=========================================================== By Dan Bentley Last modified on 2004-5-21, but HalfLife2.net mentions it being published on 2004-03-19. https://web.archive.org/web/20040813210751/http://www.maxitmag.co.uk:80/magtalk.php?articleID=4&document=1 =========================================================== So here we are. Six years on from the release of Half Life, the game that rocked the first person shooter genre and set the de facto standard for years to come. With truly cinematic qualities and a gripping storyline, gamers were drawn into an artificial world like never before. Fingers were glued to keyboards as they guided Gordon Freeman through the horrors of the Black Mesa research facility. Everybody talked about the prospect of a sequel but Valve buried itself in secrecy and maintained silence. And for five long years we waited. And waited. Great first person shooters came and went but for most the hunger was never fully satisfied. Fans world over had an insatiable desire to re-live the Half Life dream. They were disappointed until, at what looked set to be an uneventful E3 game show in 2003, Valve shattered the silence and Half Life was back. The incredible footage of Half Life 2 left gamers speechless - rich new worlds, amazing facial animations, characters able to convey real emotions, unprecedented levels of detail and a physics system to die for left everybody with just one question - when will it go gold. Alas, the September 30th release date was not to be. A group of hackers targeted Valve HQ and managed to steal valuable source code from the game, releasing it on to the internet. As it spread like wild fire, Valve had no choice but to pull the release and return Half Life 2 to Area 51 status as they set about damage control. Six months on with still no confirmed release date, we caught up with head honcho Gabe Newell at Valve HQ, to chat about life, Half Life and the existence of extraterrestrials. ------------------------------ Could you introduce yourself, tell us your age, job description and a little bit about yourself? Do you have any pets, hobbies or wild burning ambitions to be the first man on Mars? What kind of things help you wind down after a long day at Valve HQ? ------------------------------ My name is Gabe Newell. I'm 41, a co-founder of Valve, and I like long walks in the rain. I have two pets, one of whom started kindergarten this year. I used to have a burning ambition to be a fire eater, before advancing age and the police caught up with me. After a long day at Valve HQ, I wind down by sitting in the GOD-DURNED, MOTHER-FIRKING, GOAT-LICKING parking lot we call a freeway here in Seattle. ------------------------------ How did you become involved in the gaming industry and why first person shooters? ------------------------------ I got involved in the gaming industry when I was working on Windows back in the old days of DOS extenders and config.sys hacked boot disks. It was common wisdom that it wasn't possible to write a good game in Windows because of, well, unnamed technical reasons. This was annoying, so I decided that we would find the most technically advanced PC game and port it to Windows to show that there wasn't any reason for games not to be Windows apps. At the time, the shareware version of Doom had just come out, so I contacted John Carmack and Jay Wilber at id and offered to port it to Windows and give them back the code for free. I kept in touch after the project, and when a fellow Microsoftie, Michael Abrash, went to id, he kept telling Mike Harrington (the other founder) and I how cool working on games was. This was about the time Microsoft was making the transition from cool, agile software company that was whipping IBM's butt, to Evil Empire status, so working on games kept sounding more and more attractive. ------------------------------ The ads we see in magazines often depict a human with a mechanical Valve inserted in the neck or eye. What does it all mean and how did it come about? ------------------------------ It means that we found a free-lance photographer who had a bunch of cheap pictures of people with Valve's in their heads, and thought "hey, that would be a cool name." ------------------------------ Do you have any heroes or somebody you look to for inspiration? ------------------------------ I wouldn't say anything, I would set them down in front of a game and let them play. The games themselves are the best case you can make. ------------------------------ Thanks to the success of the original Half-Life, Valve paved the way for a string of first person shooter titles. Why do you think so many first person shooters have failed to live up to the standard set by Half-life and what would be your advice for anybody looking to develop a winning FPS in a crowded market. ------------------------------ I'm not really sure why. The best advice I can think of would be "make sure you understand why it's going to be worth someone's time and money to play your game." ------------------------------ Just how much does it cost to produce a cutting edge game like Half-Life 2? ------------------------------ A lot. Last time I checked, we were about $40 million into the project. Yikes, that's a scary number. ------------------------------ We've all heard about Half Life 2's advanced facial animation technology that allows in game characters to convey believable emotions. Will they be able to convince players to care about what happens to them and will they have feelings themselves? How else will Half-life 2 merge the line between reality and virtual reality for the game player? ------------------------------ Characters are an important part of it, and carry the burden of making the story and the player's actions matter. The world also needed to be able to suck you in more, and that was a combination of visual quality as well as things like deeply integrated physics that make the objects in the world react to the player and player actions. ------------------------------ Are there any features you would have liked to incorporate into Half-Life 2 but had to leave out due to present hardware technology capabilities? ------------------------------ The nice thing about Half-Life 2 is that we can use Steam to update people's games as new hardware emerges. So let's say there is some new fantastic capability that emerges in the hardware, we can give updated content to all of the people who buy this hardware. Basically you'll plug in the hardware, Steam will detect it, and get the new shaders, textures, or whatever you need. Being able to individually deliver unique assets is a big step forward from the one-size-fits-all approach that traditional physical goods delivery has restricted us to. ------------------------------ Where do you see the FPS genre in say 10 years time - photo realistic graphics, massive online never ending stories, virtual reality headsets? Do you think interactive games were players can be the star will ever replace TV shows or the movie industry as the mainstream brand of entertainment? ------------------------------ Well, Counter-Strike multiplayer is already bigger than pretty much any US TV show in terms of audience, so that transition has already started to happen. Everybody who tries to do these predictions always gets haunted by how goofy they sound a few years down the road. "We'll have SMELL-O-VISION(tm)." If I had to pick one thing to be horribly wrong about, it's that we'll have pretty good digital companions in 10 years - that you'll have synthesized people who are more enjoyable to be around than the majority of your friends. ------------------------------ The test of any truly great game has to be the 'WOW' factor. Best explained as the moments you see or experience things you never expected were possible in a computer game. With the sequel to the number one first person shooter looming closer, what are your favourite WOW differences between Half-Life and Half-Life 2. ------------------------------ Uh, we don't get to have WOW moments until we ship. Half-Life beats Half-Life 2's pants in this regard. ------------------------------ Half-Life2 has a strong presence of otherworldly beings. Do you believe in the existence of extra terrestrials. If you met ET what would you say on behalf of planet earth? ------------------------------ I'm not big on belief when it comes to empirically verifiable facts. I wasted an afternoon once trying to do the math on how quickly an intelligent life form would spread throughout a galaxy using current technology, and it seemed pretty obvious that if there were intelligent species that they would be all over the place and pretty obvious. So where the heck are they? My theory is that once they figured out they could travel around the galaxy (albeit slowly) that they decided it would be more fun to do it in a super advanced video game and stayed home instead. ------------------------------ The speculation of the release of Half-life 2 is a hotly debated topic with gamers around the globe demanding to know but one thing - when will it go gold. Estimated release dates have come and gone. Surely, the finish line must be in sight now. Are we talking days or months? ------------------------------ Months. ------------------------------ Would you consider a date with one of the Maxit UC Babes in return for an advance copy? ------------------------------ If you can get one for my wife as well, sure. ------------------------------ And to finish off, do you think Half life 2 will stand up to a grilling from Old Man Murray? ------------------------------ We worried about this a lot during the development. Finally we gave up, and the first thing you see when you start the game is a crate. We figured that that was the Old Man Murray equivalent of throwing yourself on the mercy of the court. So there you have it folks. Still months off from completion but at least we can look forward to a second showing at this years E3 show in Los Angeles. If anybody would like to stump up a suitcase full of cash so we can fly a couple of UC Babes out to Seattle and pick up our advance copy, we'll be sure to let you know just how good it really is. You'll be able to download a copy of Half Life 2 as soon as it's ready via Valves Steam Powered community. If you haven't signed up for this service yet, you should head on over to http://www.steampowered.com/ and register now. And if you've still to experience Old Man Murray and his website of outrageous uncensored reviews, interviews and thoughts on life, you can catch up with him at http://www.oldmanmurray.com. ------------------------------ All that remains is for us to say thanks to Gabe Newell for being a great sport (the life time subscription to the UC Babes on it's way buddy ;) ------------------------------