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