Mr Gabe Newell, you and your team at Valve Software stand accused of entertaining us with hours upon hours of prime FPS action from the one of the greatest gaming franchises of all time.
When the studio was formed in 1996, Gabe Newell expected his gaming venture to produce one "mediocre game" and then it'd all be over. But that wasn't to be the case.
In the latest instalment in our Creative Minds series, we quiz Newell on Valve's conception, the impact id Software had on the studio and the success of Half-Life and Steam. Get yourself a drink and take a seat - this is a bloody good read...
At which point did you feel that Valve moved from being an ordinary developer to the industry powerhouse that it's become?
Gabe Newell: (Laughs). I don't know how to answer that question since I've never felt like an industry powerhouse. I think it was exciting when we saw the reception that Half-Life was getting, but I'm not really sure what the difference is between being a regular developer and an industry powerhouse.
How did the company come about?
Newell: I was at Microsoft for 13 years and, to use games industry parlance, I was the producer on the first three releases of Windows.
One of the problems that Windows was perceived as having, between going to Windows 95, was that it wasn't a good gaming platform.
So around the time that Doom shareware came out, I installed it on a laptop and dragged it around everybody's office and said, 'Look, look what PC games can do! This is a lot better that your NES system or your Sega system', and decided to have some engineers work on porting Doom to Windows.
I called John Carmack and said, "Hey, we'll do this for free". And eventually it became the Doom port to Windows.
During the course of Quake development, a friend of mine at Microsoft moved to id to work with John [Carmack] on Quake - he was one of Carmack's programming heroes. So he'd gone from Microsoft to id and the two of them said to myself and Mike Harrington, another Microsoft employee, 'Hey, you guys should stop working at Microsoft and start a games company'.
We went down there, must have been the summer of 1996, and bounced around some ideas with John and he said 'Great, here's the source code to Quake, go build a game'.
Mike and I looked and each other and said, 'Well I guess we're going to start a games company now'. That's how we got started.
I'm assuming you didn't expect Half-Life to become the phenomenon it did when you started out?
Newell: No. Mike and I had been working on operating systems and productivity software, so the idea that two guys from essentially an office environment were going to be able to build an entertainment product was...
We were pretty dubious that we were going to do anything other than make a mediocre game and then end up crawling back to Microsoft with our tails between our legs.
We were much more successful much quicker that we had any right to expect.
How much of that was down to luck, do you think?
Newell: Oh, there is a big element of luck. Luck in terms of picking the right project to do at the right time, and luck and our ability to draw together a great team of people from around the world.
At the time it hadn't really occurred to anybody to look to the mod community as a source of really talented level designers and programmers. There's these people doing all this really fantastic work and nobody was contacting them and trying to pull them together.
We went out and were able to bring all those guys together at Bellevue, and Half-Life was the result.
It started off in scraps like many of your original ideas. How stressful was it to put together the game at the last minute? Were people sleeping under their desks?
Newell: Yeah, they definitely were but that's actually sort of fun. It's nice to have this all-consuming thing. Half-Life 2 was much more stressful than Half-Life. With Half-Life, the stresses were all with building something.
With Half-Life 2 we had the break in when our source code was released on the internet, the lawsuits with the publisher...
Nothing is more unpleasant than to be caught up in the middle of a giant lawsuit with the people you're hoping are actually going to help you sell the game.
Coming on to Half-Life 2, the Source engine hasn't perhaps been adopted by as many developers as expected. Does that surprise you?
Newell: Our hopes are that we have good tools for people. With Half-Life, the things we saw come out of that were Counter-Strike and Day of Defeat - it takes a while for those things to develop.
With Source we've now got Portal and Left 4 Dead and Arkane's project (The Crossing - Ed), so we're think we're on a similar pathway to seeing really interesting and important games coming out on Source over time.
How important do you think it is to carry massive games like Counter-Strike across to a new engine?
Newell: We think that's very important. The Counter-Strike non-Source community and the Counter-Strike: Source community are both by themselves bigger than anything else.
As long as people still want to play those games we're going to be still supporting them and as long as those game styles are popular we're going to be implementing them on our new tech.
We're also doing it for our non-multiplayer pieces, so when we release the multicore version of the Source engine people who are playing the original Half-Life 2 will be able to benefit.
The big PC developers these days seem to be investing a lot in engines and engine licensing. How much do you guys bank on that - like Epic and Unreal and Crytek?
Newell: Well, I think that's a little inaccurate. The biggest PC developer right now is Blizzard with World of Warcraft. Nine million sales, and they're getting 15 dollars off each of those customers a month, so they're the biggest, right?
They do nothing in the way of engine licensing... I think there are a lot of different strategies being used.
In the first-person action market there's more of a tradition of doing engine licensing. But that isn't the only viable strategy at all.
Steam's obviously become massive. How do you take that forward now that you've got so many publishers on board and so many users?
Newell: We've spent the last year working on tools and utilities for the game developers and game publishers - like tracking a great market product or seeing how, if they do a free weekend with the game, what happens with their sales and being able to watch that in real-time...
I think that that's been really successful and those are the types of things we wanted as a game developer and it's nice to see other game publishers and developers on there.
Our focus is now starting to shift toward providing, not value for the game developers, but for the game players. The first piece of that is the community services that make the social aspects of gaming easier.
The goal is to take that as a starting point, iterate on that a little... and then there's a bunch of other features to make the Steam client more useful for game players.
How heavily has id Software influenced your work?
Newell: A huge amount. I think people forget how even in simple ways like with the user interface.
Prior to id's games, a PC interface would require a special template you put on your keyboard. Doom was like a light going off - actually you can streamline the whole control part of it and make a better game that way.
This openness to the mod community and willingness to help other people, that people credit Valve with, really is a legacy that we got our start that way, because of the efforts of the guys at id.
I think they had a huge impact on us.
Another one is, someone should do a family tree of id and Looking Glass, it might turn out that there isn't anyone in the industry who isn't a descendent of one of those two families.
We have a bunch of Looking Glass people at Valve. It's amazing how many times they reference back to experiences and decisions they made at Looking Glass that are just as relevant today as they were when they first made them.
Bioshock is the latest example of what people who have descended from that family tree having an impact on the industry.
Out of interest, have you played Bioshock?
Newell: We've had to ban Bioshock from our offices, so nobody gets to play it until Orange Box is done. That's our reward to ourselves as a company, that everybody gets a copy of Bioshock to play. So I haven't had a chance to play it. I'm really looking forward to it.
How effective do you think your episodic approach has been?
Newell: In terms of things like sales and our ability to move the technology forward it's been effective. We've been able to ship a lot more technology to customers faster than we would if we were still waiting to ship another Half-Life 2-scale monolithic project.
I think what we really want to do is have a couple of examples out there - Episode One, and how long it was to play and how long it took to develop, Episode Two, Portal and TF2, and then the third part of the trilogy.
And then sit down with the community and say, 'OK, so what do you want? Do you want us to do more episodes? Do you want us to really tighten down the time frames and look at the scope of what we're doing so that that's possible, for us to go back to the large monolithic projects?'
We just want to sit down with three examples in front of us and talk it over with gamers to find out what they would like us to do next.
I'd also like to spend some time with other people who have been experimenting with this, like the Sam & Max guys to find out what they've worked. And talk with Rob Pardo [lead designer on WoW] because essentially you can think of the things they've [Blizzard] been doing with World of Warcraft as serving episodes in an MMO.
So you're going to come to a crossroads once Episode Three's in the bag?
Newell: Yeah.
Speaking of Episode Three, with the Xbox 360 and PS3 engine all ironed out, does that mean a shorter wait for that to come out?
Newell: We're not going to saying anything about the schedule because we're always wrong. I'd rather wait to be wrong than be wrong earlier (laughs).
Does Half-Life have an end? Do you guys have an idea of how you're going to wrap up this whole franchise?
Newell: Well, there's specific stories and character arcs or plot lines that we know terminate. We have this bible that covers a lot, and there's a lot of interesting stories to tell.
Portal, for example, is bringing out stuff about Aperture Science way before we had originally thought we'd be telling stories set in the Half-Life universe.
We'd certainly love to be working in other universes because any time you get two Valve people together they come up with five game ideas and thirteen universes that they would like to tell and play them in. So there's a lot of Half-Life left at Valve.
How are you going to top the Orange Box's value with Episode Three when that comes out?
Newell: I think we've always tried to give gamers good value. If you look at something like Counter-Strike, it's had like 40 updates since we originally released it.
I think that that contributes to the long-term sales of our products and the loyalty of our customers. So I'm sure we'll figure out some way to do it.
Finally, what does the success of Steam mean for the industry?
Newell: Well what I hope it means is we're learning ways to be closer to our customers and that the value is going up. For example for us, it's this question of how do you get new customers.
One way of getting new customers is to go of and hire an ad agency and do TV commercials, but another way is to use your existing customers and say to them, 'Hey, you love this game - here's a guest pass you can give to one of your friends. Here's something you can do that's good for you', and potentially it'll mean a new customer for us.
It's way cheaper to get a new customer by using your customers and given them benefits than it is to give money to ad agencies. I'm hoping those are the kinds of lessons we're learning that will allow us to do a better job.
A lot of what Gabe is talking about - user content, guest passes etc - are great ideas but Valve needs to really try and implement them. We've had, what, one guest pass so far?
Guest passes have been done for several games. I've had two for DOD:S, about seven for The Ship, and I think I've had one for CS:S as well.
As for user content, the SDK is readily available to any HL2 owner. Custom maps are (dare I say) the norm for CS players, and new mods are coming out all the time.
Valve are definately a big inspiration, they're sucha a selfless company when it comes to their implementation of Steam. I'm waiting for the day Microsoft's Games for Windows runs into the huge brick wall that is Steam, it's going to be integrate or die" for one of them, noone wants to be running 2 backbone networks behind their games at the same time...
I'm a big fan of Valve and what Steam is doing for PC gaming. I hope they manage to keep innovating. I think that the community has huge potential as it grows (maybe into a PS3 Home / Second Life type feature would be ace!) Also, with Gabe’s experience working with Microsoft, why not a Steam OS. Log into Window’s or log into Steam with just the essentials for gaming. (I know that this would take co-operation from Microsoft, but hey, it’d be good!)
Gabe is such a wonderful example of how you *should* profile your company. He openly praises Bioshock - a competing product - and even says they've had to ban it at the office.
This is far removed from the transparent (and sickening) hype-speak we get from most companies. Most press releases and so on, makes you want to throw up, because you've seen it a million times before. "Will revolutionize gaming" or "breathtaking graphics". Die, marketing drones, DIE!
Gabe manages to be an industry superstar in his own right. Think of Valve, and Gabe's name pops up. What face, what personality, do you associate with Ubisoft? EA? Exactly. Gabe makes himself "our guy" on the inside, instead of just another suit.
People like Gabe Newell give me hope. There's still much much more to come from the gaming industry that will counter all the crappy blockbuster-movie-cashcow-games and uninspired ripoffs of something that was popular half a year ago.
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