with that? They wrote back and said, you're out of your mind.
Whoever translated doesn't know what they're talking about. I talked to Andrew again. I said, well, it looks like we're going to have a kind of a fight about this.
We're going to need an affidavit from you about your translation. Can you tell me a little bit about your Korean skills? He goes, well, I'm a native speaker at UCLA. I majored in Korean language studies. And I said, that's good.
That sounds like we're in good shape. The assistant general manager in Korea sending the letter to the general manager of Korea saying, I have destroyed those documents related to the valve case as directed, which I think is one of Carl's happiest moments as a lawyer in his entire career. Just like stuff like this never, ever happens.
I did a lot of lawsuits for a long time. I never saw anything like that. Never. Maybe there was document destruction that couldn't be proved, but that was like. We're talking about it in writing.
I'd never seen that before. At that point, Judge Dilley said, all matters of fact are now, according to Valve, you don't get to contest any of those. Now we're just discussing how much you're going to have to pay and what the damages are.
And Gabe was still pretty mad. He was mad. He really didn't want to settle.
He was mad enough that he wanted to keep going. I remember sitting down with Carl and having a conversation with Carl and I was like, so Carl what do you think? Should we settle at this point? Is the right number? And he was like, well you know there's this old saying there's a difference between being a pig and a hog.
Carl was done with the deposition and that was the only question I asked him to ask that particular witness was is Half-Life 2 being replicated and shipped to retailers. He said yes and the relief was hey, no matter what, at least the game's gonna get out to people which is kind of a that's pretty unusual way to find out from your publisher that they're shipping your game to retail. You know, I've kind of been thinking about this for the last few days and, you know, what if there was one thing that I can point to that made us successful over that development period?
And I think that it was really this culture that Gabe created where we were hiring people that were senior enough to be managers, but also passionate enough to still be individual contributors. They were willing to stake their credibility and their name on these big features and sometimes spend years working on those features. Yeah, and it was like...
you know, six, seven days a week, you know, 10 to 14 hours a day. It wasn't always, I would say, a good 18 months at least. But a lot of good memories, though. I mean, everyone in that room has such great sense of humor. Like, we all, we knew each other's sense of humor, we trusted each other, respected each other enough that, like, we could rib each other without, you know, like, stepping on it.
each other's toes and stuff and it just worked pretty well. It was just bigger, more pressure. But that all, and I think that seriousness in some ways, there's still humor, but that seriousness kind of infuses into the game. You feel it's a heavier game. It's the most cohesive product feeling I can think of at scale that we've done as a company.
The whole company was just aligned and got it done. I think back on this experience and it was a really hard time but I feel super grateful because we were supported to make the very best game that we possibly could and given the time to do it we're going to ship it when it's done even when we made unreasonable promises about when that might be in advance and it was also at a time before the game industry was quite as specialized as it is now where people got to wear multiple hats and contribute in all the these different ways. So it was a rare life experience and I'm really grateful to have been part of it. Part of the fallout of Half-Life 2 shipping was the realization that we can't... We can't do six year long bet the whole company bets over and over again and all if we get it wrong one time we're a big crater in the ground as Gabe would say and so we started to think about episodic releases.
The first idea when they pitched it to us like we're gonna do this episode of content we'll do one every how much 12 months. Yeah we were gonna have like alternating teams every year and a half something like that. Yeah so I was like yeah this is neat but then yeah it just got out of hand. So when they decided To start playing with episodic content, the promise for me that I felt was we can build smaller pieces, denser pieces faster, and we know what we're doing.
We're going to be really good at this. So a lot of it was like, you know, do more with less, like keep a bunch of the existing stuff and retweak it to make some new interesting scenario. Like probably the biggest real new thing for... Episode 1, as far as technology, was just having Alex with you throughout the entire thing and having her behave in a way that was believable and fun.
You know, she's with you for a few distinct parts in Half-Life 2, but they're always pretty heavily scripted and not really in combat. Having her there and able to actually be a useful companion, so there's a lot of little tricks that we did to try to make that as fun as possible for players. She doesn't have supernatural knowledge.
She's not just finding things without you lighting them up. But like if you throw a flare out or you look at them with the flashlight, it's like, okay, she's going to go for that target because she can see it. We were like cranking on that and it took forever. Like we were not just partying, hanging out.
I was pretty much crunched that whole project. Yeah, we were crunch mode. And then same thing with episode two.
We started at the same time as episode one. And so we ran for, you know, an extra year that way, which allowed us to stretch and push. push more.
So the hunters were initially something that we wanted to have a more sort of frenetic pursuit built into the design of the character. So it was really focused on, at the time, creating a creature that could. follow the player into more types of spaces. One of the questions was how do we keep Alex out of your way during this really intense high action scene where the player has agency to make whatever decision they want about where they want to be inside the house and that sort of thing and that's when we got the idea to have her sort of camp out by a window and she would fire out the window and let you know if she saw any hunters or soldiers out that window and if the player started to spend time at that window she would find another one to go be at.
I mean... So Dario Casali was trying to create this final fight in Episode 2. The striders always reminded me of AT-ATs in Empire Strikes Back. Of course we wanted something fresh because just rocketing a ton of striders wasn't going to be repetitive after a while.
So that's when we started collaborating, talking about the Magnuson device and the hunters. How would those all come together to make this sort of overwhelming 25-30 minute battle set piece. The citizens and the hunters and to a lesser extent the Strider are all secretly in cahoots to create this like tension. Because like what we always wanted was like gotten the Magnuson device on the last guy are you gonna be able to shoot it?
Oh my god the rocket's gonna be destroyed and then like boom you hit it so that when everyone comes out running you really feel heroic. You have the car and you have of a big space and you're not guided anyway. You have to go and take care of this threat in a way that you think is best.
I think it pays off, it makes the player feel like, oh you know, I did this myself. You know, I wasn't guided by a level designer at all because we give them so many options right you have yeah you can you can kill the hunters with driving the car into them you can pick up the log and throw it then you can pick up the Magnuson device and throw it too soon and they'll shoot it down you have to learn oh yeah I have to kill the hunters first you can use rockets to kill the hunters like you have options and you have time and you have space but we dial the tension and the the pacing up pretty slowly over time It is pretty cool, all the cinematic destruction stuff that happens in there. It was so hideously faked because basically you would send a Strider who would do that low scuttling run, and he would just sit there and wait, just staring at this building until the player could see the Strider plus the building. He would literally sit there forever. We dial the tension and the pacing up pretty slowly over time.
The playtest we like the most is when the Strider is getting ready to shoot the rocket and then the last Magnuson device goes off and he's down. We held them off! Like, people were failing left and right, and the team was calling for the map to be cut.
Wow, it took a lot of heat for that. And, yeah, we just had to see it through. We were going to do an arc of three, of course, because that's just how you think of stories in those terms. And then you want a high point to come at the end of the second one.
And Gabe at one point saying, Who's the important character you're going to kill? I'm like, Lamar is going down. This is going to be it. I want the end. episode two to end with lamar floating into space and like everyone cries and gabe's like that's not good enough the episodes were a lot of that was an experiment on like what's the right amount of episode episode two was longer than episode one and bigger and people like that better but it also took longer It took longer to make and people didn't like it as much as they liked Half-Life or Half-Life 2 kind of scope, right?
Yeah. So by saying episode, are we solving a lot of problems here or are we just making a sideways trade-off, you know? I think that's maybe the way I felt about it.
Even into episode three, I still don't know what that would have been if we'd built it, because it hadn't been built. That was the feeling of excitement of something I can't even imagine is going to happen as a team. I was not imposing a top-down, this is what we must do to tell our very important tale. It's more like, oh, we have new features?
How do we use... of story can we do with these now? Well I worked on episode three and I was working on this gun called the ice gun that basically let you create amorphous shapes out of ice so you could like raise a ice wall in front of yourself. It would be attached to the floor and then the Combine soldiers could shoot holes in it and it would shatter and break like kind of like glass I guess. So that was the primary mode of you could build ledges for yourself to get down you know cliff faces.
It had another mode that was like a kind of like a silver surfer mode where you would extrude the ice in front of yourself and and then run along it and use it to cross gaps go over chasms and things like that. What else do we have? It was set in the Arctic because it was around, centered around Borealis.
I remember the little blobby, squishy... Oh yeah, yeah, Brian was working on the blobs. So we had the ISO surfaces that we ended up using in Portal for the paint.
So we had that as an enemy, it was a blob enemy, and it could change its shape. And you could choreograph its shapes with some content tools. And then... It could also split into little hoppy blobs that could, they were almost like little head crabby things, but they were, you know, they were little splats that would hop around.
We were doing all kinds of stuff with that. It could pass through grates. You know, you could get more gameplay out of something where you had maybe a couple of creatures with simpler behaviors. Oh, yeah.
And then you would spend time like combining them and combining them with other game mechanics. Story was never the boss of anything. It was always the, you know, we worked on a peer-to-peer thing. We were all going to, what can we do?
What do you think would be cool? It was still a collection of, like, playable levels in no particular order and a collection of story beats and story concepts. And we were still, like, probably another six months we would have had a critical mass of, like, mechanics and then start putting them in a timeline.
I think probably a year and a half easily. You know, depending on how ambitious we got. Could have been, you know, two and a half more years.
Yeah. It's hard to be a lot less than two years. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, I think we were six months in on it when we moved to Left 4 Dead. I don't know, we were moving at a pretty brisk pace too. I thought that we needed to go much bigger on episode three or do something else because I don't know if this is the right way to describe it, but element fatigue.
I think we had really explored a lot of what made sense in the Half-Life universe and setting. Arkane was building the Ravenholm game, and even they were having trouble doing cool new stuff with this toolset. And like, if those guys can't figure out a bunch of cool stuff to do with this, I think we're running out of fuel. Episode 3 is coming along, it's like, well, what's the new big thing here?
It's gotta be bigger than... all the stuff we just did, you know, even episode two. And it's like, oh my God, you know, it just becomes... Are we allowed to cry in this documentary?
That's what I want to know. Left 4 Dead needed kind of an all hands on sort of an effort to ship. And so we put down Ep 3 to go help Left 4 Dead. And it was a really tight shipping schedule and it required a lot of work from everybody to get out the door. And it was worth it.
Yeah, Left 4 Dead came out. Left 4 Dead came out great, but it took long enough, and this is the tragic and almost comical thing about it, was it took long enough that then by the time we considered going back to Episode 3, the argument was made like, well, we missed it, it's too late now. And we really need to make a new engine to continue the Half-Life series and all that. And now that just seems, in hindsight, so wrong.
We could have... Definitely gone back and spent two years to make episode three. And you can't get lazy and say, oh, we're moving the story forward.
That's copping out of your obligation to gamers, right? Yes, of course they love the story. They love many, many aspects of it.
But sort of saying that your reason to do it is because people want to know what happens next. You know, we could have shipped it. Like, it wouldn't have been that hard.
You know, the failure was, my personal failure was being stumped. Like I couldn't figure out why doing episode 3 was was pushing anything forward. But yeah, I mean some of those people made Left 4 Dead 2 and then Portal 2. Yeah, we did other things instead. It's not like that. that choice would have been free.
In terms of the players, they may have gotten that and not something else. So it's hard to say. But a lot of us have been doing Half-Life for eight plus years. We saw a bunch of really compelling reasons to go explore more multiplayer-based projects too because not only just what customers were doing, but internally we found ourselves wanting to play a lot of multiplayers. Sounds silly to say it because we're, you know, we're a relatively big company that has a bunch of stuff but we're not that many people.
There's 300 something people here and so we're working on a bunch of different projects and it's like... You know, people are passionate about Portal, people are passionate about TF, people are passionate about Left 4 Dead and Half-Life and, you know, CS and Dota, Deadlock. I mean, there's a lot of things there and, you know, I also work on our hardware, so I've worked on Steam Deck and the original Steam Controller and a tiny bit on VR. Unfortunately, for any decision we make, somebody is going to be unhappy, but hopefully we're making a bunch of people happy with the choices we do make.
If it weren't for the episodes, there'd be no such thing as Dota, and I know that sounds really weird. But it was the things that we learned in developing the episodes that led to, you know, Team Fortress, to more rapid updates. I think everybody that worked on Half-Life misses the working on that thing.
But it's also hard not to be like, man, I am kind of, I've seen every way that you can fight an antlion or, you know, whatever. And so you want to like, you know, get some space away from it until you can come back to it with fresh eyes. It was easy to think about.
VR being a vehicle for Half-Life because that was a big technological innovation and kind of a core reason for that product's existence and I think like one of the things we have internally tended to attach to the Half-Life IP is innovation. Gameplay innovation is oftentimes enabled by a technological innovation. Clearly there was a ton in Half-Life 1 and 2 and so yeah it's an interesting challenge moving forward to like think about what that means for future Half-Life stuff for sure. The ending of Half-Alyx is somewhat a self-critical realization.
So that was super satisfying and all credit to the people who are specifically involved in that decision and those sets of designs. I think that Half-Life represents a tool we have and promises made to customers to capitalize on innovation and opportunities to build game experiences that haven't been involved previously. And I think that there are no shortage of those opportunities facing us. as an industry right now.
Oh, fiddlesticks. What now?