GameWEEK Interview: Gabe Newell, Valve

By Chris Hudak

Sierra On-Line's Half-Life is one of the most anticipated 3D shooters for the PC in 1998. GameWEEK spoke with Gabe Newell of Valve, the game's developer, to learn more about the game and the development team behind it.

GW: You've brought in people who've worked on big-name game titles across the industry spectrum. How long has Valve been in operation, and what is the state of the company now? And while we're at it, why "Valve"?

GN: Mike Harrington and I started Valve in August of 1996, and since then the company has grown to about 25 people. That's about the size we want to stay for a while, as it lets us have two projects in development and yet still keep things manageable. Overall the whole startup process has gone a lot smoother than Mike and I expected, which is mainly due to the professionalism and experience of the people who've joined on.

Why "Valve" for the company name? One of the main things we were all thinking about as we put the company together and brainstormed the products we wanted to build was that we wanted to have respect for gamers. Looking at the advertisements for a lot of games, we saw stuff like "Giant Breasted Women from Testosterone Induced Rage, Inc. - It's So INtEnSe, You'll Soil Yourself" for some lame-o 16-bit sidescroller. As gamers, we always thought "what a bunch of crap." So we wanted to go with something for our company, for our website, for our packaging, and so on that said to people that we wanted to do something that was cool, that had confidence in what we were building without a lot of silly posturing. The thing that sold us on Valve as a name rather than a bunch of others we kicked around was the visual treatment you can see on our website of the two heads with the valves.

GW: In the midst of all the hype and preparation for the release of Half-Life, are there any other projects on the drawing board? Is Valve open to game design documents/proposals from other parties, or is the idea to keep everything firmly internal?

GN: We do have a second project in development, which we aren't saying much about. Greg Coomer is running that effort. We're always happy to talk to people about ideas, but we've got enough ideas of our own to keep ourselves busy for the next decade. There are a couple of projects that could probably distract us from our own agenda if people were interested - for example we've messed around building Mario 64 levels with the Half-Life engine or, given what fans Mike and I were of the originals, we could get convinced to build a sequel to the Ultima Underworld games. But those kinds of things almost never happen.

We get tons of e-mail from the game community with feature ideas or game ideas. Almost all of the ideas we've already thought of, because we're all rabid gamers thinking about the kinds of things we'd want in games. Every once in a while we'll get something that is pretty clever, like a different take on how cooperative mode should work. We usually don't get them at a time when we're actually designing that part of the game, but I keep a file of submissions so that I have the names of the people who've suggested something interesting.

The one area we're definitely interested in hearing proposals on is for Half-Life add-ons. We're right in the middle of sorting through our plans for those.

GW: There are daunting numbers of people using and tweaking the Quake engine for their games---what is Valve doing that will make Half-Life stand out from the rest?

GN: Many of the people who've seen Half-Life have said something along the lines of "this sure doesn't look like Quake." We've done a ton of work on the engine such as Ken Birdwell's skeletal animation system, the 16-bit color, Wedge's AI, Kelly Bailey's digital signal processing of audio, Jay Stelly's beam effects, train enhancements, and physics that people haven't seen before in an action game. This is non-trivial technology and it grew out of what we wanted to achieve with the gameplay. Our view was that way too many companies were building games that were basically "monsters-in-boxes", where you'd run through brown-green architecture you didn't look at, shot at monsters who always did the same thing, and found keys to open doors so you could repeat the same experience. We wanted to make action games fun again and picked the kinds of technology we thought would give us the greatest amount of fun for people who are tired of doing the same old thing again.

GW: When the Valve designers aren't busy cranking on Half-Life, what games are they playing?

GN: We had our big Ultima OnLine phase, which passed pretty quickly as people got frustrated. Chuck and Ted are playing through a bunch of PlayStation fighting games - their favorite right now is Street Fighter EX plus Alpha. Marc Laidlaw just finished up Riven, which he thought was a big disappointment. Mike's been playing Golden Eye and Jedi Knight. I've got a huge stack of games on my desk at home I keep wishing I could play (the PC version of Oddworld, Gettysburg, Wing Commander Prophecy), but I mainly end up playing Mario 64 and Diddy Kong racing while trudging along on a Stairmaster.

Oh, and everybody just went off on Parappa the Rapper. Wedge came back from E3 last year when it was first being shown and said "Hey, this is either really cool or it totally sucks, I can't tell". Louise, our office manager, is really into Parappa the Rapper.

Continue--->

Entire contents copyrighted 1995,1996, 1997, 1998 Cyberactive Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form without the express written permission of the Producer is strictly prohibited. Video Games On Line, Video Game Advisor, Video Game YellowPages, GameWeek and their respective logos and Cyberactive are trademarks of Cyberactive Publishing, Inc.The Official E3 Daily, E3 Daily and E3 Show Daily are trademarks of the IDSA and are used under exclusive license by Cyberactive Publishing, Inc.