Half-Life: 25th Anniversary Documentary
Valve
0:10 KAREN LAUR: You just go over the mountains over here, and you're in high desert.
0:14 You get past Ellensburg, and it's high desert.
0:16 So I spent a lot of time out there getting reference.
0:20 Most of the reference came from Eastern Washington.
0:23 I did a drive out to the Columbia Gorge and took a lot
0:26 of photos and also a lot of just reference imagery of just like,
0:29 hey, this is what desert looks like, and big cliffs and stuff like that.
0:34 That drive was two days.
0:36 It was eight hours down, eight hours back.
0:39 And I'm not even sure I spent the night.
0:41 I did, I must have done, spent the night down there.
0:43 So while it was definitely made for the Southwest,
0:47 the local reference was out in the Columbia Gorge.
0:51 ANNOUNCER: Good morning, and welcome to the Black Mesa Transit System.
0:55 This automated train is provided for the security
0:59 and convenience of the Black Mesa Research facility personnel.
1:40 My name is Mike Harrington.
1:41 I was a co-founder at Valve.
1:43 I wasn't really used to big companies.
1:45 When I started at Microsoft, it wasn't that big.
1:48 It was like 1500 people, like a big high school.
1:51 Nine years later it was significantly bigger.
1:53 And I was like, oh, this place is too big.
1:55 And, you know, that was still like 1996.
1:57 So they had a long ways to go.
1:58 I told my managers like a year before, like, I'm leaving.
2:01 I'm leaving in a year, and I'm gonna start a game company.
2:03 And the first person I talked to was a good friend of mine, Michael Abrash.
2:07 But at that time, he was trying to do something within Microsoft.
2:10 And by the time it made sense, John Carmack had convinced him to go work at id,
2:15 so how could he say no to that?
2:17 And then I was having lunch with Gabe and I said, Gabe, I'm leaving.
2:21 I'm just gonna leave, and I'm gonna start a game company.
2:23 He goes, I wanna leave.
2:24 I wanna start a game company.
2:26 I go, alright.
2:26 And that was it.
2:28 On the surface, we should have failed, and realistically,
2:31 both Mike and I thought we would get about a year into it,
2:34 realize we'd made horrible mistakes,
2:36 and go back to our friends at Microsoft and ask for our jobs back.
2:40 But we did think that we knew a fair bit about software development,
2:44 that there were expertise that goes into it.
2:47 I think we also had some pretty clear ideas of how to design a company, right?
2:51 So when we were building Half-Life,
2:53 we were also designing Valve at the same time.
2:56 We had no plan, except for by then, like I mentioned,
3:00 Michael had gone to id, and he said, oh, you're starting a game company.
3:05 You have to use our engine.
3:07 So Gabe and I flew down to Mesquite to meet id.
3:11 We spent a good deal of time with John Romero, and he told us like,
3:15 this is what you need to do to start a game company.
3:17 You need to go out and hire some level designers and do that kind of thing.
3:20 And we kind of understood the engineering part.
3:23 And then, because we were Michael's friends,
3:25 we walked away with the source code to Quake that day.
3:28 We had no contract yet.
3:30 We had kind of an idea of what it could be, and they just gave us a CD.
3:33 And we had kind of the crown jewels of id.
3:37 And that, you know, game on.
3:44 DAVE RILLER: I think most of us had no game development experience.
3:48 We were either amateurs working in our homes at night for fun, or we,
3:52 some people were from the software world, but they had never worked on a game.
3:56 I think we had three or four people in the entire
3:58 company who had actually shipped a game when we started Half-Life.
4:01 We have to figure out what is Valve's first game.
4:04 So we have to come up with an IP.
4:06 So everything is done from scratch.
4:07 Gabe came into the office, and he said, I read this story.
4:10 I read this Stephen King story called The Mist.
4:12 You know, it's Stephen King.
4:13 It's got monsters, people in a grocery store, fog comes in, monsters in the fog.
4:18 Use your imagination.
4:19 We didn't wanna write that as a game.
4:21 That wasn't really the point.
4:22 But it was just the tension and how it felt.
4:26 Well, it was interesting.
4:27 At first we had two games.
4:29 Greg was working on Prospero, and then Half-Life was originally called Quiver.
4:33 My job was then build a team and figure out another game for us to build.
4:39 That'll be the second game Valve ships.
4:40 What features should it have?
4:42 How is it gonna be different from a normal first person shooter?
4:46 Every time the engine got a feature for Prospero, Half-Life stole it.
4:49 And then Half-Life just started getting visually more impressive and cooler.
4:55 And eventually it just, yeah.
4:57 Because it was gonna ship sooner, it just stole the resources from Prospero.
5:01 And Prospero just faded away.
5:04 So it had this character who had like a floating orb,
5:06 and it had, wanted to have some effects on it.
5:10 This kind of magical energy something.
5:12 And so I worked with them on that and came
5:15 up with the first version of the beam effects.
5:18 And they were using it.
5:20 They were happy with it.
5:21 And then people on Half-Life are coming over and are like, what is that?
5:25 Where did, how did you do that?
5:27 So very quickly that got into Half-Life.
5:29 The disaster sequence has kind of beam effects all over it.
5:33 And we ended up using it for the Vortigaunts.
5:36 [GUNSHOTS] [VORTIGAUNT YELLING]- There were a bunch of things that we were doing
5:42 that we thought would help us tackle the problem of what video games were.
5:45 And what video games were were a rapidly changing field where at the time,
5:49 90% of video games failed to turn a profit.
5:53 And a few percentage of them were, were very, very profitable, right?
5:57 So it was a field that really valued talent.
6:01 Like I said, Gabe and I brought some people,
6:03 and then from there on out, we had to hire people.
6:05 And, Romero said you got to hire level designers.
6:08 So we found some people who had industry experience.
6:12 Worked on Rise of the Triad first as a pixel artist,
6:15 and then went with Duke Nukem, and then everything just went nuts.
6:19 But I was sitting in my office one day, and my phone rang just out of the blue.
6:22 And I pick it up, and it's this recruiter.
6:24 Eventually he hooked me up with Gabe, and they flew me up here.
6:27 It was a big surprise.
6:29 But then we started looking.
6:30 The nice thing that we had is we had a whole
6:33 bunch of people in the world who had been working on mods.
6:36 And so we could start looking at those folks,
6:39 and that's where we hired a lot of our designers.
6:42 Steve and Guthrie, Steve Bond, John Guthrie were my favorite hires by far.
6:49 Other than Doug.
6:51 [LAUGHING] Gabe sent them an email and they're like, who is this scammer?
6:56 Never heard of these guys.
6:57 Just kids.
6:58 Like barely 20, I swear.
7:00 And they show up, and they're just the most creative, brilliant—- Clever.
7:05 Oh, fucking clever.
7:06 Steve had the magic ability to make stuff fun.
7:10 The fact that those guys had been hired
7:13 to go work on some game for some company,
7:17 I think that was the start for a lot of people that something
7:20 cool is gonna happen because those guys were already doing stuff that was cool.
7:25 MIKE: And then Marc showed up and like, Marc actually knows how stories work.
7:29 You know, beginning, middle, end and all this stuff.
7:31 And he had all sorts of great ideas.
7:34 And he also would just bring good ideas out of everybody else as well.
7:39 Like the person who wrote more code on Half-Life was a chemistry
7:44 major who decided to be an IP lawyer in Atlanta, right?
7:48 And he ended up writing more code than anybody else.
7:50 Or the creature designer for most of the AI for the creatures
7:53 in the game was a manager at a Waffle House.
7:56 It's not like there are a bunch of people that you could say,
7:59 oh, this person has a PhD in video game design.
8:03 It was that combination of both finding those people when it wasn't
8:07 necessarily easy to find them at that stage in the video game industry,
8:10 and then also convincing them that it was
8:12 a better place to work than anybody else.
8:39 One of the things that I definitely learned was how to hire engineers.
8:44 And, you know, we needed some engineers.
8:46 For us anyway, we had licensed id's engine.
8:48 You know, we were using the Quake Engine.
8:50 And one of the things me and some of the other engineers, probably Ken,
8:54 were talking about was if it would be possible to use the save
8:59 system to kind of like join our levels together in a really seamless way.
9:03 So you'd get to the end of the level, save stuff,
9:06 and then load some of it on the next level
9:08 and have it just feel like the world's all connected.
9:12 And so we had like every once in a while,
9:14 a hallway or the train would get to a point,
9:17 and you would have a little stop for the level to transition.
9:20 And so he wrote that code leveraged on top
9:22 of just the save load code to do the transitions.
9:24 And I think in Half-Life 1 we got, most of the transitions were a second or two.
9:29 I remember when we went from 8-bit to 16-bit, like, hey,
9:32 we don't have to have all our textures fit in a certain 256 colors.
9:37 That was a huge liberation.
9:39 JAY: The two tech investments we made for Half-Life was
9:43 to get to 16-bit color and skeletal animation for all the monsters.
9:47 But at the time it was completely revolutionary.
9:50 Your Quake characters were, it's like a text file of vertex positions over time.
9:55 I wanted so much more animation,
9:57 and I wanted to the animators to to have the freedom to put in 100,
10:02 200, 500 frame of animation if not more.
10:06 And then you can do all sorts of other things because you have a skeleton.
10:08 So it's like, oh, I can hook on a gun to a character.
10:12 I can start to make changes of characters and replay
10:15 the same animation or reuse most of the same model.
10:18 So it can swap out heads, we can swap out this, we can swap out whatever.
10:22 Like all the technology that went into the game to make
10:24 it as fun as it is was not available one generation before.
10:30 So licensing the Quake engine, which was very mature and had level designers
10:36 who'd grown up just goofing around with it.
10:38 I wasn't into heavily into scripting since back into Doom.
10:41 Like my old Doom levels have a lot of weird, odd events in them.
10:44 I think I asked Ken, is it possible that I could have
10:47 access to the character's animation, like a trigger,
10:50 like what I mentioned, I could make the guys go into an animation,
10:52 I could make them run, and then I would configure everything.
10:55 It was all hack.
10:56 This is total hacky stuff.
10:58 And that is mostly what I built.
11:00 It was like things like characters reacting
11:01 and jumping out or made to look like.
11:03 Or I'd push, I'd use a push brush to throw
11:06 a headcrab out to make it look like it launched at something.
11:08 CHUCK: Or if a loud sound happened— BRETT: They would respond, yeah.
11:11 CHUCK: Would cower.
11:12 KEN: So Gabe's dictate was, as you walked forward,
11:15 something needs to happen like every three to five seconds.
11:19 The player stands still...
11:20 DOUG: Didn't have to be much.
11:21 KEN: ...the universe can be quiet.
11:22 But if they move forward, if they're active,
11:25 the universe needs to play back something needs to do something,
11:28 even if it is a scripted sequence or— DOUG:
11:32 Or even just a interesting sign or something.
11:34 KEN: A sign, or a sound, or some vignette or something.
11:38 So I came up with this interaction method where you could do little
11:42 AIs where the characters would talk and interact with you a little bit.
11:45 And then we wanted to do spectacle,and that was
11:48 scripted sequences where you could tell a character,
11:51 you need to run here and then jump into this animation,
11:54 and then have a bunch of you all synchronize your animation.
11:58 'Cause it's somebody flying through the air,
12:00 they're smashing something, or they're doing something like that.
12:02 DOUG: Yeah.
12:03 And then test it and then figure out like, oh, this is real easy to break.
12:06 That was the roughest thing about scripted sequences where we'd
12:10 have like a headcrab jumping on a scientist or something.
12:13 And it's like, yeah, it works totally fine 90% of the time,
12:16 but some people just sprint right at the scientist.
12:19 And sometimes we had to put 'em behind glass.
12:21 KEN: Sometimes getting the level designers,
12:24 making the player want to do the thing that gives
12:28 them the most fun is a very subtle art.
12:31 CHUCK: The tentacle sequence is probably the one I remember the most.
12:34 BRETT: You're playing it, right?
12:36 That was the first time I think they melded together with play so closely.
12:39 CHUCK: Because you had your trigger, and we wanted it to be triggered.
12:41 So by the time you start to see it,
12:43 you see the scientist flying through the air and hitting the wall.
12:46 Then you could, you could look in, and you
12:48 could see the scientist being carried away.
12:51 The tentacle itself is separate.
12:52 It's on its own.
12:53 And you bring the two together, mesh 'em together, and boom.
12:56 BRETT: It felt so seamless though.
12:57 And that for me was like, moments like that.
12:59 And that might've been the first one is when you start to see
13:02 the the scripted events and play start
13:04 to blend a little bit more than just ambience.
13:09 For god's sake, open the silo door.
13:11 They're coming for us!
13:12 It's our only way out.
13:14 Oh my God, we're doomed.
13:18 DAVE: I remember Brett in particular had done some of the lab scenes where
13:21 scientists would walk from one area to another and just look at a monitor.
13:25 And they just, it gave them a little bit of life.
13:27 A ton of the work that went into that area was
13:29 because we knew it was gonna be the beginning in the game,
13:32 and we really needed to make it a vibrant and interesting,
13:36 fun place to be and explore.
13:38 So originally they were designed to sort of be behind glass.
13:41 They were just designed to be spectacle.
13:43 Yeah.
13:44 Little vignettes.
13:44 And then all of the level designer's like, no,
13:46 no, I'm gonna put that right in front of you.
13:48 And I'm like, oh God, how am I supposed to make this work?
13:51 It's not supposed to do it.
13:53 Get away from there, Freeman.
13:54 I'm expecting an important message.
13:56 -The run speed for the player was so insane.
13:59 KEN: Yeah.
13:59 DOUG: It was like, what, 25 miles an hour or something?
14:02 KEN: It was sprinting.
14:03 It was.
14:03 DOUG: You could get so far, so fast.
14:06 And so you'd either have to make the script a sequence
14:10 like so quick that you could barely see what's happening.
14:14 Most people weren't looking in the right place anyway, so, you know,
14:17 you'd have to like get their attention with like
14:20 a particle or a sound or lighting or something.
14:23 And then you wanted them to see what was happening.
14:26 But when we playtested,
14:28 and it's like a scientist was like being pulled into a vent or something,
14:33 like people wouldn't just stop and be like, oh.
14:35 Sometimes they would, they'd be like, oh wow, look at that.
14:38 They'd just like, just run straight ahead and just start shooting.
14:42 It's hard when you think back to it to recognize
14:45 that those kind of interactive moments were so new.
14:48 Like people just hadn't seen them.
14:51 KEN: It was worth it because no other games were doing that.
14:54 No other games had that interactivity.
14:56 No other games had that spectacle playing out in front of you.
15:00 And it just added that whole feel of Half-Life.
15:09 Gabe had started to develop this theory around interactivity,
15:14 and the environment needed to let you do what you wanted and then react to it.
15:20 So if you did something, if you shot your gun,
15:23 there needed to be a bullet hole in the wall.
15:25 If you did a thing people needed, you know, other characters needed to react.
15:30 The world is acknowledging you exist.
15:32 The world is acknowledging all of your actions.
15:35 And that's a huge part of reinforcement.
15:37 [SIREN] [GUNSHOT]- And you'd have these conversations where you'd
15:42 be sitting in a design review and somebody'd say, that's not realistic.
15:45 And you're like, okay, what does that have,
15:47 like, explain to me why that's interesting.
15:49 Because in the real world,
15:51 I have to write up lists of stuff I have to go to the grocery store to buy.
15:55 And I have never thought to myself that realism is fun.
15:58 I go play games to have fun.
15:59 And so we had to come up with some notion of what fun was.
16:03 We knew it was an ad hoc definition, and it was the degrees to which the game
16:09 recognizes and responded to the players' choices and actions, right?
16:12 In behavioral science, you would say we were explicitly talking about
16:15 what were reinforcers and what the reinforcement schedules were.
16:18 Right?
16:18 At that point in time, that was a useful way of making design decisions.
16:23 [METAL CREAKING] The point I would make is, if I go up to a wall and shoot it,
16:28 to me, it feels like the wall is ignoring me.
16:31 I'm getting a narcissistic injury when the world is ignoring me.
16:35 So does this...
16:36 Like to me, I was trying to convey to the user a sense of yes,
16:39 you were making choices.
16:40 Yes, you were progressing,
16:42 which meant the game had to acknowledge that back view.
16:45 If you shoot at a wall, there have to be decals.
16:48 If you kill a bunch of marines, the marines have to run away from you.
16:51 Right?
16:52 You have to have this sense of the game acknowledging
16:55 and responding to the choices and actions and progressions that you've made.
16:59 Otherwise it loses any, any sort of impact.
17:13 HARRY: Ted and I, we were on the same
17:14 page in terms of what the game should look like,
17:17 which would be just sort of alien in a very naturalistic kind of way.
17:22 Like these are, these are creatures from another dimension,
17:25 another planet that look like they evolved in a way.
17:29 And Chuck had a very, he came from Duke Nukem.
17:34 He'd made a bunch of monsters that went in a sort of a different direction.
17:39 And for awhile the game had a hard time coalescing around a single vision.
17:46 All the ones that looked like genitals were Ted's.
17:49 [LAUGHING] And all the ones with shiny
17:51 bits that look like alien soldiers were Chuck's.
17:55 That was a thing when I first came in, Ted's style and mine.
17:58 BRETT: And trying to figure that out.
17:59 CHUCK: Trying to find the harmony between the two to make it work.
18:02 BRETT: Yeah.
18:02 CHUCK: Ted had, he was, he really liked the Wayne Barlowe aesthetic,
18:05 and I had a little bit different, but it worked.
18:08 Ted made these really weird.
18:10 He did the headcrab, you know, that's pretty much the symbol of it all.
18:16 And I remember taking his headcrab and putting
18:18 it on a scientist and making the zombie.
18:19 Right.
18:20 Well, we pretty much had, we talked and it's like, okay, we'll do, you do that?
18:25 And Ted did the soldiers, I did the scientists.
18:29 I did a lot of the aliens.
18:32 And with the hornet gun I did.
18:33 did the hornet gun for that one as well too.
18:35 You know the alien slave?
18:38 Well I did some animations for the bull squid, or bull chicken.
18:41 I have to call him that.
18:43 But that's a Ted creature there.
18:45 The houndeye was Ted's as well.
18:47 BRETT: Yeah.
18:48 A lot of the fleshy, if it's got like over,
18:50 like a lot of flesh on it, maybe too much— CHUCK: Yeah.
18:53 That's Ted, that's a Ted-ism.
18:54 You can always tell Ted's designs, because they're much more aquarium than...
19:00 Aquarium and/or, like Unspeakables, you know?
19:06 Oh, Big Mama.
19:07 I forgot about Big Mama.
19:09 Oh God.
19:09 It's like, you know, it's a testicle, right, Ted?
19:12 That's just so disturbed.
19:13 I concepted a guy in sort of a NASA spacesuit, a scientist guy.
19:17 He was actually modeled after a couple of programmers I know,
19:20 big beefy, bearded Linux programmers, you know?
19:23 And so that's where the HEV suit sort of emerged out of.
19:27 There was a lot of desire for not having a Space Marine or a soldier be the guy.
19:34 And then Chuck Jones went off and did a pretty different
19:38 version of him that became known as Ivan the space biker.
19:43 Oh God.
19:43 I remember telling myself, it's like,
19:45 anytime you make a screenshot, make sure it's good.
19:48 'Cause you don't know where this is going to appear again.
19:51 We didn't know that.
19:52 And Ivan is the prime example of that one.
19:56 So you're looking at it.
19:57 Well, go look at Quake.
19:58 It's like, okay, I'm looking at that, and he's got this incredibly boxy head.
20:01 And you're always hearing don't put too many polys in it.
20:04 And it's like, okay, so Ivan got the the, the square head.
20:08 And it was kind of an early, just a rough prototype of a Gordon Freeman baby.
20:14 And I remember, we didn't know what Gordon looked like.
20:18 So it's like, I was looking for somebody, and I found Mike Harrington.
20:22 And It's like, Mike, what does Gordon look like?
20:24 He said, I don't know, put yourself in there.
20:26 It's like, oh, okay, okay.
20:28 And so I went in and, and put kind
20:30 of my likeness on the early Gordon model in the game.
20:34 And it kind of stayed there.
20:36 BRETT: Did you have a ponytail?
20:38 Well, I was ex tattoo artist, so yeah, I definitely had.
20:39 Ah.
20:40 I don't, I don't have anything to work with now.
20:42 But yeah, at that point, I had a ponytail on.
20:44 If you play the game, you know that it's Chuck,
20:46 if you play multiplayer and see the model.
20:47 CHUCK: But yeah, if you look on the back
20:49 of that, there's this little four triangles,
20:50 and he's got a little ponytail back there.
20:53 I did the G-Man.
20:54 And again, that one was, Gabe was talking about the cigarette man from X-Files.
20:59 So we needed our own equivalent of that.
21:01 Because after a while, after playing with the game for a whole,
21:04 for a long time people realize like, hey, we made this character.
21:08 And just in this one office scene in the beginning,
21:11 where he is behind the window and he is talking to a scientist or something,
21:13 and then he's like, he looks really creepy.
21:15 It was late in the day that we thought, oh, okay,
21:18 well he's gonna be the big bad behind all of this.
21:22 Like scatter him around in places that you can't get to him.
21:27 But he's there mysteriously.
21:33 There wasn't enough in the beginning of the game.
21:35 It's like, we need another monster.
21:37 Headcrabs weren't enough.
21:38 It got kind of repetitious.
21:40 I think I grabbed Ted and said, I need them to do this and this.
21:46 And so he whipped it out in not much time at all.
21:49 I'm gonna get the timing just right, and I have no time to do this.
21:53 I'm just gonna bang it out.
21:55 And then once it was working, everybody said, oh,
21:58 let's go back and sprinkle them back in the maps.
22:02 And that was this—- Yeah.
22:03 Because then we introduced them a little earlier than we were planning.
22:06 Yeah.
22:06 Because they, they ended up being, they weren't real tough.
22:09 They weren't supposed to be tough.
22:10 DOUG: But they were ranged.
22:11 KEN: But they were ranged, and they were fun, and they had a big show,
22:14 and like, that was showing off a bunch of stuff.
22:26 DOUG: I remember the assassin came in pretty late.
22:28 KEN: That was it.
22:29 It was like, okay, I have a week and a half.
22:32 It was already done.
22:33 It was already all modeled, already all animated.
22:35 And the requirement was it couldn't have any new
22:37 animations and any new anything, so had to come up.
22:40 I grabbed a bunch of Steve Bond's AI, and banged that thing out.
22:44 I built a level, super crude, but it had all the right spacing and all
22:49 the right heights and all the right geometry.
22:53 Again, it's just a presentation where this, this creature gets to shine.
22:57 This enemy gets to shine and is your entire focus for that scene.
23:01 And it's kind of a memorable experience 'cause it's,
23:05 it just takes place in a different fashion than other encounters.
23:08 You get knocked out, and there's all kinds of, like,
23:10 the lights go out and you get dragged through corridor and things.
23:13 So again, it's something you remember in the game.
23:18 And if they find the body?
23:20 Body?
23:20 What body?
23:33 TED: We just did a lot of playtesting and did
23:36 a lot of level building and used all of the monsters.
23:41 and used everything that we had developed,
23:43 and started seeing which ones kind of stuck out a little oddly.
23:47 Like we had the houndeyes that Ted had concepted,
23:50 and Kelly had done great sounds for 'em.
23:52 And so they seemed like a very oddly plausible sort of alien creature.
23:58 And Chuck did what we called the panthereye,
24:02 which was this big black panther looking creature that also just had a big
24:08 red eye for his face and a big shark fin coming out the back.
24:13 And design-wise, he seemed like a, oh, this is a very useful creature.
24:17 You know, it's like when you design things, you know,
24:19 you like to have a gradient of difficulty, a gradient of escalation in threat.
24:24 And so if we had these hound eyes, then oh yes,
24:28 this like panther, bigger, scarier looking thing would be more of a threat.
24:35 It was in the game for a long time
24:37 and then sort of just worked its way out because
24:40 folks couldn't find a way to incorporate a creature
24:43 like that into the environment and make it seem reasonable.
24:48 CHUCK: The stooka bat was, it was something that I had did.
24:52 Just a weird, another creature from the air.
24:55 We had the chub toad that we were gonna use as a feeding animal to help.
25:00 And yeah, they had a mechanic to where they were going
25:03 to use this to distract monsters so you could possibly get by.
25:07 And it pretty much reached fruition to where we created the object.
25:12 But then again, time became the factor, and it had to get cut.
25:24 I grew up just outside DC |and so there's all these like,
25:27 big, really banal office buildings, and that's kind of the direction I went.
25:33 So it started becoming a facility.
25:35 And so I started making these kind of linoleum tiles,
25:38 and the drop ceiling, the concrete block wall, the black and white tile floor.
25:43 She was like the texture artist for a long, like for most of the game.
25:48 It's just an overwhelming amount of work.
25:51 KAREN: Originally I was hand painting all of the textures,
25:53 and you can really see a shift in some
25:56 of 'em where they go from hand painted to photo reference.
25:59 The photo references are much, much better.
26:02 [LAUGHING] So I was all over Seattle,
26:05 Harbor Island, Gasworks Park, getting rusty metal things.
26:08 What can I get good pictures of that is vaguely industrial
26:13 and interesting to look at, and then how can we use this?
26:20 And so, you know, sides of boxcars,
26:22 and I don't know how many hallways in Half-Life
26:25 are the side of a train car kind of thing.
26:28 The Kirkland Costco.
26:30 Lot of time in the Kirkland Costco getting just packages
26:34 of I don't know why I needed snacks or something.
26:50 DOUG: The first year was all about opportunity,
26:52 and it, you know, it wasn't quite as focused.
26:55 We were trying, we were finding our footing.
26:57 KEN: We were getting into the three months before supposedly shipping in 97.
27:02 And it's like, this isn't gelling.
27:04 This is really not good.
27:06 This is like a quick knockoff, cash grab, stupid, and let's not do that.
27:12 There was a lot of disconnect between
27:14 what all of the different groups were doing, what engineering was doing,
27:18 and what level design was doing and what animation was doing.
27:22 We had a bunch of monsters that had no plans to get
27:25 in the game 'cause nobody else was assigned to work on them.
27:28 And we had a bunch of levels that like, what's supposed to go in here?
27:31 Oh, I don't know, everybody's gonna do a bunch of stuff.
27:33 And like, no, that doesn't work that way.
27:35 So here we were, all these people doing all these cool things and just,
27:38 everything's just this random collection of oh,
27:40 here's a cool moment and a cool this.
27:42 And you know, and then it's gone and you know, oh, now on to the next thing.
27:45 Because the way we were building the game was every
27:48 level designer was kind of his own silo, his own universe.
27:52 And I think that just grew out of our kind of mod developer roots.
27:57 But it wasn't cohesive,
27:59 and it certainly didn't have a strategy for like maximizing any of that stuff.
28:05 You must have been in the meeting when we reviewed all the levels.
28:07 It was like the first time everybody piled into a room.
28:10 And Gabe had his crazy Hellraiser chair
28:13 with the beautiful Mac monitor, and we played.
28:16 For two days, he played everyone's levels.
28:18 But I remember one moment he turned around, he was like this with his hair.
28:21 He's going, we're gonna fail.
28:23 We're gonna fail, we're gonna fail.
28:24 And I was just like, I was like, it blew me away.
28:26 I was like, oh shit, this isn't good.
28:28 You know, we were doing our best trying to make this game and the story.
28:32 And we had a schedule from Sierra, and it was a tight schedule.
28:35 And we told them like, we're not gonna ship this.
28:37 And we realize that you're not gonna pay us
28:40 to continue developing this, but we're going to do it anyway.
28:43 Late is just for a little while.
28:46 Suck is forever.
28:47 Right?
28:47 We could try to force this thing out the door,
28:50 but that's not the company we want to be.
28:52 That's not the people we want to be.
28:54 That's not the relationship we want to have with our customers.
28:57 And so we kind of, Kelly and I kind of sat down and, and sort of tried
29:01 to take an inventory of all the cool stuff we had built and why weren't we just,
29:05 you know, building more on top of that.
29:08 And those discussions kind of led to our us
29:11 building this kind of, design cabal process to try
29:14 to give some cohesion to the game and kind
29:17 of changing the way we were approaching it.
29:19 And so a cabal was a small group of people, a multidisciplinary group.
29:24 You know, there's like an art, artists,
29:26 level designers, engineers, and you know, everything.
29:28 And in that, small team that would write up a spec for a level.
29:33 There was the arc that Marc had written.
29:36 So we knew how that fit into the story.
29:39 And we got a small group of people together and we started with the beginning.
29:43 And we went through how literally what map do we need
29:46 to build to tell us the story we're gonna have to tell,
29:48 and then what does that connect to, and what's
29:50 the next piece and the next piece.
29:52 The strongest and most influential thing that came out of them was,
29:55 to me, the sketches.
29:56 And they were really the visual meeting notes, right?
29:58 MIKE: We came up with a formula for how that worked.
30:01 We had a certain percentage of the time where you were fighting,
30:04 certain percentage of the time where you're exploring,
30:05 a certain percentage of the time where you're solving puzzles.
30:09 And so we could apply that uniformly through the game.
30:13 And that worked pretty well.
30:16 Testing, testing, everything seems to be in order.
30:22 Good morning.
30:23 And welcome to the Black Mesa Transit system.
30:26 This automated train is provided for the security
30:29 and convenience of the Black Mesa research facility personnel.
30:34 The whole opening of the game was specifically a reaction
30:36 to how all the other first person shooters were,
30:39 whether they had cutscenes or not.
30:42 Like sometimes like they would just open without a cut scene.
30:45 But you know, you're standing in a room with a gun and you're gonna,
30:48 there's a thing attacking you.
30:50 So we could look at examples of all that, and I think there was
30:53 expectation that that's what Half-Life had to do
30:55 because every other game was doing it.
30:59 I can't tell you the number of people who started up the game,
31:02 were staring at it, and then accidentally
31:04 bumped their mouse and realized this is live.
31:07 Yeah.
31:08 And as simple as that sounds,
31:09 it was mind blowing for so many people 'cause it was too much going on.
31:14 This isn't real time, this is a recording.
31:15 That was sort of the way we, you know,
31:17 stumbled through a lot of the new narrative tricks was like,
31:21 well what can we do?
31:23 You could do this in a movie or a story,
31:26 but nobody's doing this in first person shooters.
31:29 You're this anonymous scientist, and you're riding on this train into work,
31:33 and rolled the credits at the beginning.
31:35 It was kind of like a cinematic experience, almost like,
31:37 I don't think games had really gone down that road.
31:39 It's so funny to look at it now because it's so primitive.
31:41 But at the time it felt like you were really in this Black Mesa world.
31:49 Pre-disaster survived from the first year.
31:52 So a lot of that geometry was from that first
31:55 version of the game but in a very minimal way.
31:58 Just some, the basic style of some of the hallways,
32:01 the curved corners in the hallways, things like that.
32:04 They more became sort of like Lego pieces
32:07 that John could use and stitch together and extrude.
32:11 And I know Brett did a lot of the raw geometry
32:14 from pre-disaster and then John did most of the work to ship it.
32:19 And then the post and the train ride was all John, I think.
32:23 The sector C.
32:24 So those were heavily influenced by NASA
32:28 control rooms with my favorite green hammerite,
32:31 really influenced a lot of like the starting,
32:35 we started with the kind of the consoles.
32:37 I'm trying to remember.
32:38 And then there was just lots of hallways, and people were getting lost.
32:41 And I did the color stripes to help people follow them places.
32:46 One of the things that was actually super exciting was how quotidian,
32:49 a lot of it really was.
32:51 You know, the lunchroom with the microwave.
32:54 You'd press the button, and would go splat.
32:56 My god, what are you doing?
32:59 Yeah.
32:59 All this work so you can start a microwave and blow up some soup,
33:02 which was a reference to real life because that happened regularly.
33:07 Like we regularly accidentally blow up soup.
33:10 That was later mostly, wasn't it?
33:12 There were a few people who were just challenged with kitchen
33:18 appliances and at one point we had a company fire.
33:21 We had a lot of things going on in that kitchen.
33:24 All of that stuff had a real kind of eloquence that in the late nineties,
33:30 in a world where everything was so over the top.
33:34 But we still got to go on flights of fancy.
33:40 Welcome to the HEV.
33:43 I think like a super pivotal moment for me was when we came
33:48 in this one morning and we saw
33:51 the test chamber sequence that Kelly and John Guthrie,
33:55 and Wedge was in that office, and Dario, Driller,
33:59 they were all in this corner dark office where so much cool stuff happened.
34:03 But so Kelly and John stayed up all night and did the test chamber sequence.
34:07 And it's pretty much like the one we shipped.
34:10 That was a lot of what went on in that room that we called the submarine.
34:13 It was just improvisation, you know, just what can we do to solve this problem?
34:19 How do we connect what's happening before to what's happening after?
34:22 This needs to be somehow important, but we just don't know what to do.
34:27 John and I talked about it.
34:28 I went home that night, and I sort of sketched out like,
34:30 you know, maybe we could do something cinematic.
34:32 We'll take the camera away, we'll turn the lights off,
34:35 we'll do sounds, we'll just throw everything we can at it.
34:38 We built that basically that day.
34:40 It was just a sort of a one day throw it together.
34:43 That's how fast we were moving.
34:45 They had audio, right?
34:46 We had the script.
34:47 Yeah.
34:47 Yeah.
34:47 It's like the heartbeat and the breathing, all that stuff was in there.
34:50 And I played through it and it was like, damn,
34:54 I have not seen this in any medium in anything before,
34:58 experienced something like this where this immersive
35:00 experience of this actually happening like this.
35:03 And at that point it's like, okay, I see what it is we're doing.
35:08 And it's this kind of immersive,
35:11 unbroken experience that happens to you, the player.
35:16 And then that was this key principle about
35:19 how we never take you out of that role.
35:23 Personally, the difference between before
35:25 the disaster sequence and after disaster sequence, I felt we really had,
35:30 I had an understanding that this product was gonna be special
35:33 or it was gonna be possible it was gonna be tied together.
35:36 Whereas before that there was a lot of really
35:40 good stuff and a lot of little things all disconnected.
35:45 But we, man, well you guys managed to tie
35:47 two very different parts of the game together really well.
35:50 And I thought, okay,
35:51 now I feel like we're on a track for finishing this product.
35:54 To me, it it shifted my brain to have a lot of confidence that this product's
35:58 coming together rather than just generating a lot
36:01 of content that exists independently of other content.
36:05 One of the ways we were funding our development was we
36:07 sold a preview copy of Half-Life to a video card company.
36:10 I forget which one.
36:12 And so they had in their contract that we
36:14 had to deliver it to them by a certain date.
36:16 And we got like the first three levels done for them.
36:19 It was, it was really a good milestone for us just,
36:21 you know, from working as a company.
36:23 'Cause hey, there was a deliverable.
36:25 We got it done.
36:26 And you know, we shipped off to them, and then I swear the next day it leaked.
36:30 And I was just livid at first, which was stupid.
36:33 But I was just like, agh, I can't believe you guys let this get out.
36:36 Like, you know, this wasn't us, you know?
36:38 And then it turned into something amazing where
36:41 people started playing it and it was all over.
36:43 And we started seeing it online, what people are thinking about it.
36:47 And I forget which magazine who said, usually we don't review beta software,
36:51 but they reviewed it and said, this is awesome.
36:54 And that gave us a tremendous amount of confidence.
36:57 It was an outside validation of what we were trying to do,
37:02 that it was the right thing.
37:09 DOUG: I think just with first person shooters already kind of, they
37:13 were kinda like the vowels of, of weapons you put into first person.
37:17 You gotta have a shotgun, and there's obviously a pistol,
37:20 you need your, your weapon that's going to make you struggle,
37:24 drive you to get another weapon.
37:26 KEN: That was a lesson in how to make
37:28 all of your weapons as orthogonal as possible.
37:30 So each one did something completely different.
37:33 All the crazy weapons, those are my fault.
37:37 So I did like the rocket launcher, and the Gauss gun, and the snarks.
37:48 I like snarks.
37:49 Snarks always made me laugh.
37:51 It was just always funny to watch people run away from the snarks.
37:54 The squeak grenade.
37:55 Yeah, it's called the snark.
37:56 But I wanted something, a little creature that you could bring up and hold,
37:59 and you could throw it out, and it would just start running.
38:02 'Cause people were camping, and everybody hated campers at that point.
38:05 So you wanted the anti-camp weapon,
38:06 but it was kind of, you could literally find a little hidey
38:09 hole and just sit out there and just throw out 30 of 'em.
38:13 And they're all over the map.
38:14 I had a cat and you, you'd sit there, you'd do your finger.
38:17 Blue, yeah.
38:18 You'd do your finger towards him, and he'd get mad at you, and he'd swat.
38:20 So that was the inspiration for that particular animation.
38:25 And then the other, that big, uh, alien creature with the, um,
38:29 we, we needed some kind of alien weapon.
38:31 Drew that one, built that one, animated that one,
38:33 but that was also another one that would, whenever you would,
38:36 you could get in a corner and just shoot
38:37 them in the air 'cause the hornets would track.
38:39 I think that was the biggest thrill is brainstorming these with your crew,
38:44 making them, building them, putting them in the game,
38:47 and then playing with them.
38:48 And then they're fun.
38:49 So there's sort of a trope of having a melee weapon.
38:52 I think it was Steve Bond and Ken Birdwell and I
38:55 were saying we wanted a device where the world was reacting to.
38:58 It was really goes back to that theory of fun.
39:00 But we were just running around like idiots smacking the wall.
39:03 It's an odd thing to know in retrospect,
39:05 but at the time it felt profoundly satisfying to be able to smack walls.
39:10 And that was just an example of how that fairly abstract notion of what
39:15 fun was ended up translating into a set of decisions that were really visceral.
39:20 When you're going around whacking a wall,
39:21 a crowbar is an obvious thing to whack the wall with.
39:23 [WOOD BREAKING] [CREATURE NOISE] [GUNSHOTS]
39:36 [FOOTSTEPS] [GUNSHOTS] [MACHINE WHIRRING]- If
39:49 the sound could let you know what's going to happen,
39:51 that really makes it powerful.
39:53 So we're always on the lookout for that in level design
39:55 and monster design communicating because the AI is often hidden from the player.
40:02 So we use the sound to broadcast the internal state of the AI.
40:12 You know, soldiers, they tell you, I'm injured,
40:15 I'm gonna throw a grenade, I'm taking cover.
40:18 You know, they are broadcasting as constantly as they can,
40:22 what's about to happen.
40:24 So it was really important to try to keep
40:27 those states distinct so that as you play the game,
40:30 you're actually, whether you're aware of it or not,
40:32 you're starting to be able to tell what's about to happen.
40:34 [WOOSH]- We knew he was a musician too, so he could do sounds,
40:39 but you know, he also decided he was gonna write the sound engine.
40:42 And then he wrote the soundtrack, and he'd never written a soundtrack before.
40:46 And he wrote the whole, you know, soundtrack for the game.
40:49 And it won an award, and it was crazy.
40:52 There just weren't that many of us.
40:54 I had a little bit of a background playing music.
40:57 I understood the sound engine really well.
41:00 So it was really easy for me to just hook sounds in, and I understood enough
41:04 about the level design side that I could
41:07 kind of connect those things a little bit.
41:10 The sounds could come from anywhere, and then I just heavily modified them.
41:14 Usually those are animal sounds, reversing changing the pitch,
41:19 chopping them up and rearranging them.
41:22 Headcrabs were rats.
41:23 The little squeaky.
41:24 Yeah, that's a rat slowed way, way down.
41:27 And then reversed.
41:32 Yeah.
41:33 The DSP stuff was another cool thing that Kelly built when you got in a vent,
41:38 it sounded like you were in a vent.
41:40 And that wasn't really happening I guess in, at least
41:42 in Quake and other games I was playing back then.
41:51 You know, we had these huge silos, these cavernous spaces.
41:55 The day they had their own echoey DSP, it made an enormous difference, right?
42:01 You believed the space.
42:10 Kelly tells me, oh god, Chuck Jones asked him if he could,
42:13 if the characters could speak and have their mouths move.
42:17 And Kelly said, you know, that's super easy.
42:20 I could just look at the audio and and see if they're talking,
42:24 and do that, but like getting their mouths to move is stupid, he says to me.
42:27 And I, look, Chuck Jones told me the same thing.
42:30 I told him, making the mouths move was super trivially easy,
42:33 but knowing when they're talking and knowing how
42:36 to follow the envelope of the speech would be impossible.
42:39 And Kelly and I just both looked at each other and like, oh.
42:42 And so I went back to my office, and he went back to his office,
42:45 and I think within an hour the characters
42:48 were talking and their mouths were moving.
42:50 And it was only because we sat there
42:52 at lunch bitching about an animator who was 100% right.
42:56 Why are you leaving me here?
42:57 Scientist conversations, Kelly and I made that.
43:00 When they're next to each other,
43:02 one scientist will occasionally play a question,
43:04 and the other one will give him an answer.
43:07 And it's not a script.
43:09 It just might be, it might not always make sense.
43:14 I am rather looking forward to this analysis, aren't you?
43:18 I don't think so.
43:19 But it had a bunch of personality.
43:21 It was really cool.
43:22 And it worked on getting those guys to look at you and turn their heads.
43:27 When we first added the ability for scientists to respond
43:29 to the player and other things in the environment,
43:32 we call 'em what response rules.
43:34 The first time that went in they came flying down the elevator,
43:39 and one of 'em looks at you and goes, oh, hello Gordon.
43:41 [LAUGHING] And then they explode into pile of jibs at the bottom.
43:48 Hello.
43:49 The automatic diagnostic and announcement system welcomes
43:52 you to the Black Mesa research facility.
44:08 I hadn't really started working on the biggest part of the game,
44:11 which I ended up shipping, which was surface tension.
44:13 Prior to then a lot of the work that I had done was the alien research labs,
44:17 which turned into questionable ethics.
44:21 And all of that was ditched.
44:23 Though some concepts that made it through, everything was rebuilt from zero.
44:28 But you know what did make it through was power up.
44:31 Yeah.
44:31 Basically that geometry survived completely intact.
44:34 It was so closely designed for that creature that because the creature survived,
44:40 the levels survived along with it.
44:42 Yeah.
44:42 There's this sort of central circular thing where you have to rotate the train.
44:46 You have to kill the Gargantua first,
44:47 'cause he was always defending the way out.
44:49 I mean, you have to go to, you have to go to like another area
44:52 which looks very much like it was designed for Quake because pretty much it was.
44:57 [LAUGHING] There was a flooded pump room, and you have to drain the generator.
45:02 And then you could switch the power on and then you could take the train out.
45:05 Yeah, I remember him being totally central to this whole thing.
45:08 And then, well, how do we block the player?
45:10 Which is, I mean that's pretty much like
45:12 design point number one for all level design.
45:15 Okay, well how do we prevent the player
45:16 from just walking straight out through the exit,
45:18 and you design backwards from there.
45:28 In the first year we built a lot of world space, a lot of track as we call it.
45:33 And the programmers would try to fit the AI into the existing maps.
45:38 What we did the second year was we built
45:42 the AI in very constrained environments that showcased the AI.
45:47 Let's make the ideal space for the AI and then give that to the level designers
45:51 to incorporate those elements into their map so
45:54 that it worked better and was more interesting.
45:56 And that Gargantua was an example of that.
45:59 And the grunts especially.
46:01 Yeah, we had the AI that Steve had been working on, and he
46:03 had designed all these interesting encounters with them just in his test map.
46:06 And so he had had 'em up high and down low.
46:11 And so basically we just gotta re-leverage that.
46:14 Say, okay, let's, let's start with the player comes in low,
46:16 and there's a marine on the same level.
46:18 And then the next one they're up high, and then he'd come running down.
46:22 'Cause it was really neat to see them retreat.
46:24 They'd try to run back up the stairs and try to flank you from another side.
46:28 So Steve Bond, like I mentioned earlier,
46:30 was this really young guy who had been making mods in QuakeC.
46:33 Really the designer for so much of the AI,
46:36 I mean all the stuff that's good about the soldiers,
46:39 the grunts you fight in Half-Life.
46:42 Yeah.
46:42 We had a little bit of a language that we could sort of use to say,
46:46 you know, this is a place they can climb.
46:47 This is a place they can jump to.
46:49 This is a good place to hide.
46:50 These are good places to go in general or interesting places.
46:53 So, you know, the AI had a little bit of help.
47:04 We were trying to build something that utilized,
47:06 you know, the train technology that Jay was working on.
47:09 And we thought, well, let's give the players something that they can control,
47:12 but in a limited way.
47:13 We couldn't do vehicles like you see in Half-Life two.
47:15 So we did this, the most constrained vehicle
47:17 we could think of, which was the train.
47:21 Players didn't always bring the train with them.
47:23 And so you had a bunch of these poor people walking down these tunnels.
47:28 Oh, is that why you electrified the rail?
47:30 Yeah.
47:30 And the rails were, that was part of the feedback.
47:32 Kept dying from that.
47:33 Part of the feedback was, well you can just bypass all this.
47:36 So we made the rails electric.
47:37 It's like, well maybe that'll teach them to use, bring the train with them.
47:41 But the basic idea was, let's explore that and then also reveal some
47:44 of the hidden deep parts of the base.
47:46 You know, the abandoned areas where you might
47:48 get a lot more of the Xen creatures.
47:50 You know, we had designed some of the, some of the ones
47:53 that didn't make it into the game to appear there,
47:55 bats that would dive bomb you and while you're on the train.
47:58 Stooka bats.
47:58 Yeah, stooka bats.
47:59 And then we also tried hard to not make
48:01 it feel like it was the super linear thing.
48:03 So we tried to give little branches, and so there were some challenges there.
48:20 Well there is a, there was a really good sketch that Kelly Bailey made,
48:24 which basically charted surface tension, and it was pretty extensive.
48:27 Like it went through the cliff side and it went through
48:31 areas where tanks were and like a lot of soldier holdouts.
48:35 Yeah.
48:35 It even went through the desert with the cactuses
48:38 and the helicopters and then across a dam.
48:41 It was pretty extensive.
48:43 When I saw that sketch, I was so motivated.
48:46 Yeah.
48:46 To just start building all of that stuff.
48:48 So I ran ahead with a lot of level design, a lot of geometry,
48:51 and it seems like a lot of it stuck in some way or another,
48:54 which is really amazing.
48:55 I did the, oh yeah, the dam, which was funny.
48:57 I just did that in a day, right?
48:59 Like, it was like about four or five hours.
49:00 I did a Hoover Dam thing 'cause I like the Hoover Dam.
49:03 I saw a concept of the cliff side.
49:05 I think Harry Teasley built that render of the skybox,
49:09 and I just thought, holy crap, this is perfect for vertigo.
49:13 Whatever we do here, we have to play on vertigo, and like narrow little ledges,
49:17 and you know, places you would like to normally dodge a grenade, but you can't.
49:28 And that's, that's the moment.
49:29 That's really the big part of that level is that reveal
49:32 and the play is kind of, kinda supports it afterward.
49:35 The helicopter comes in, you're fighting the helicopter, which is awesome.
49:47 First of all I had a bunch of textures, and then every time I made new ones,
49:52 whoever was working on the new levels would be like,
49:54 oh, fresh textures, I'm gonna use those.
49:56 Somebody making another level would start using them.
49:59 And I was like, no, this is chaos.
50:01 We need to restrict this.
50:02 So I started naming the texture sets by the level that they were made for.
50:07 I was trying to enforce some sort of like, visual cohesion.
50:11 And so that really ended up working.
50:14 There was one level I did,
50:16 it was the introduction of the sort of the bounce pads,
50:19 the alien bounce pads in the, in the real world.
50:22 And because, story wise, like, okay,
50:24 you're getting closer to hitting the alien world.
50:27 So I was, well, let's get a little
50:29 bit of alien world infection into the real world.
50:31 So I had done it just as a visual thing.
50:34 John Guthrie made it 10 times better.
50:36 And that's actually where he found the photo of my daughter.
50:39 'Cause I didn't put my daughter in Gordon's locker.
50:42 I hid her in like this destroyed office someplace,
50:45 as a little Easter egg for myself.
50:47 And they, and John went and put my daughter's photo in Gordon's locker,
50:52 which I think was a good decision.
51:05 I still get questions about stuff that I spent five minutes on 25
51:08 years ago from people who've now thought about this for 25 years.
51:12 And they're thinking that there's 25 years worth of development went into this.
51:16 I'm like, on some level, when you start talking about lore,
51:19 I'm like, well there's Black Mesa.
51:21 That was just a matter of we needed a name for something that was evocative.
51:26 In that entrance when you get off the train
51:28 and there's that lobby where there's a big map on it.
51:30 And when we were making that map, that was fairly early on, I put a dot in New
51:35 Mexico and then that turned into, I think Marc saw that.
51:38 He was like, oh, where is that?
51:40 This is where we are.
51:41 And then he named it Black Mesa.
51:43 That is a favorite thing of mine actually.
51:45 If you come up with a name for something then,
51:47 and it evokes something, then you don't have to write the whole story.
51:50 'Cause it's a conspiracy plot.
51:52 Everybody knows more about it than you do.
51:54 So you don't have to do, you don't have to answer those questions.
51:58 You just keep raising questions and make the mystery kind of thing.
52:01 Like dialogue came in later.
52:02 Also, a lot of the scripted sequences came in later,
52:05 and those helped to kind of sharpen the storytelling aspect of it.
52:09 Because I mean, setting expectations to get up to the surface and then like,
52:13 oh no, they're not here to help us.
52:15 The whole thing about diegetic writing, right?
52:17 Like keeping the exposition in the game instead of outside the game,
52:20 you know, give a lot of credit to Marc.
52:24 After playtests, we'd realize that maybe you
52:26 need more of a dialogue cue about something.
52:30 That's when we started to have,
52:31 do like scientists who were literally pop up in a corner and go, go that way.
52:35 There's a few of those that we stuck in right at the end when we'd like,
52:39 well we get one more session with Hal.
52:41 He can say, go down here, you know, go around that corner.
52:46 Well, so much for the government.
52:47 Their idea of containment is to kill everyone associated with the project.
52:51 Judging from your hazard suit, I'd say you were part of what went wrong.
52:55 I knew Hal from San Francisco as an artist cartoonist.
52:59 He was also an animator and an actor in some science fiction movies.
53:04 So when we got down to the wire,
53:06 we did a bunch of voice casting, and nothing was right.
53:08 And I just kept thinking of Hal, and I finally just called him and said, Hal,
53:12 I want you to at least talk to people here so they can hear your voice.
53:16 And I got him on a speaker phone,
53:17 and I had a bunch of people gathered in my office.
53:20 And I'm like, okay, Hal, everybody's here.
53:21 And he's like, well, what would you like me to say?
53:24 And everybody was like, this is him.
53:25 This is the guy.
53:27 Why do we all have to wear these ridiculous ties?
53:31 Another interesting voice thing was the G-Man.
53:33 So we liked Mike Shapiro's work, so we knew we wanted to use him,
53:37 but we brought him in to do Barney and also the G-Man.
53:41 So we did a take on all the G-Man lines with kind of a straight voice.
53:46 And it was thinking that, okay, we have something safe,
53:48 but we're not super excited about it.
53:50 And give us something else.
53:52 And he does does this crazy lizard voice.
53:55 The border world Xen is in our control for the time being.
54:00 Thanks to you.
54:01 Quite a nasty piece of work you managed over there.
54:05 I am impressed.
54:08 And we took it back and everybody just loved the crazy lizard voice.
54:11 And so that's how it worked out.
54:15 Did you do the Nihilanth?
54:16 I did.
54:17 Ladies and gentlemen, the Nihilanth.
54:19 Just imagine his head floating in space as a baby.
54:35 I went into Gabe's office and I demanded Gabe to either fire Ken or I quit.
54:41 And Gabe just laughed at me.
54:44 [LAUGHING] Correct response from Gabe.
54:46 Yeah.
54:46 I was like, argh.
54:48 Until Bill got there, I was the oldest guy there.
54:51 It was hard because I had to go home in the evenings,
54:55 whereas the kids who had just,
54:56 the young guys who just moved out from Florida or wherever,
55:00 they did not have to go home in the evenings.
55:02 I'd go home, see my kids when they were in bed.
55:05 I would come back down the hill to Valve.
55:07 Nobody else I worked with had to get up
55:09 to get their kids off to school in the morning.
55:11 But I did.
55:12 You're wired to just take full advantage of the situation.
55:14 You're like, you put everything into it.
55:16 So when we say we worked 18 hour days, that's no exaggeration.
55:20 Yeah.
55:20 Not at, not at all.
55:21 I can edit all day.
55:22 I can make, I can design all day.
55:24 I don't have to worry about anything.
55:26 You know, two guys from Microsoft start a game
55:28 studio with, with a bunch of incredibly capable,
55:30 you know, with an incredible team.
55:32 You're gonna, you're gonna push yourself harder than ever before.
55:36 I don't usually crunch real hard.
55:38 I get it done in like, I come in, I work, I go home.
55:42 And a lot of people were living like, you know,
55:45 really long hours, you know, the classic, we'll all come in at 1:00,
55:49 and then goof around for a while and then work late into the morn,
55:53 you know, late at night.
55:55 I was employee 17.
55:57 there was a, a woman that was the kind of the office manager and eventually,
56:02 Mona Lisa Guthrie came in as the, at the desk.
56:06 I was the only woman on the team.
56:09 [SIGH] That was not awesome.
56:13 I decided to become a baseball fan here after the birth of my first daughter.
56:18 So she's the one in Gordon's locker, Isabel.
56:21 But she was, she's very special needs.
56:26 She's 25 today.
56:28 You know, cognitively, she's about three years old.
56:35 So after her birth in the middle of Half-Life production,
56:38 it was, it was really hard.
56:41 It was really hard.
56:43 'Cause we were getting about two hours of sleep at a stretch.
56:46 'Cause she had to be fed through a tube in her stomach every two hours.
56:50 I had a, just a difficult time relating to the world when she was a baby.
56:57 I had a hard time just talking to people.
56:59 'Cause I was just kind of tired and angry all the time.
57:02 Yeah.
57:03 My wife, she worked at Valve for a while.
57:05 She did a bunch of textures for the game.
57:08 Like I said, she did those soda machines.
57:10 She did just a bunch of level textures.
57:13 She textured Big Mama, the sort of boss creature.
57:17 She textured him.
57:20 when Isabel arrived, she obviously had a lot of issues.
57:25 So, yeah, had to stop working and stay with her at home.
57:31 And it was the last year of Half-Life,
57:34 and we'd pretty much crunched that whole year.
57:36 So, I was at work a lot.
57:39 It was, it was hard.
57:40 It was definitely a hard year.
57:56 Games have often had this thing where they're
57:58 just a little too attached to Star Wars, Blade Runner, Alien.
58:02 So it wasn't that hard to try to get people to go,
58:06 let's think of something really alien.
58:08 Like what Xen was initially was you're gonna go inside a huge alien
58:12 organism and kill it or figure out how to turn it on or off,
58:15 or something like that.
58:17 I didn't know you, we couldn't actually do that.
58:19 Or what was involved.
58:20 What does it mean to have alien architecture
58:23 or a planet that's biologically defining the structures
58:27 in it as opposed to what the tools we're good at, which is making rectangles.
58:32 And then slowly it scaled back till it was more and more corridors,
58:36 and that everybody was really good at.
58:39 People were finishing up stuff,
58:40 and I was still working on Xen because it was like,
58:42 it went through a lot of iteration or at least,
58:44 we're trying to figure out what it was.
58:46 Different people were taking swings at it, either static concepts...
58:49 Weren't you in a bit of a timeline crunch for it as well?
58:52 Yeah.
58:52 It was the end of the game.
58:53 Yeah.
58:53 I wanted to cut stuff out and they're like, no leave it in.
58:56 And I'm like, yeah, but I don't have any,
58:57 I don't, there's nothing, I don't have any support for this.
58:59 Right.
59:00 And then after a lot of it was built, it was like,
59:02 oh yeah, we're gonna change the gravity and give you a jump pack.
59:04 That came later [LAUGHING] And I was like, ah.
59:07 There's a lot of stuff, especially in Xen where you know,
59:10 that you're getting close to a first draft of some things, right?
59:14 'Cause we just didn't have time and we got to the end of the game.
59:17 And so we considered not going to Xen,
59:20 but the art concepts people did were so cool.
59:24 For the Xen textures, I was deeply inspired by electron microscope imagery,
59:30 and we'd had so much of that regular structural
59:34 texture material that I wanted to do something more organic.
59:37 Insects as well.
59:38 I think there's a lot of textures that were based on beetles.
59:41 It was, that was really fun, and incredibly challenging levels to make.
59:46 'cause the, that editor was not friendly for organic shapes.
59:51 I built the little behaviors for the tree that hits you if you get too close.
59:55 And the one, the light stalk that kind of hides.
59:58 But Ken did a bunch of AIs there.
1:00:01 The floating controller guys.
1:00:03 The flying guys were great,
1:00:04 but you had to set up air nodes for them to travel properly.
1:00:07 I prototyped a lot.
1:00:07 And some of those prototypes were used in the final battle, I believe.
1:00:12 And also for the Gonarch, which I think Randy did.
1:00:15 We at some point have to stop polishing.
1:00:17 At some point we have to like, it is what it is.
1:00:20 And if the player hasn't had fun up until that point, well then we failed.
1:00:24 They're not gonna get to that point.
1:00:25 So who cares?
1:00:26 It just has to finish, and it did.
1:00:29 And there's always Half-Life 2 to win 'em back.
1:00:31 I love that sensation of being alone and inhaling dimension.
1:00:34 But the experience that people really liked in the game
1:00:38 was scientists pop up, and Barney pops up,
1:00:41 and you have companions and you have this feeling of companionship
1:00:44 around you with all the other stuff that's going on.
1:00:47 So a lot of people missed that, which I understood.
1:00:49 And I think if we had thought about the ending from the beginning,
1:00:53 we would've figured out some ways to do that a little more.
1:01:16 I remember coming back from downtown Cabo
1:01:18 very drunk and then running to the beach,
1:01:21 but didn't know there was like a six foot retaining wall there.
1:01:24 So I just went right over, and then I was hurting so much.
1:01:28 I slept the night where I fell.
1:01:30 Yeah.
1:01:30 I woke up the next morning.
1:01:32 I had never heard that story.
1:01:33 With like a really stiff neck.
1:01:34 Oh my God.
1:01:35 It's a good thing you were pretty young.
1:01:37 I remember after we'd gone final on the game,
1:01:42 I was home one morning taking a shower, and my wife asked me, It's done.
1:01:47 Is it any good?
1:01:49 Is the game any fun?
1:01:51 I go, I don't know.
1:01:53 Like, I hope so.
1:01:55 I don't think it's exaggerating by saying if any
1:01:58 one of the crew had disappeared for a month, we wouldn't have shipped.
1:02:04 It didn't matter who they were.
1:02:05 You know, everybody was, was mission critical.
1:02:09 My inspiration from Valve, what I really took away with me,
1:02:12 was that the thing that is most important to me is what are we making.
1:02:16 Coming in as a texture artist,
1:02:17 you don't have a lot of expectation that you're gonna get to influence that.
1:02:21 And I was able to have quite a bit of influence on, on the what.
1:02:26 It was so fun to work with the people who were making Half-Life.
1:02:29 The collection of people were diverse,
1:02:31 at least like in their professional backgrounds, was kind of all over the place.
1:02:36 And so figuring out how to work with all those people.
1:02:39 But also just the fact that we had
1:02:42 hired really stellar people who were good at collaborating,
1:02:45 like the conscientious people,
1:02:47 deeply passionate about what they wanted to create.
1:02:51 That just was a recipe for a professionally, like, really good time.
1:02:56 It seems to me that one of the things that good games do
1:03:00 is make two games worth of stuff and then throw away the bad game.
1:03:05 And fortunately Valve was able to do that, A lot of companies couldn't do that.
1:03:11 But backstopped by Gabe and Mike, Valve could afford to do that.
1:03:16 I always have absolutely nothing interesting to say when people say,
1:03:19 would you reflect on your legacy?
1:03:21 Like, I really don't look back a whole lot.
1:03:24 I'm always excited by the future, right?
1:03:26 So to me it's like, I can look back at the things that we did,
1:03:29 but to me they're just sort of like the stepping stones
1:03:33 to what we're gonna be able to do in the future.
1:03:36 That's just how I'm, that's just how I'm wired.
1:03:39 [ELECTRONIC MUSIC PLAYING] [GUNSHOTS] Oh no.