(intriguing music)
- I always have been doing since my childhood
a bit of urban exploration.
So I love to break to a window of an abandoned factory
or building or train station.
So that's one of my hobbies, used to be.
What's on the roofs of buildings.
What's in an abandoned building cellar
and in a factory?
We did a lot of work on this.
(intriguing music)
(intriguing music continues)
At the time when I did my first photo shoot
of the Austerlitz station, it was under construction.
But then there was no security guards, no fences even.
You can just walk and see the broken textures
and layers of paint and brick and history.
And it was just so cool that I can get
and get this information
before it got overbuilt with a new neighborhood.
I went to check it out last night
and it happens to be completely destroyed
and under construction again.
And it just goes back, luckily, coincidentally
to the exact same state
where I shot it 25 years ago actually.
(intriguing music)
(slowed down gunshots) (radio beeping)
(train horn blaring)
(intriguing music)
(intriguing music continues)
(music fading out)
(compelling music)
- So one of the big challenges with "Half-Life"
was just establishing the company
and sort of determining whether or not
we could actually make video games at all.
My background was operating systems and spreadsheets.
Mike Harrington, who was the co-founder,
had a similar background.
He had a little more game experience than I did,
but with "Half-Life,"
we were pretty sure we were gonna fail.
And then "Half-Life" was successful.
It was like a lot more successful
than we had any reason to expect.
And now we had to follow it up, right?
We didn't wanna have a sophomore slump
We didn't want to be a one-and-done kind of company,
so now we had the terrifying obligation
to our customers and to our fans
to somehow advance our game design skills, our technology
all needed to level up for the second game.
- I think a bunch of us were really shocked
by the success of "Half-Life 1."
We were this young, unproven company.
I don't think any of us really knew
what to expect when we finished the game.
I remember when we started working on "Half-Life 2,"
we had already set the bar pretty high for ourselves.
- So during "Half-Life 2,"
what we were really trying to do
is take advantage of the visibility
that "Half-Life" had created for us in the industry
to continue to hire the best people
that we could find in the world.
It just got easier.
The bar didn't get any lower, but the fact that we had,
it went from, "Hey, this weird dude
who worked on operating systems
wants to convince you he can run a game company"
to, "Oh, 'Half-Life' won a bunch of awards
and now they're working on a sequel to that."
- It was either my first week or my first day
was actually the going away party for Mike Harrington,
the co-founder.
- Yeah, I came to Valve when I was just tiny.
We had, I think, maybe 10 or so people.
Dave and I grew up together in Louisiana,
so he and I had always talked about
maybe starting a game company at some point.
And during "Half-Life," that kind of changed to a,
"Maybe instead of that, the dream could be
you come and work here at this one with me."
- Yeah.
And I interviewed the day that "Half-Life" went gold
and I took the team photo.
- [Jay] Yeah, there was like an old photo of us.
We broke a paper mache Headcrab and everything.
- Yeah, I was freaking out.
- Yeah. (both chuckling)
- I was actually working on
a video game concept in high school,
and I was seeking a mentor and I got in touch
with Marc Laidlaw at Valve.
I guess it was the right time and right place
and quite a bit of luck,
and I ended up getting an internship that way.
I guess I was 17 at the time.
- So you've got a whole company
that's familiar with tools and a whole process,
and then we just started over.
We rebuilt the tools and we rebuilt the engine.
So we had this long period of time
where we could sort of take our time on design.
And so we spent a lot of time working on story
and just trying to figure out how to make this thing bigger,
like somehow more epic.
And those discussions eventually led to this idea that,
so in "Half-Life" one, you open this portal,
some strange rift to another dimension.
And we thought, "Well, what if that broadcast
this signal to the universe that's like,
'Oh, there's this planet there.
It's free air and water.'"
And so then we sort of came up with this idea of,
"Well, there's this mega organization
that's resource-starved
and they're just gonna come and take it if they can."
- How many years passed between? Six?
- Yeah. - So I would say
the first two years we tried a lot of things,
and a lot of those story arcs that we had initially
didn't have really any carryover from "Black Mesa"
or any of that.
- There was originally gonna be
three different alien races like the bugs or religious ones,
and the Antlions actually came out of that bug race
that was supposed to be a much bigger part of the game.
- It had three alien races.
The Warrior Aliens, the Insect Aliens,
and the Spy Aliens.
And it had a Prague-like city,
which ended up being the closest thing to City 17.
- In a lot of ways, it reminds me of writing music.
Everyone was sort of riffing ideas on,
"Well what if we did this or tried that?"
I remember we were really ambitious at the beginning.
I remember we designed, what, four cities?
At one point, Prague, Jerusalem, Chicago,
Los Angeles, I believe.
We had an Arctic base, an underwater base,
an icebreaker ship, an airplane sequence
that crashed into a high rise,
which we cut right after 9/11.
We had several Combine bases in the Wasteland.
We had the Air Exchange, which is where they were taking
the atmosphere from Earth.
We had a train depot and so on.
So we really obviously had to scale back
what we were trying to do.
But that's okay to go a little bit nuts at the beginning.
- I saw it almost as sophomore anxiety maybe, you know?
Like, "Oh, wow, we have to surpass 'Half-Life',"
and "Half-Life" was important, you know?
And so it was this unbounded ambition.
- And we kept asking ourselves and Gabe kept asking,
"Well, how is this 'Half-Life?'"
When you have a silent first-person narrator,
you could tell people this is Gordon
and throw that character into literally any environment
and say, "Yeah, this is 'Half-Life,'"
but unless the environment is telling you
that that's the case, it's very arbitrary.
So we wrestled with that a long time.
Slowly the sort of grab bag of characters we had,
we started to feel like there was connections between them.
And then at some point we realized,
"Oh, we can make this out of the science team
the survivors from 'Black Mesa'."
And suddenly, for me it was the idea
of it's a science team.
That suddenly, you could put those guys anywhere,
and because they have a familial interconnectedness
and they recognize Gordon, that will make you feel like
it's a continuation of this story.
Obviously Alyx was totally new to that universe,
but she had a father who had been in "Black Mesa"
and he and the other scientists were friends,
and they had extended their relationship
into this new world that you were in.
That was kind of the click, was the science team.
And that was a while till we got there.
- Much like the first one
where all the contributors were really
collectively deciding on the direction,
is we were really making a push to grow the team
and hire new artists.
Dhabih Eng was an influential early contributor.
I think he and I were doing character designs
for Gordon and for Alyx
and for some of the antagonist Combine characters.
- At the time, I was looking at a lot of,
I mean, really the helmets,
which I think are kind of one of their defining features,
was based off some gas masks from Europe
that I had seen in some reference.
I remember doing early concepts of the new HEV suit,
like, "What's Gordon gonna be now?"
And I had kind of just started,
and so I was like, "I'm gonna make this my own!"
It looked I guess kind of like the still suits in Dune,
but black and a lot more belt buckles and latex.
And Gabe was just kind of like, "What's this?"
Like, "It's Gordon." I was really proud and excited.
He's like, "Why is it not orange?"
(Dhabih chuckles)
Or something to that effect of essentially,
"Why are you giving up this iconic part of the character."
- People love it.
- [Dhabih] Yeah, people love that, so what are you doing?
And it's like, I kind of was like,
"Yeah, I guess he's right."
So we kind of went back to the drawing board
and ended up with what shipped.
- We had, I don't know, so many creatures
that we tried and abandoned, you know?
Not because they were bad,
because we had better things to pursue.
Like there were the Sackticks, the Cremator, the Crab Synth,
the Stalkers. - And even stuff, like
the Stalkers we had a little bit in the game, right?
- [David S] Yeah, we shipped the Stalkers,
but not as an adversary that you fought.
- There was definitely an evolution
of how biological versus how synthetic
a lot of the creatures in "Half-Life 2" were.
And I was always hoping to get to a space
where it was ambiguous, you know?
Where you couldn't quite tell if this was created
or if it had grown or if it was natural or synthetic.
- There was some Synths I did that never ship.
Actually, we, we did ship 'em.
They were at the end of the game
when you're going through the Citadel.
I had designed these Synths
that no animator could figure out how to actually move
'cause they weren't built to move.
- And much like some of the environments
that we've seen released in the leak that were very dark,
some of the early "Half-Life" stuff was also very dark.
But at the time, video games were very dark.
- In the interim before we hired Fletcher
and before Viktor was there,
'cause it was the old environments, right?
I don't remember how it came about
that they built this level,
but the idea was there was some looting going on
and the idea was you're in this little alley
and you see a citizen, you hear a voice saying-
- "TV! Free TV!"
- They just got into the TV store
and the citizens and the cops are fighting,
and you see a citizen run past you holding a TV set
and he goes, "Get one! Get a TV!
Get yourself a TV!"
And then he runs off down the thing
and you go in another courtyard
and there's a cop with a night stick and a citizen,
and they're having a fist fight.
And it's interesting
'cause the NPCs are negotiating their bounding boxes
and there's some animation
like how difficult it is to contact.
- We captured everything.
We took pictures of whiteboard design sessions.
There were really crude drawings and ideas.
Some of the stuff from the very beginning
made it all the way to the end, you know?
Ravenholm, Antlions, Dog, Kleiner's pet Headcrab.
Those things were just so fun in the moment
that how could they not survive, right?
The other thing that was really memorable
is I remember we started making the world really dystopian,
really dark at the beginning,
and some of the concept art shows that.
We didn't think players would enjoy
spending 20 to 40 hours in such a dark
and a kind of oppressive setting,
so the game lightened up considerably over time.
But still maintain the feeling of a security state.
- So I was trying to get all these cool ideas
that the team had already when I arrived
and streamline them.
Instantly I think we were friends with Marc Laidlaw,
we had a common sort of vision and fantasy
to create Orwell-like city.
And then slowly, I brought context behind that,
the idea that we can place this
in an anonymous Central Eastern European city,
which is a perfect setting
because in these countries there were
so many waves of invasions.
We had the Ottoman Empire, we had the Russians,
and now why not the aliens?
- And one of the first maps I remember working on
was they called Test Room Standards.
In "Half-Life," every level designer
kind of had their own idea of how big stairs were
or how big steps were gonna be or how big a button was.
Make sure we had some consistency.
Another thing that was sort of important
was just getting more people to go on field trips
and going to do research,
'cause I think a lot of the level designers on "Half-Life 1"
just were building very abstractly,
and so we wanted to have some more grounding in reality
and have more realistic proportions.
And also just get, textures were going from hand painted
to more photographic, and so we would go out
and collect a lot of the pictures for those textures
to start building for our new library.
- I joined "Half-Life 2"
probably a year after it had started.
I know that it was at least a year
because I was put on Borealis,
which everybody else had disowned.
But then I came along and they said,
"Oh, well, I guess this is now your problem."
So I started on Borealis,
and of course I failed at that too.
That eventually got cut.
- Yeah, so I came in having had experience doing game AI.
I was at Looking Glass Studios,
probably the biggest thing I did there
was lead programmer on "Thief: The Dark Project,"
the AI for that too.
And actually my first thing is they handed "Borealis" to me.
- After I'd finished?
- [Tom] Yeah, to do the AI for the guy
that you're supposed to walk through the Borealis ship with.
- There was a bunch of work put into it.
We even went on an icebreaker ship to get reference.
As soon as we started to put it together,
we realized how unbelievably tight the space was
and you could never make any kind of really
interesting combat in it.
And so it just withered on the vine right there.
- I mean, when I started there was that document
that was the tech wishlist.
- Yes. - It was just this very
bare bones bullet list of tech features.
And I mean, I think it was six years of work
to build that tech list and then realize it into a product
and leverage all the implications of it, you know?
- So this was a main feature,
that the light felt very, very realistic and intuitive
because of the source engine and the work,
the collaboration between artists and engineers.
Ken Birdwell, he was a fan about photography
and getting the lighting right.
- The math that we were using was wrong.
And not only that,
the math that everybody was using was wrong.
And then as I started to correct it
and I realized just how bad it was and then I fixed it
and suddenly everything looked great,
I had to go tell the hardware guys,
the people who made hardware accelerators,
that fundamentally the math was wrong on their cards.
That took about two and a half years.
I could not convince the guys.
Finally we hired Gary McTaggart and Charlie Brown,
and those guys had enough pull and enough-
I have a fine arts major, nobody's gonna listen to me.
- Charlie and I met at college at the University of Florida.
We were both getting computer science degrees, yes?
I ended up dropping out to go work at 3dfx
as employee 11 there.
And then I think Charlie,
you actually graduated, didn't you?
- I graduated, then I followed you. And I was 17 there.
- Yeah, yeah. - I was 17 there.
- There were three kind of principles.
One was to make something that was immersive,
visually really rich and appealing,
something more like you would see in a film,
and the art direction
and the technology to make that happen.
Second one was to have characters that you cared about.
So basically that could react, emote,
that mattered in the world instead of just being signposts.
Third was to have a responsive environment
with physics that mattered.
- I think that I maybe more than other people
realized just how big of a task
we were setting for ourselves.
So I was a little bit daunted by that.
- We felt the pressure from Gabe actually to double down
and make something even grander than "Half-Life 1."
Therein lies the sort of little bit of the trap
of "Half-Life 2's" development story,
which went from being a pretty quick,
"Let's figure out how to do this" to a six-year slog.
- [Tom] Yeah, and it was six, seven days a week,
10 to 14 hours a day.
- [Ken] "Yeah, we're gonna cut your feature.
Sorry. It's just not worth it."
- [David S] So I ended up being really the point person
working with the FBI.
- [Charlie] I remember coming in that morning
and figuring it out,
and I just felt like someone had just punched me in the gut.
- [Robin] What's this mean?
Can we still keep working on the game?
Is someone just gonna release the whole game tomorrow?
- [Jay] I definitely was not shielded from that.
- [Scott Lynch] I remember one conversation with Gabe,
which he was like, "So how fucked are we?"
"Yeah, we're kind of screwed."
- [Gabe] The company was pretty close to going bankrupt.
I was pretty close to going personally bankrupt.
It's like, there was no money left.
- [Karl] I can't think of another case when that happened.
Yeah, a real bullshit move.
- [Marc] Are we allowed to cry in this documentary?
That's what I wanna know.
(tense music fades out)
(gentle music)
(gentle music continues)
- I remember we shipped "Half Life 1"
and the world loved it, and we were just super happy.
Like, "Yeah, we did this thing!"
And we had a big meeting, and Gabe looks at me
and goes like, "So all the animations are terrible.
How are you gonna make 'Half-Life 2' better?"
- In "Half-Life 1," we made what were at the time
significant improvements,
but still they were fairly robotic and mechanical.
And so we had to go and do a huge amount of work
on the animation system and on the facial animation system
and coming up with authoring tools
that allowed you to do it.
- Oh.
End of the line,
- A lot of this was level designer design,
like figuring out how to build atmosphere.
We knew that we wanted to start you off
seeing the Citadel right away
and we wanted to introduce you to the city
with this great voice acting from Robert Culp.
We wanted to finally do real characters.
We knew that from "Half-Life 1",
the way that players would respond
to having any character talk to them
was way beyond the reaction that we expected.
When we figured this out in play testing,
if Barney would follow you around and shoot things,
suddenly you just love this guy
and you love the scientist and you love these characters.
So we knew we wanted to just bring that
way up to the next levels beyond what we could imagine.
(loud explosion) (frantic screaming)
- And the theory was if we could make a character
who could act realistically,
that that would help the player make an emotional connection
to the other characters in the game.
And at the time we decided we were gonna do that,
not only did none of the technology work,
but I would go talk to industry professionals
and they would tell me not to bother
'cause you couldn't do it.
Luckily found a research work done in the '70s
by Dr. Paul Ekman,
and he had just broken down how the face works
and how humans make expressions
and he had this incredibly wonderful
formal clinical description of what a face does
and the sorts of things that normal people do
with their face.
- I tried this experiment with putting a grid
on Scott Lynch's face
and shooting him from the front and the side
so that we could get points from this grid
in three space for the geometry.
And we got shots of his texture and we found a good way
to model a reasonable head of his geometry
and then project the texture onto it,
and then abstract it or stylize it enough
so that it didn't look totally photographic,
but it looked like kind of a real person.
- Occasionally when somebody hears the history,
it will generate a light bulb,
but no, no, I don't get accosted.
- [Producer] No one's asking you for beers or anything?
- No, no. Or buying me beers.
(both laughing)
- We added Ken's eye tech to that, which was amazing
because he really modeled
and he went deep into the research of how eyes work.
- Eyeballs was about nine months.
Just on eyeballs.
(Ken chuckles)
But you have to do each step.
You have to get the shape of the eye right,
you have to get how the eye lid
gets pushed by the cornea and the ball of the eye.
So as your eyes move around,
your lower lid, your upper lid,
all of those get sh shifted slightly and it's all automatic.
It was wonderful.
The day I got it working, the characters went from looking
like interesting dolls to, (gasps),
"Alyx just looked at me!
Oh my god, this is working."
- They would ask for surprising things at times,
like they wanted really fine control
over looking at named objects in the 3D world,
no matter what direction the actor is facing.
So you had to figure out things about,
"Oh, maybe the upper body needs to turn
and the head needs to turn and the eyes need to turn."
- So we're in the elevator coming back from Starbucks
to get morning coffee, and we saw this face and it's like,
"That's him, that's the scientist!"
And he was an accountant in the firm below ours in Kirkland.
- Yeah, definitely, and kind of blows your mind
when you've been working all day
on this character in your game
and all of a sudden you get on the elevator
and you're like, "Holy crap, it's him!"
- I once ran into him at the airport.
- So we cast people that were real change vendors
in front of supermarkets, we'd cast waiters in restaurants.
- [Ken] When I was in junior high school,
I took karate classes
and that was my old karate instructor.
- Randy Lundeen said, "Hey, there is a guy
holding a sign for work at this exit on 520 every day
who has this great face."
And he took a picture of his face
and he stop and asked if he could.
And so it's like, "Oh, this is great.
I think this guy's Eli."
We brought him in and paid him a couple hundred dollars,
which is what we were paying people back then,
and so that's where he came from.
- Erdine Gesiche was a Bosnian friend
that I knew from school.
He was like, "We want the East European
contingent and stuff too," so it was pretty interesting.
- We wanted anybody to feel a part of the world
when they're playing it as a player,
and so we found people from pretty much every skin color,
different ages, male and female,
equal numbers of males and females.
Sadly for them, they all had to share the same voice actor.
(all laughing)
- Sadly for us too!
- We dropped a crate of rockets coming across the plaza.
We hoped for one more fighter to help storm that barricade.
We never dreamed it would be you.
- I mean, Kleiner's Lab was the first prototype that we did
of how characters could work together in a scene.
- Yeah, it was like a proof of concept.
We kind of had to make that work
and put everything we could into it at the time
to test all the technology,
and then know from there what can we do,
what else can we do with this.
- Turning it into a performance that would be engaging
rather than just the audio radio play kind of thing.
Yeah, I mean that was the point where,
that scene was where it all started to come together,
all our theories and hopes for what the experience might be.
- And it all went completely smoothly outta the box,
it was amazing.
- The most difficult technical aspects
are really kind of boring.
They're the, "Okay, the character is running through AI
and now they need to jump in
and hug another character.
Now they need to pick up something from the desk,
and that thing on the desk can move
and where the character is can move
and where the player is can move
and everything about this whole scene can move dynamically."
And to get to that stage where it just looks right
is this huge technical challenge and artistic challenge.
But once it's done, it's just amazing.
- Gordon?
Gordon snap out of it.
You're staring at me again.
- [Kleiner] Ah, warming up nicely.
- Are you sure you don't want me to swap out the polarizer?
- I remember when we got Fletcher on
and he would kind of teach us about
how they did things at Disney
and they would bring in acting coaches for the animators.
What does sarcasm look like?
Certain expressions,
and there's a timing to those expressions.
- When you have a scene with multiple characters,
it's not always the person talking
that's doing the acting, right?
Everybody's acting.
Even though you may be looking at Kleiner
because he's the one talking,
every character in that scene around you, behind you,
they're all doing stuff
because not everybody's gonna be looking at the same place.
- Yeah, I remember even just like when Alyx teleports
and then you see her show up on the screen, right?
- Oh, that was incredible.
- Heads over, gives him a quick kiss.
- It tells you so much about the relationship
without having to say, "Hi, dad, I love you."
And all this extra heavy-handed stuff.
- Jake was a random demo reel that was sent in.
It was incredible.
- Jake was incredible. - Jake was incredible.
Miss that guy. - One of a kind.
- Yeah, miss that guy.
Amazing technical animator.
- [Matt] Yeah, I mean Jake was one of those guys that,
whatever needed to be done, he would figure it out
and just make it happen.
- [Douglas] It'll just get done correctly.
- [Dhabih] I think also the context
of when all this was taking place,
like the problems that he was helping solve
were just things that weren't being done.
Even something as simple
as passing someone an object between two characters
sounds super simple
but actually really, really complex, especially back then.
And so he really helped push how do we even do this
in collaboration with the programmers.
- Dhabih wanted to do a goo thing,
so I worked on the shader for that.
I did the stuff for rendering that
and all the little monitors everywhere
that showed other scenes.
Did the refraction shaders and the supporting code for that.
The shaders didn't really have conditionals
or loops or anything like that,
so we would unroll it all and compile a bazillion shaders.
It got to the point where it was so many shaders
and it took so long to compile that we,
I think Mike Desalt implemented distributed building system.
Everyone's machine, the company was running something
that could sit there and compile shaders all the time
or do lighting for the levels or whatever.
- [Dhabih] Any opportunity to kind of add
to the visual storytelling I think was...
- Yeah, and I think we hid the first G-Man sighting there.
- [Dhabih] That's right, he was one of the monitor.
It would flip to him. - Yeah. Yeah.
And then he'd just walk out of frame.
- The moment where you see him
makes you realize there must be a lot of moments
where you didn't know he was watching you.
He's not Big Brother, that doesn't make sense to me
that he would be a Big Brother
because that's sort of industrial and bureaucratic,
and this is much more intimate.
He's always over your shoulder, watching,
waiting for the moment to speak.
That's where I think he lives.
My name is Mike Shapiro and I am G-Man.
I am also Barney.
And Barney's, he's not that far from-
"Gee, Gordon!"
He's not that far from where I live.
He's so fallible and he's always tripping over himself,
and he's just such a good guy, you know?
Not necessarily the most capable,
but just really there for you.
Get that thing away from me!
- Here, my pet. Hop up!
- I think early on, I had a sense that G-Man knew a lot
and was taking care of a lot
that we didn't quite understand,
was kind of enjoying fucking with people
and massaging reality in a way
that he had a unique capacity to do.
There were also aspects to him that I knew pretty early on,
like his relationship to time
is very different than you or I would think.
In my mind, he could literally be in two places at once.
And so sometimes there was a kind of
an implied hitch in his timing,
or he's experiencing two or three different moments at once
and that might be funny for a reason that you don't know
'cause you're only in one time with him in a moment.
The right man in the wrong place
can make all the difference in the world.
- [Marc] I think as we realized how well she worked
coming out of stuff like the Kleiner's lab experience,
we started looking for more and more ways
to include her in stuff.
- And of course she really came to life
when we found Merle Dandridge.
- Yeah.
We could feel her a already as a partner
in creating this character, I think, coming out of that.
She's just got a creative relationship with this character
and she's gonna bring a lot to it.
- [Bill V] I feel like she was really able to bring a warmth
and humor into her deliveries, too,
that other people, it was more like
a soldier in a game a little bit.
I mean, she did this great job of bringing
a character warmth into it.
- And now we're sitting ducks
unless we can get this thing running.
Come on, Dr. Kleiner. Is it gonna work or not?
- Now, now. There's nothing to be nervous about.
Let's see.
A massless field flux itself limit.
- My name is Harry Robbins, I'm known as Hal Robbins.
I have a stage name of Dr. Hal.
My only doctorate is in theology
from the Church of the SubGenius, which I'm involved in.
Well, I think perhaps Marc was familiar
with the things I do on the radio
and he thought my voice would be good for it.
I have a monthly Ask Dr. Hal show on Twitch and Zoom,
and I am also on a couple of radio shows.
Well, I'm a graphic artist.
I've worked for DC Comics for their Paradox Press line.
Well, I have some patrons who I do painting for.
I've painted many things for them.
I played Dr. Isaac Kleiner
after I did the voice of a number of different scientists.
I try to pronounce all the words.
I make sure to aspirate consonants, for example.
I don't say "didn't" the way most people do,
even newscasters today.
I always make sure to say "did-n't."
Perhaps it sounds archaic that way.
Marc wrote archaic expressions into my dialogue,
and I would say things like, "Oh, fi" and so forth.
No, not up there!
No, no! Careful, Lamar!
Those are quite fragile!
Oh, fi!
It'll be another week before I can coax her out there.
- Yeah. Longer if we're lucky.
- Barney! (chuckles)
You're not an animal person.
(Kleiner grimaces)
- It was always pleasant. I was always well treated.
They were always patient,
even if I mispronounced something which was obvious,
they would correct me and I would pay attention.
And I always try to be as close as possible
to a one-take wonder so they don't have to do it again.
But that enabled them to do it many times.
And so they had a lot of things which arose from that,
and some of these are the things I'm asked to say by fans,
which are inexplicable to people who don't know the game.
Like, "You want this guy to say,
'Have you seen my coffee cup?'
'And why do we all have to wear these ridiculous ties?'"
(Hal chuckles)
(compelling music)
- So in the same way that we thought it was important
in "Half-Life 1" that when you shot a wall,
that we put decals on the wall to indicate that you shot it,
we wanted to say, "Okay, what happens
when you throw a grenade at a bunch of boxes," right?
The world itself needed to be
more reactive to everything you did.
- We used some third party code,
but Jay Stelly was the one
who really wrote the wrapper on that, that integrated it.
- And physics was, even earlier in the project,
was pretty successful, right?
Once we got over the initial thing of things falling over
and we started adding breakable objects,
things you could script and hammer.
We added vehicles, sound cues from all the objects
and the AI, so you could drop things on them
and crush them and things like that.
All of those behaviors, once we got
just a few of those things in, that was really fertile.
- For everyone who worked on "Half-Life 2,"
masses got broken down into a set of scales
that I assume someone's already talked about.
No? Okay.
- Well, you see!
- So, yeah. All right.
So the question is whether it's bigger than a bread box
or smaller than a space station, right?
- When you want to debug something and the text says,
"Oh, this thing weighs as much as a racehorse-"
- Yeah, you knew it was more than a bread box
and not as much as a space station.
- "I think so, but I don't know in the scale
if it's closer to this or closer to that."
A refrigerator.
- Yeah, a refrigerator.
This all came from at some point,
I think it was David Speyrer,
so you could look at any entity in the game
and turn on a bunch of debugging text about it.
And one of the most important things to get right
with every object in the game
that was physically simulated was its mass,
'cause that dictated an enormous amount of things,
like the amount of force it would
apply to something else when it impact, when it hit them,
its response when it's hit by something else.
All that stuff, had to get it right.
But of course, masses is just a number.
What does this mean to anyone?
And so I think it was David Speyrer who found online
some list of masses and objects,
and he just brought that into the game
so that when you looked at an object,
it'd say like, "100, racehorse" or something.
And so over time, you all just got that locked in.
And because it was a logarithmic scale,
it went from things like bread box, paint can or something
up to like space stations.
- Yeah, the moon. - The moon!
- You're like, "What? What do we do with this?"
At this point, it's just key frame at that point.
- Yeah, so there would be many conversations
where we'd say something like, "I don't know.
Do you think that's more like a racehorse
or the space station?"
(metal creaking) (water splashes)
- The very first physics puzzle that we put in the game
from a development calendar standpoint
was the washing machine puzzle,
where you push the washing machine into the hopper
and raise the ramp for the airboat to jump over.
We developed that because we felt like we had
this section of relentless pressure
with the attack helicopter.
Watching players play test,
we felt like they needed relief from it.
You see the very first training of it
in the on-foot canals with the teeter-totter
that you have to put the cinder blocks on,
which was added to the game later,
and it's sort of training of like,
"Hey, you can interact with levers and balance
and create paths for yourself."
And then, yeah, later the buoyancy puzzle,
we added that one after the washing machine puzzle.
And it was just kind of like,
"Oh, you can connect masses with invisible pulley systems
and then build little machines that way.
(barrel thuds on the ground)
- I guess at first, right, the gravity gun was kind of this,
we weren't even sure we were gonna ship it in the game.
It was like a development tool.
And so it was this beam,
you could reach out and grab things
and pull 'em toward you or reposition 'em,
drop 'em, grab 'em from another point.
But then we talked about simplifying it
and just making it to where it was just pushing on things
and pulling on things, and where could we go with that.
- [David S] And the first draft of Ravenholm
wasn't really about physics so deeply, right?
We ended up reorganizing the game
to put Ravenholm after you get the gravity gun.
Originally it was before you would park the airboat
at the dock of Ravenholm
and then get out and go explore Ravenholm.
(eerie music)
- We wanted a horror area,
since in a lot of ways "Half-Life" was a horror game
and the horror was kind of leaching out of "Half-Life 2."
So we at least went in one environment that was just scary.
And then we had a design meeting where Doug Woods said,
"Preacher with a shotgun."
And it was like, "Oh, yes!"
- The important thing to know
is we didn't sit down and design Ravenholm
as the tutorial for all those things.
It kind of kept getting things over time.
And then after we got more physics working,
we had this idea that there would be traps
for the zombies in there with physics.
And there were a bunch of 'em,
and they didn't all make it into the final game.
And then some of them did work though,
and we had to build a system for cutting the zombies in half
once we added the propeller traps,
and we had to make 'em the right height
so you could crawl under 'em
or the zombies could crawl under 'em.
And then someone had the idea,
"Well, what if the top half can keep going
and it can get you under there?"
We tried that and that was great.
Someone had the idea of a saw blade,
and Ravenholm already existed and we ended up,
based on this behavior happening in another level,
built a saw blade and went and put it back in Ravenholm.
- Ravenholm was probably some of the most fun
I had working on "Half-Life 2,"
the whole idea behind Ravenholm
and that we were going to starve you of ammo,
sort of force them in a position
where they have to rely on physics
and the context of the objects around them.
It's like, "Oh, wouldn't it be awesome if this zombie,
it's gonna take him 30 more seconds to get to me,
but he's got a barrel right there.
What if he could swat that at me?"
So that was definitely something that was just like,
"We have physics now.
This would be a cool thing to do with it
and it'd be a thing that would make sense
and a thing that would be scary and fun."
- [Tom] One of things that John was extremely strong at
was little touches like, I think we called them puzzlets.
- We did call them puzzlets.
- They weren't puzzles, they were puzzlets.
- Yeah, it's this little thing that takes you
between five and 60 seconds to resolve,
and at the end you either get something
or you feel a certain way.
And it was really a big part of making sure
that minute-to-minute gameplay, as we called it,
was interesting.
Yeah, he was good at that.
(monster yells out) (gun emits whirring sound)
(loud gunshot)
- We actually did this as an exercise of like,
"Okay, take all the elements in the game
and have a grid of rows and columns of all those elements
and make sure that there's a meaningful thing
at each intersection of those cells,
so that everything has a meaningful
interaction with everything else."
And where we saw empty cells,
we would actually design a thing.
- [Jay] Yeah, like, "Is there something we could do there?"
- Yeah, barnacles plus grenades or whatever, you know?
"Okay, we need to make sure that they'll eat the grenade
and then blow up."
- The reason we build these scripting level design tools,
it makes it accessible for all the people on the team
if you can't write code, to like put something together,
try out an idea, see what we can do with this,
and the entity system's no different, right?
A lot of things that level designers just wanna like,
"I have this idea for something that could happen.
Is that fun?"
- Look to your own salvation!
(man laughing maniacally)
(loud gunshot)
- Yeah, I was on "TF 2" at that time
and I don't remember exactly,
I think it was during 2000 maybe?
Someone else has probably told you this
and got the dates actually right.
But at some point we all jumped from "TF 2"
over to "Half-Life 2."
I feel like that marks the sort of,
in some ways in retrospect,
the end of pre-production really of "Half-Life 2"
and it becomes now, "Let's build this thing and ship it."
(exciting music) (helicopter whirring)
- Actually, the first thing I got told to work on
was a jet ski, and I spent three weeks
trying to figure out a jet ski in first-person.
I was like, "Okay, none of this is working.
I don't see how you do this without making people sick."
So I remember one weekend out of frustration,
I just made the airboat.
I don't know, maybe it's the Florida bit in me.
- So Charlie Brown had worked on the airboat,
and then we picked it up a different group.
We started working on the canals.
And we had this idea of it was gonna be
kind of like a lot of tricks under pressure,
where you're doing skateboarding-type moves.
I think it was Kelly Bailey who basically said,
"I'm playing the canals and I'm trying to do these tricks,
and I'm failing, and then I'm getting shot."
And he's like, "I wanna be like 'Smokey and the Bandit.'
I just wanna be smashing my way out."
We did this whole other pass of the canals,
where we dialed down the consequences for failing the tricks
and we dialed up the feeling of power.
- Some players absolutely refused
to really stay in their airboats.
They wanted to get out and look under every rock,
behind every tree.
For those players, we had to craft enough density
through the lengths of the canals
to keep them entertained and happy.
And then there were people
who just wanted to smash through everything
and treat it like a racing sim.
And so the game had to be fun and interesting for them,
and sometimes that would clash.
- If you stop here, we're going to give you
a reward, basically.
Either a narrative reward or an actual in-game reward.
The lambda caches, the lambda designs,
we use them a lot more in the canals,
and part of that is literally because we did it afterwards.
I mean, I had worked on on coast maps
and we didn't have that yet.
- The canals are restrictive
'cause we want you to drive this airboat through them
and we've got all these fun things to do,
like you could jump over things,
you could smash through things.
The worst case scenario is you're trapped
with people who have guns and they're shooting at you
and you don't necessarily have a way of shooting back.
So that led to, "Well, we need to add
a weapon to the vehicles."
- Well, part of it was the helicopter
was such a persistent pain in your ass
that we really wanted to put a bow
on that whole experience and give you some vindication,
some vengeance, where you get to now hunt the helicopter.
So as soon as we attach it,
one thing we really intentionally did
is you start to drive down the tunnel
and the helicopter pops down in your face
and it's blocking you, and you have no choice
but to just shoot it if you want it to go away.
And then you see it flee.
And so it's like, "Oh, okay."
The players could connect the dots, right?
"Now it's my turn."
So the next sequence is all about
chasing the helicopter down to that final battle at the dam.
(loud automatic gunfire)
I remember we worked pretty intentionally
to make it the ultimate showdown
between you and the helicopter,
and some of it was by accident.
I remember Brian Jacobson,
who did a lot of the code for that,
at one point it accidentally did this thing
where it just spit out a ton of bombs.
And we're like, "That is awesome! Keep that!
Make that part of the fight."
We tried to make it as action intensive as we could
within reason, right?
(loud gunfire)
That battle was actually,
in a way we designed it to be a final exam.
We unraveled those elements
into the levels beforehand, right?
You learned how to dodge bombs,
you learned how to shoot at it,
and you learned how to shoot while driving.
And then we throw those things together at you
with a little bit of a twist.
- Canals was sort of like a crucible
because a lot of good things came out of it
'cause it was such a difficult design problem.
The easy thing to do is to make a punishing design,
where you just say, "You can't go here
and we're gonna shoot you and force you
to fail and fail and fail until you get to see
the next part of the game."
It's much harder to create something
where the player feels there's an evolution,
they have some power and some agency,
so that their skill is being rewarded
and they can be creative in that restrictive environment.
(loud crashing)
(chatter over radio) (vehicle revving)
- So basically had a whole car engine
down to through transmission,
down into gearing and differentials and turning the tires,
but then it turned out, "Oh, we can really only go
15, 20 miles an hour,"
otherwise you would blast through
the extents of the map in about 10 seconds.
which wasn't gonna do anybody any good.
People made jumps and made all these things,
nothing was working.
So I was like, "Oh, you must be doing a jump.
I'm just gonna turn off gravity
on the car for a little while and let it just go
and then gradually ramp it back in
so that it actually felt like you were jumping."
- It was interesting how like the dynamics of the buggy
was so much about the perceived experience
versus how it actually performed.
- It just sounds like it's going faster than it is.
So Jay and I worked really hard on these engine sounds
and this fake transmission and doing all this stuff,
but you're really going like 30 miles an hour maybe.
So it's like someone just driving around in first gear.
- Got pulled into coast,
one, 'cause I was interested in working on more game stuff,
but two, it was the biggest I guess group of people
utilizing the displacement tech
since it was more of a trainee thing and outdoors,
and we were trying to figure out
how we wanted to use the displacement.
Meaning we knew we wanted the things to look more natural.
There was a lot more geometry in those maps
than our previous ones,
given just displacement in general.
We were always struggling with performance
and trying to figure out how to make things
a little bit faster, easier,
or where we could make things do what we wanted them to do,
but not necessarily cost as much as they cost.
- It's much faster than walking speed,
so you just signed up for building a huge amount of game.
People can just stop and get out anywhere.
So now you have this trade off of density versus distance.
- We got a vehicle we wanna drive for a while,
so make those levels long.
But from "Half-Life 1," we still had the philosophy of,
"There should be something cool around every corner."
Not like a monster popping out of you,
but different reasons to be engaged in the world.
So they would dot the coastline with little towns
and you knew if you went exploring,
you'd always get some kind of reward for that.
It might be a health pack and ammo
or it might be a character interaction.
So that would let the player set their own pace
and feel like they get to explore the world
and they're always rewarded for that.
But if they wanted to drive straight through, they could.
- I worked on the area where the roller mines first come in
and you're going along a curving path
and then they blow up all the rocks
and drop stuff in front of your path
to try and slow you down,
and then you've got like a little house fight.
There were cases early on where people
would just try to drive past everything and be like,
"Why would I stop at this if I've got a car?"
And so we really wanted them to be fairly unavoidable,
and so you'd have to get out
and deal with taking 'em off your car,
and then you'd be in the space.
So it was really fun just jumping in there
with the Combine soldiers
and crafting little fight scenarios.
What makes AI fights interesting
is not that they're the smartest or the best or anything.
It's easy to make AI
that can just perfectly shoot the player and kill them.
That's not what makes them smart.
It's putting on a show that makes them feel interesting.
So in that fight in particular,
you go up inside of a building
and you get to the second floor
and you're fighting guys in there,
and they kind of pull you up there,
there's guys up in there
and as you go up and fight them, that happens,
but then more guys spawn outside.
There's a bunch of windows up in that top section
and there's a crate sort of near the window,
and when you go over to get that crate,
they start shooting through the window at you.
And it's not that the AI actually knows that you're there
and starts shooting at the window the moment they see you,
we have these things called bullseyes
that you could place in spots
and they basically would act like a target
that the AI wanted to shoot.
A lot of that isn't actually the AI
doing this carefully crafted thing,
it's more of us thinking,
"What makes this a neat presentation for the player
and gives 'em that sense that they're kind of,
they need to hunker down?"
Like later on in the same coastline,
there's a sequence where you're fighting a gunship
and you're in the lighthouse.
And as you go up the lighthouse,
it's sort of predicting where you are
and shooting through the windows right in front of you
and giving you that same sort of show,
and that's all bullseyes and things.
Almost every game you play,
you're developing a sense of mastery,
and that actual sense of progress and mastery is the fun.
Piecing it all together is very core to what makes it fun.
(loud explosion)
- Hello, Dr. Freeman.
The car's all ready for you.
Hop in and I'll lower you down to the beach.
- We did the player drivable cream first, I think, right?
- Yes.
- [Robin] And then we went back
and used it again at the start
- [Adrian] As a perfect tutorial.
Like, perfect training.
"This is how that thing works.
Don't forget 'cause it's about to happen later
and you have to do it."
- We did actually get very close to the base of a crane.
Obviously you wanna be in the crane,
you wanna be driving and all these things,
but yeah, we did get up very close to this crane.
Again, I think it was asking somebody,
"We're just wanting to take some pictures for a video game,
could you just let us in?"
Try to act as nice and non-threatening as possible.
- [Robin] We need to buggy to get into a state
where it was flipped, so you could have to learn to recover
and all that sort of stuff.
- Like, "Oh, we're gonna flip it over
and then to proceed, you have to use the the gravity gun.
We're just trying to wrap that in some sort of narrative
instead of just spitting some text
that tells you, "This happens."
- I mean, the crane was a hard physics problem
'cause one of the worst case scenarios for physics
is really high mass objects moving around
'cause they're gonna apply an enormous amount of force
to anything they touch,
and we have a rigid body physics system.
So in the real world
when a giant heavy mass touches something,
usually it crushes them.
We can't really crush anything.
So already we're in a tricky place.
The good news was we had a fixed space
it could operate in, right?
We could control how far you could extend the thing,
and so as the level designers could look at it
and be like, "These are the only things
that the crane will ever really be able to interact with."
And so we could be pretty careful around,
"What are the things that this magnet's gonna touch,
and let's make sure that at least the physics works
pretty well for that."
(train horn blaring)
- So I worked on the bridge
as one of the really early things I worked on there,
which was great.
Sawyer had already built the bridge.
It's actually based on Deception Pass.
So Deception Pass is nearby here in Washington.
Coincidentally, I actually proposed to my wife there.
But anyway, it's this really nice bridge
that if you go there, you'll be like,
"Oh yeah, this is the 'Half-Life 2' bridge."
The fight against the gunship and everything
wasn't really all put together.
It definitely had that scary fear of heights scenario
of going under the bridge,
but we hadn't fully fleshed it all out yet.
One of the first things I did was like,
"What if this was a train bridge
and you had to play chicken against the train?"
And getting the timing quite right
took a little bit of of work,
but hearing the like train horn come in
and the moment of realization that players would have of-
Probably some people die.
A lot of people probably die the first time there,
but you have this like, "Do I go faster or do I turn around?
What do I do?"
I don't know, it was just a fun moment to create.
All credit to Sawyer on coming up with the
going underneath the bridge scenario.
People to this day still are like,
that freak them the hell out.
Like a lot of people would just,
it's sort of seared in their memory,
which is just, it's what we wanna do
when we're creating levels.
- Trying to like capture the sense of height
and playing with the ambient sounds
just to capture the sense of being precarious
and high above the ground,
it was just a fun little design challenge.
- David came up with that and we play tested it,
and the first time it play tested
I think the person who was play testing,
their knuckles were white and it was really tense.
And of course then someone had the brilliant idea of like,
"Oh, they finally made it.
They felt great.
Now we're gonna make 'em go back."
Oh, and the gun ship. Yeah, that came in.
Yeah, so that was always fun.
(loud automatic gunfire)
(distant helicopter whirring) (muffled beeping)
There's this thing we called "edge friction."
So when you're moving, you have a friction
that just reduces your normal movement rate by an amount.
But what we would do is whenever players
would get close to edges,
we would increase that friction a lot
so that people wouldn't accidentally fall off things.
It's just not fun for the player, right?
So there was definitely a bit
of friction play involved there.
(wind blowing)
(vehicle revving aggressively)
- Gordon Freeman!
Hurry, get in the basement!
We're expecting gunships at any moment!
- He became iconic for reasons I don't totally understand
except the performance.
We were calling that town New Little Odessa
or a Little New Odessa.
And then I got spam email from Odessa Cubbage
or something like that.
It was definitely a name that came out of a email spam
and I'm like, "This name is amazing."
So it went straight into the game.
and then John Lowry came in and acted him
with his fake British accent.
- Damn!
Let me just send a warning to Lighthouse Point,
and then I'll come right up and lend a hand!
- So Odessa Cubbage had this whole problem
of training the rocket launcher.
That was a real pain.
The laser guiding aspect was just a nightmare to train,
'cause training in combat is always a nightmare by itself
'cause people are under duress, trying not to die.
They're focusing on some other thing
that's threatening them.
It's hard to observe what's going on rationally
and draw lessons from it cleanly, yeah.
So you always know it's gonna be hard
if you're trying to teach something,
you're trying to teach in combat.
When you watch a play tester,
they step out and they fire a rocket at the gunship,
and then they duck behind cover.
And so the laser dock goes onto the fence in front of them.
We all hear the rocket turn around and start coming back,
and so you hear like- - It's basically, "Here we go.
Five, four, three-" - As it gets louder,
and then the player looks out again at the gunship,
and the rocket goes (whooshing).
So he moves around, back at the crate, gunship.
And we're like, "Ah!"
And then he ducks back again and we're like, "Oh my God!"
We hear the market getting louder and louder.
And he peaks at again, it whips off again,
- An integrated part that I think has really
always been important,
something that Gabe introduced in "Half-Life 1" one
was the way that we play test.
And then iterate really rapidly
on the play test results.
So you have dozens and dozens of people come through
one section of the game
and you sit there painfully silently,
taking notes while they struggle and get frustrated
and totally misunderstand your brilliant design.
And then you go and you fix that
over and over and over again.
- If your title is game designer and your design sucks,
then it can be threatening, right?
Like, "Maybe I'm bad at my job
and I should get fired," right?
And so a lot of the games industry
never did any testing at all with this play testing process.
That's what basically taught me design in a lot of ways.
We would just come up with an idea for the helicopter
and then we'd be like,
"Okay, let's put it in front of somebody
and watch it happen."
And then we'd very quickly start realizing
that our mental model
of how people are reacting to this stuff
is wildly different than what we expected.
(loud automatic gunfire) (beeping)
(compelling music)
- I joined the team in January, 2000.
I had met Gabe when he was starting Valve
and I was at Sierra On-Line.
But pretty much the first thing was,
Gabe was like, "So when you're at Sierra,
we did this deal with you for 'Half-Life' and 'Half-Life 2.'
You need to go fix that
'cause we don't like the deal that we did."
The intellectual property for "Half-Life"
was owned by Vivendi.
The "Team Fortress" IP was owned by Vivendi.
So it was get back our IP, get a better royalty rate,
and then have the ability
to experiment with online distribution.
We knew we were gonna grow the team,
and then part of the deal was also
that we were gonna take on all of the funding responsibility
for "Half-Life 2", "TF 2," all those things.
There was cashflow from "Half-Life,"
we were figuring out how to do things here and there,
like expansion packs.
A large part of it was Gabe tapping into his assets.
He had done fairly well at Microsoft.
Not crazy well, but things started to get a little thin.
(suspenseful music)
(loud banging on door)
(suspenseful music continues)
- So I assume you guys have talked
to Scott or Eric or somebody
about sort of the context of the whole-
- [Producer] Yes, we talked to Scott, Eric,
and Gabe about it.
(Karl chuckles)
- Sierra, by that point, had become acquired by Vivendi,
had worldwide distribution rights,
but only for retail package product.
- Vivendi was licensing "Counter-Strike" to cyber cafes.
We went to Vivendi and said,
"Hey, this is not a big deal,
just agree that this is outside of your license.
And we've spent a little bit on attorney's fees,
some tens of thousands just covers for that
and we'll move on and just keep going."
And they wouldn't do it.
I think some people at Vivendi
did not like the new deal that they ended up signing.
And I think there were some hurt feelings
in some quarters about that deal.
When we said, "Hey, the cyber cafe thing,
you really can't do that"
coming on top of a year negotiations
and torturous negotiations,
I think that just struck an angry cord.
We ended up filing the lawsuit,
but really just on this narrow thing of like,
"Hey, court, will you go just read this language
and say are they outside the license or not?"
And Vivendi decided to go World War III.
- We filed our case in Seattle, federal court in Seattle,
and they hired a law firm to defend it, of course.
There was some initial skirmishing about discovery,
there were some disputes
and motions that had to be decided by the judge,
and those went all Valve's way.
And then suddenly the law firm disappeared.
They hired a big scary law firm from San Francisco.
They thought, "Okay, Valve's had some success in this case,
and so we need to change their mindset from
'We think we're gonna be successful'
to, 'We're gonna be destroyed.'"
The next thing we knew,
here comes this big stack of counterclaims,
everything from canceling the 2001 agreement
to obtaining ownership of all the "Half-Life" IP
to keeping us from doing Steam, you name it.
Where they included Scott and Julie Lynch
and Gabe and Lisa Newell, who was his wife at that time,
personally as defendants.
- And so it was kind of like,
"Well, we're gonna put Valve out of business
and then we're gonna bankrupt the two of you."
I think that was a lot of
what they felt like was their path
towards winning this fight.
- They decided that it would have more effect and be scarier
if process servers showed up at everybody's house
in the night and handed-
I mean, so yeah, a real bullshit move.
- It's not a legal strategy,
it's basically trying to intimidate you.
In other words, they're saying, "Not only are we going to
take all this money from the company,
but we're gonna take money from you personally as well."
- I can't think of another case when that happened.
- They were certainly a lot bigger than we were.
Vivendi was a multinational conglomerate.
As compared to us, their funding was infinite.
It felt very David versus Goliath.
- Publishers at that time in the industry
were used to being able to bully developers, right?
And so this was really about an assertion of power
as much as it was optimizing for a financial outcome.
The tactics that they were using
were trying to just run us out of money, right?
So they knew how much money we were making
because they were doing retail distribution of our games,
and so they were just trying to crank up our legal costs
as just another way of draining resources from the company.
- We were protected from that a lot internally,
so we didn't have to think about it.
They did a pretty good job of letting the team concentrate
on what the team could do
without worrying about the future of the company so much.
I mean, that was my perspective.
- So yeah, I definitely was not shielded from that.
The lawsuit was something
where it created all this uncertainty
around whether the game's gonna come out.
Vivendi was definitely trying to use that as leverage.
And so even if we finished the game,
they're not gonna let us release it.
- There came a point where Gabe had pretty much
used up his liquid assets and he was like,
"Should I put the house on the market?"
And I was like, "Yeah, I think it's the time
where you put the house in the market
if we want to keep going."
- The company was pretty close to going bankrupt.
I was pretty close to going personally bankrupt.
We went all in.
It's like, there was no money left.
- [Producer] How anxious was that for you personally?
- I don't know.
There's certain things that I just,
I'm kind of a weird person in a number of dimensions.
I don't really think, "Oh, this is super scary."
I don't have an emotional response to it,
I just say, "Well, this is what we're doing
and we'll see how it plays out."
So I don't think it was super stressful to me, right?
I mean, it didn't really bother me.
I was diving in South Africa recently
and a shark tried to bite me a couple of times,
and the people around me
were way more freaked out than I was.
I was like, "Oh, a shark's trying to bite me.
I should get away from the shark."
Whereas other people were having like, "Oh, a shark!
It's trying to bite somebody!"
And I just think that's how I'm wired.
I don't think it's anything
that speaks to my character or anything,
it's like I just seem to not get
particularly agitated around risk,
which probably means I take on more risk at times
than most sane people would,
which can be a positive or you can wreck
a bunch of other people's lives
being in the neighborhood of your risk indifference.
(suspenseful music)
(suspenseful music continues)
(eerie music) (monsters shrieking)
- They're this rigidly structured organization.
Of course they're gonna have this really terse language
for everything they do.
There's sort of an announcer voice that follows you around
and kind of comments status essentially,
like how alert the world is to you.
(chatter over radio) (gun reloading)
I sat down and just basically wrote a language for that
so that the soldiers and the Metro Cops
would have jargon that they would use.
Then I just used that to kind of encode.
So that's where like Anti-Citizen One
and things like that came from, rather than saying,
"The guy with the orange suit is causing trouble,"
it would be, "Anti-Citizen One breach.
Scalpel something, sector something."
So I basically just had this little dictionary.
Then I overdid it on the vocal processing.
because they're all wearing these masks
and I wanted it to sound like they're in a mask.
- And it was very deliberate
to never have to shoot somebody that you can see their face.
Like, we didn't want you killing humans.
I mean, the Metro Cops are humans,
but we covered all the faces up.
I think it was all part of this calculated
and deliberate way of saying like,
"Look, games don't just have to be a certain way.
There's so much room in what we can do here."
(gun clicks, reloading)
- Well, the metro police and the Combine soldiers
share a lot of AI,
and so there's an internal communication among them.
And one of the things we did,
both for the sake of difficulty and exposition,
was limit the number of squad members
that could be firing at the player at any given time.
I think it's two.
So if you have a squad of four,
a guy who has an opportunity to shoot with the player
grabs one of those slots if it's available
and starts to shoot.
And if someone else, another squad member,
wants to attack the player but no slots are available,
they have to find the next best thing to do,
which is, "I'll get outta the scene for a second,"
or, "I'll go reload" or, "I'll throw a grenade."
And that was all stuff that we learned
building "Half-Life 1" and I think got a lot better at.
(rapid gunfire) (loud explosions)
(chatter over radio)
(rapid gunfire)
(loud automatic gunfire)
"Half-Life 2" used a node graph system,
hand placed nodes by developers in the levels
would describe a really super low fidelity version
of the environment for the AI to use.
- It enabled the level designers
to sort of inject and puppeteer a little bit the AIs
in ways that were just easier for them
to sort of be in control
as opposed to having to grab an animator or a programmer
to be able to get really cool things into the game.
(loud whirring) (wood thuds on ground)
(monster growls)
(loud automatic gunfire)
- Floor-is-lava is a really obvious piece of gameplay.
Physics is really fun to manipulate.
We just thought like, "Hey, you could build your own path."
We'd already seen players who enjoyed moving stuff around,
like building bridges and stuff,
and we're like, "We don't have enough moments
where I just pick up a plank
and lay it across a gap and walk across it."
Like, obvious stuff, we've barely done that
in the whole game.
- And the fact that you're laying stuff down on the floor
means that the finesse required to do precise placement
wasn't necessary, right?
You're like, "I just wanna place it here," right?
And doesn't matter the orientation,
you just kind of jump on it and you do the next one
and so on, right?
And also training was free.
We didn't have to train it.
- Yeah, everyone got it. - "Stay off the sand"
and everyone was like, "Oh, the floor is lava."
- Laslo, the finest man of his generation.
- You couldn't figure that one out.
- He tells you exactly how to do it.
- Someone's coming.
- You there! Stop where you are!
Stay on the rocks!
Don't step on the sand, it makes the Antlions crazy!
Laslo, don't move.
No! Help!
(monsters shrieking) (loud gunfire)
Dear God!
Poor Laslo!
The finest mind of his generation!
To come to such an end.
We were heading for the Vortigaunt camp,
hoping to pick up some Bugbaits
so these damn things would leave us alone.
Without Laslo, what's the point?
- You just give these NPCs a name at the moment they die
and let the fans fill in their whole life story
and give them something to play with.
- The free men will have needs of these
for parts on the path ahead.
Gather them now.
- Nova Prospekt and the Antlions
with the pheromone balls were really fun
because it lets you experience them in a different way,
and it was another classic example
of getting the most value out of technology investments
that people could.
- I remember the beach thing,
the design intention was definitely to make it feel like
a sort of D-Day beach landing.
You didn't come from the water,
but you're storming up towards these old gun placements,
if I remember right, with Combine in them
and you're invading the bunkers
and you're bringing your hoard with you.
You're overwhelming these in place defenses.
It was surprising how much chaos you could get away with.
I remember we did a lot of tuning to make sure
the Antlions spawned.
We had difficulties from time to time
with design some choke point or challenge or whatever,
and the Antlion flow rate wasn't enough
to make it feel chaotic enough.
We had an atmospheric goal too,
it wasn't just about, "Mechanically, can you overcome this?"
You wanted to feel your forces have stormed the walls,
they're everywhere, there's chaos all around you.
And so a lot of the tuning was about achieving that feeling,
not just about mechanically getting past
the enemies that we'd set.
- Nova Prospekt was different
than a lot of the maps that I worked on at least,
is that in that we had some early art prototypes
that were done.
We have this whole concept of zoom maps we call 'em,
which are basically little art test scenes,
how they would fit together and some basic lighting.
- But by the time our cabal got to Nova Prospekt,
we knew we were coming in with Antlions and with Bugbait.
And so we already knew that
a bunch of stuff was gonna change
because we had to support you and your army of Antlions
fighting Combine soldiers.
Antlions look great whenever they were being shot by anyone.
Particle flecks flying off, and they always look great.
And so setting them up
against Combine soldiers looked great,
setting rights against turrets looked great.
- Those were super fun scenarios to work on though
because having these Antlions that you could just use
in any way you wanted was really fun.
And coming from the coast,
just the contrast of shrinking everything down
and then just piling it full of stuff was a lot of fun.
(loud gunfire)
- The first time I saw one of those,
I think it was Ted Backman's concept.
I just thought, "I can't believe that I get to use
a creature this cool in level design.
These guys are really, really, really fun to use.
- [Ted] I remember Kelly Bailey had created a short list.
Things like he wanted flocking flyers
and he wanted a moving guard tower,
which was the first description of the Strider,
was a mobile guard tower.
So I saw that and immediately understood that,
kind of orchestrating the enemies in that way,
trying to get the most variety
and the most breadth of shape and movement and experience
was the correct way to move forward.
- The design for that first strider map,
it was something I came up with
and I was really passionate about.
It was all about running across
and just getting one shot in your tush, right?
Just as you made it through.
- [Dario] Even just hearing the sound,
the thump, thump, thump of them walking,
you know, "Okay, there's a boss nearby."
You just see the legs walking by,
but you can't see the body.
There are so many things you can do with these guys.
- Honestly, there were still people on the team
I think that were still thinking
that we were gonna bomb,
that was people are just gonna not be impressed.
- When did you know it was gonna be good?
- E3. - Yep.
- E3. - I'd say the same thing.
(loud rapid gunfire) (monster growling)
(loud rapid gunfire) - Oh my god!
(loud rapid gunfire) Help! Help!
- Yeah, it seems like at some point
there was an E3 demo that we got together
that we didn't end up showing,
but at least at that point it just felt like,
"Oh, wow, we actually have made something here."
- We went through and made a bunch of demos for 2002
and everybody looked at 'em and was like,
"Eh, we're still not confident about this
and we don't think we've hit the bar,
so we're not gonna go at all."
They had totally planned to go.
And then when 2003 rolled around,
I just remember everyone was still terrified.
We were like, "Okay, how are we gonna craft
everything we've had into a number of messages
about what this product is?"
And we came up with like the core theme
of each one of these movies.
- Oh, do be careful.
- We didn't really understand at the time, I think,
the embarrassment of riches that we had.
We looked at it from two angles.
One was a set of technical features,
a sort of conceptual listing of things
that we thought were important,
like physics and things like that,
and then the other side was content based.
What areas of the game were innovative,
what areas of the story we thought were compelling,
which characters we thought were worth
people paying attention to.
And so it was an interesting sort of marriage
of which features and which content
are the best showcase for all those things.
A lot of what was in the demos was rendering technology,
but I think the stuff that felt the strongest
to most of us at the time was really physics based.
(steady gunshots) (wood splintering)
- [Developer] So if something looks like wood,
then it sounds like wood, scrapes like wood, floats like it,
and if you shoot it, it'll fragment like wood.
(steady gunshots)
- To people at that time, it was pretty mind blowing
just to be able to pick things up, knock other things over,
use things in a way that felt true
to a three-dimensional reality.
Maybe it's on those videos, I don't remember,
but people were gasping
and hitting the people next to them
because they couldn't really believe
what they were seeing on the screen.
- [Developer] There's no limitations
to the complexity of those interactions.
So it's this level of believable
and consistent interactivity
that opens the door to a wide variety
of new gameplay mechanics.
- [Tester] Think this will run in my 486?
(crowd laughing)
- That person who was talking about a 486,
obviously it's just about,
"You must have a super computer behind..."
Like, "How are you even doing this? What is going on?"
(muffled gunfire)
(testers laughing)
The lines outside the booth became enormous
and it was the thing that it really distorted the rest of E3
because so many people were anxious to come see our demo.
- And I remember seeing this absolutely enormous line
with some pretty well known people in there, right?
Miyamoto was in line for this stuff.
- And Will Wright, I think.
- Yeah, Will Wright, there was a bunch.
And so then, yeah, after that was all done
people on the team were just like,
"Okay, we are ready. We can ship this game.
We know we've got something good."
It was really easy at that point.
It felt like we were rolling the ball
downhill after that. - Until it leaked.
(eerie music)
- When something like this happens,
there's not like a big sign saying,
"You've been hacked and somebody has access."
You start off with something
that just doesn't make a whole lot of sense,
and you start pulling on that sweater thread.
- Gabe's brother had a company called Tangis
and they made wearable computer stuff.
So he was kind of winding it down
and he had one or two Unix servers
that hosted the tangis.com domain name.
Unfortunately they were put inside the firewall
and didn't have the latest Linux
or whatever security updates on them,
and so this kid from Germany
was able to sort of exploit his way into that.
He sat there for months, I think,
he was able to sync the build, all the source code.
- I was riffing ideas for,
I think in particular "Counter-Strike."
that information ended up on one of the internet chat rooms,
and I only two people knew the contents of that email.
Of course, Gabe and myself.
And I went to ITG and said,
"This could only have come from a leaked email.
We gotta figure out how that got out there."
- But I remember at some point Gabe walking around,
like one of those moments, like, "Turn your computer off.
Something just happened." - That's right.
- I remember being on my desk
and he's coming like, "Turn your computer off.
I think we're being hacked," and I was, "What?"
I didn't know what to do.
I actually did not know what to do.
- I remember coming in that morning and figuring it out
and I just felt like someone had just punched me in the gut.
- It's like the bit in movies
where after an explosion they'll have a scene
where someone's staggering around the street
and everyone's like...
What's this mean?
Can we still keep working on the game?
Is someone just gonna release the whole game tomorrow?
- And I don't know if the guy who hacked it
intended to. - Yeah.
He showed it to friends. - I don't think he intended
the wide distribution.
- He showed it to friends,
and then one of his friends posted it somewhere.
- Yeah.
- Unfortunate. - Yeah.
(eerie music)
(eerie music fading)
- And one of the things I think that's pretty interesting
is how much the leak of the game,
the hack of our network and the leak of the game,
how much that kind of shattered that confidence.
- It was like having a movie that you're working on
be spoiled for the world.
That's how it felt because we knew it would be hard
for people to know that that existed
and not go look at it all.
It looked all broken to us
and it just felt really demoralizing.
- Oh, man, I was seriously affected by that.
Yeah, I was pretty angry.
So I don't know, it kind of affected me for a while.
Having it be having it called the beta
when it was not even close to being a beta.
Work in progress, you know?
Wasn't really ready to be seen yet.
- Normally the office is pretty vibrant and loud
and people riding scooters in the hallway
and doing all sorts of stuff, Gabe's tubing, throat singing,
and it got very still and very quiet.
I remember that. That was very eerie.
That was the game that was gonna make or break the company.
We didn't know if we were gonna have to go find jobs.
- Not only did it show everybody
that we were not anywhere near where we said we would be,
but all the work that we had in progress,
all the plans that we were making were just laid out bare.
And so a lot of us just thought, "Oh, we're toast.
We've worked so hard.
Are we gonna go bankrupt?"
And then all that while,
Scott Lynch and Gabe were being sued by Sierra,
their wives being delivered subpoenas.
And so it was this super dark time.
- So there were two interesting threads going on.
One was traditional law enforcement intelligent agencies,
and they were doing their thing
and issuing subpoenas and seizing devices.
And then we asked our community to help us out.
And I think Axel Gembe started to realize
that he was being tracked down by the community, right?
Everything was being essentially,
it was an open-sourced investigation,
so he could see that they were getting closer,
and that's when he reached out to me.
Of course I was insanely furious with him,
but we ended up running this sort of scheme with him,
where I was like, "Oh, wow,
you must be really good at security issues.
We should have you come out and interview."
And the FBI was gonna arrest him when he got off the plane.
- And then apparently the German police sweep in
right as he's about to leave
because it turns out he's also guilty
of a bunch of bank fraud
and bank hacking and all that stuff.
- He had hacked in a bunch
of huge, huge companies over there as well,
and so they were already well aware of him.
- How much it harmed us financially
or how much the success of the game
was harmed by that, very debatable.
So it was hard for us to go through internally,
but in the end I wouldn't have wanted to have it
be a whole law enforcement debacle after that.
Yeah, it wouldn't have really helped anyone.
- And I'm not saying we should ever be lax about security,
but if we could survive that, maybe we'll survive anything.
Because at the end of the day,
the special sauce was everything that happened
between the moment of that leak
and when we actually shipped.
And if you look at that version of the game,
it's just so not what the final game ended up being.
And so even if our competition had all the source code
and that executable,
they're still not able to produce "Half-Life 2" from it
because the company kept moving forward
and the company was the interesting special sauce.
(gentle instrumental music)
(suspenseful, intense music)
(suspenseful, intense music continues)
- Gabe in particular, he had kind of a pencil sketch
of an idea in his head of what would become Steam,
but it was clear that "Team Fortress Classic"
and then later "Counter-Strike,"
it was fundamentally the thing
that we were really attracted to
was our ability to ship content directly to our customers.
I mean, there was a set of business goals
that ended up being part of Steam,
but fundamentally it was a bunch of game development goals
that it was servicing that were so attractive to us.
- It was a very weird time.
I don't think people understand
how many times we would go to people and say,
"No, you will be able to distribute
software over the internet."
And have people just say, "No, it will never happen."
I'm not talking about one or two people,
I mean like 99% of the companies we talked to
said, "It will never happen.
Your retail sales force will never let it happen."
But also people would say,
"Users aren't gonna want this," right?
"People want physical copy."
There were so many bad faith arguments that were being made.
Retail sales is not the goal, right?
It's actually an impediment,
it's somebody who sits between you and the customer.
- And we ended up going out,
finding this company called Applied Microsystems.
So we ended up hiring most of the original Steam team
from that other company to build initially
this sort of in game advertising streaming model,
but then there was the epiphany that, "Hey, it's just bits.
Why don't we just download whole games this way?
You guys go off and do it."
- The decision to not only use Steam to ship "Half-Life 2"
but actually to require Steam,
even in the versions that were purchased at retail in a box,
was the most interesting decision of all those
because it turned out to be an incredibly important decision
for the future of the company.
And a lot of us were nervous,
and a lot of the people who had been at Valve
for a long time since the very beginning
were the most nervous about that decision.
And so it was one of the rare exceptions
to our decision making process usually,
and Gabe had to really step in and say,
"No, actually we're doing it this way."
(music fades out)
- I remember coming to work in the morning,
working on "Half-Life 2,"
which meant by the time you go home at night,
me being a 24-year-old idiot,
all I wanted to do was keep working on the game.
And I started just making the game
work on multiplayer, right?
Mostly just working on prediction.
Like, what would it feel like to have a gravity gun
on a multiplayer setting, right?
Getting physics objects to work.
And it was just curious curiosity.
Scott Dalton saw me working on it and he's like,
"I'll make a map and then we play."
Put the map up, we started playing in the office
in between building "Half-Life 2," like play test.
And I remember Gabe walking by my desk
and I remember him going like, "What's that?"
And I said, "Oh, it's 'Half-Life' multiplayer."
And he's like, "Show it to me tomorrow."
And he just walked away.
- [Robin] I think that is one of the advantages
of the general cost we always pay
to keep our code in a single code base.
So when we're working on "TF 2"
and "Half-Life 2" at the same time at that point,
we're paying this continuous cost in "Half-Life 2"
for the fact that it's built upon an engine
that's designed to do multiplayer.
But it means that when you get to this later point
where you start asking,
"Well, can we build multiplayer death match outta this?"
The code's all sort of built upon
a fundamentally client-server sort of foundation.
(loud gunshots)
- Definitely the most entertaining
thing that you could throw at somebody
that happened to be scattered around the world
was picking up a toilet
and hurling it at someone's head,
and then having that show up in the upper right corner
of your screen with name, toilet, name
was very satisfying.
(automatic gunfire)
- [Adrian] I was also selfishly trying to get
the game ported to multiplayer
so then we can release the tools, the SDK ready to go.
Like it meant mod makers
could just immediately start making multiplayer game mods
rather than waiting for us to do it
or someone else to pick it up.
(loud automatic gunfire)
(character yells in pain)
- We were so heads down working on 'em,
we didn't really get a chance to play the train station.
- I remember that that was one of the lessons
that came away from "Half-Life 1," is like,
"We need to be building these games backwards in a sense."
The first thing we're gonna put in front of people
is the thing we built when we're as good as we can be at it.
We know our tools and things like that,
and a lot of the anxiety over,
"Are we building a good game?"
was behind us and I felt really confident.
"Yeah, we're building a really good game.
(tense music) (aircraft whirring)
(tense music continues)
- We're entering the Gare d'Austerlitz,
and this train station is very important
because it's one of the main inspirations
for the train station of City 17 where the player starts.
The reason why I'm using a Parisian station
produced by Eiffel, who did the Eiffel Tower,
is that there's an identical station in Budapest.
- Train station's the last bit we worked on, right?
And we always want to build
the start of the game as late as we can
'cause we understand our game at that point.
- In general, the train station
was a really interesting problem
because it was basically one big choreo sequence
intended to deliver atmosphere and story and background
and sort of set your expectations for the world.
- We let the level designers
who were really good at this stuff
figure out what was a good experience,
and then we were kind of always there
to provide dialogue, acting, stuff like this guy.
- [Bill V] I think it was pretty clear too
that we wanted to provide
incentive to the player at this point
about how people were being mistreated,
about how bad the situation was here,
and kind of start to trigger
that righteous indignation early.
- All this stuff is fun to look at,
but you just assume it doesn't move
and you can't interact with it, you can't pick it up.
Because all the stuff we're gonna do later
with the gravity gun and everything,
first we gotta start just mundane stuff,
like that little empty bit of food.
- [Adrian] I mean, it happens the moment
you leave the train, wind comes and blows
all the trash away it. - Doing it everywhere.
- [Adrian] Can see the Vortigaunt sweeping,
the guy pushing on the cases.
- [Robin] Yeah, and all those things fall off
and you can pick those up.
- We were like, "It doesn't have
to be bolted down, just make sure that
it gets knocked over." - It can move.
- You, citizen, come with me.
- [Bill V] This guy looks vaguely familiar.
Something about the way he walks.
- [Fletcher] The way he walks.
- It's like a beer drinker.
(Marc laughs)
- Who would've thought Barney has the capacity
to go undercover, right?
That seemed to be above his pay grade,
above his intelligence pay grade from the get go.
- [Marc] Look at that beautiful animation.
But where'd his that go?
It's gone!
Something is not right here.
- That's magical Combine tech.
(all laughing)
- We were trying to figure out how to get people
to figure out how to pick up things and do things,
and we were all just sitting around
'cause we'd been having this problem for weeks,
racking our brains.
And I think Robin had a Coke can on his desk,
and at some point I got frustrated
and I smacked it off his desk.
I'm like, "Well, you pick that up then."
And everyone kind of sat around and was like...
(radio beeping) (chatter over radio)
- I just found it just an immensely satisfying piece
of a storytelling and world setting.
We got to use our physics tools and the choreo tools
and all of those things blended together
into this very simple, clean moment.
- The can cup is perfect also
because while it's teaching you how to manipulate objects,
it's also telling you something
about the Combine themselves and the Metro Cups
- And your relationship. - Yeah.
So it was a twofer, right?
We got those two at the same time.
- Physics is gonna be a big part of our game.
By the time you left train station as a player,
you understood that and you'd come to appreciate it
'cause we couldn't wait until you got to Ravenholm
before you found out how awesome physics is.
If you'd had any kind of weapon,
I think they would've had to kill you.
And we found the longer we sort of
held that away from ourselves,
the more we were forced to come up with stuff
that was still entertaining that you could do.
Like the raid in the tenements
is a whole thing that could work
because the pilot could only run.
- We don't very often force the player
into a very specific set of actions.
That's one of the few times that we had to learn
to really corral the player,
and I think we ended up being pretty successful.
I think the consequences
for sort of not following on the clear path
were quick and efficient.
(Sawyer chuckles)
(chatter over radio)
- Get in here quick!
Keep moving! Head for the roof!
- So when you build the world,
I start with the infrastructure.
What's really interesting for me
is what is not visible to the tourist,
which is the courtyard, the backyard,
the shafts and the smoke stacks and the wires.
And every city has this whole existence,
and people are usually blind to it
and we tend to look at storefronts, right?
- Yeah, I mean a lot of it came down to art direction.
I mean, Viktor was very, very familiar with all that,
the look and feel.
There was certain patterns and certain iconic shapes
that anybody who lived there could pick up on.
They're like, "Oh, yeah, my grandmother had that dresser."
Or whatever.
And my parents are from Argentina
and so they have that kind of sensibility,
but a lot of it came down to the reference gathering,
which was from Bulgaria, from Paris.
- We have these buildings
that, again, have back courtyards.
They have big staircases, they have cellars,
attic spaces, cellar spaces,
and the apartments have big windows and thick walls.
So this was providing already a lot of context
for people who can hide in these apartments.
- Help me!
Stop! We didn't do anything!
(loud thudding)
(flatline beeping)
They'll be looking for you now.
You'd better run.
- I remember that we wanted to have the player
see proof that the Combine were evil people,
not that they were gray in any way,
that they were objectively the bad guys.
And then we had it to where you go upstairs,
and then we really carefully and intentionally
framed the reveal of the world
to where you see the Citadel front and center,
and it's clearly in an alert state.
- The four of us, the City 17 cabal,
we'd done City 17, which is a bunch of hard problems,
we'd done Ravenholm,
which is a different set of hard problems.
We were like, I don't know,
four months from trying to lock down the game or something.
I mean, it was really late.
I mean, we had the dates wrong, but it was really late.
And there was a bunch of gameplay that that was in there
that hadn't really received a lot of development.
- We were coming from working with
pretty much every tool in the game in City 17
to going back to basically you have a pistol and Metro Cops.
Not much really.
So John and I, John Guthrie and I,
absolutely love exploding barrels.
So we just used them absolutely everywhere we could.
We set them up. We loved ragdoll magnets and physics.
It's just one of my favorite tools.
It's basically you have a point in space
that when a character dies, they turn into a ragdoll
and then you have a ragdoll magnet that says,
"Okay, if there is any ragdoll in this radius,
pull it towards me."
And then you can give it a strength.
And so if somebody dies in an especially dramatic location,
you can have an especially dramatic death.
And we just use that absolutely everywhere.
I mean, you can use it to just pull someone directly down.
So in that bridge, the train bridge,
I put magnets directly beneath their feet,
so it looks like they just,
like the planks beneath their feet broke and they
just fell directly down. - That's right.
- I mean, they died from a broken plank,
which doesn't make any sense, but they looked pretty cool.
It was so orchestrated, I guess,
because we didn't want it to,
we didn't really have a lot of time to
have a lot of bugs come out of it.
(loud gunshots)
(metal clanging)
- Our team was the one that did the Citadel.
You know how I said that there was multiple
passes on the product over the course of the thing?
Well, Citadel had almost no pass.
And we were thinking about street war and we were like,
"Well, we just had this incredibly intense Strider fight.
How are we gonna outdo that,
especially when we only got a month to do this thing?"
We then came up with the idea of like,
"Well, what if we made this just be your god
and this is the reward.
You've won the game. Enjoy.
We're gonna like break all the rules
and let you let you be God for a little bit."
- Picking up the enemies as ragdolls
and throwing them around
really came outta that development tool,
because you could pick them up and move them around.
And people were like, "I don't know, that's pretty fun.
Why can't we do that in the game?"
- It was either a week or a day. It was incredibly quick.
I had every single mechanic of the Citadel mocked up.
The Combine ball was actually a very, very heavy watermelon
that would bounce around and eventually break up.
I had spikes in the wall that you could skewer them on,
we had electric fields that you can throw them in,
we had the zero-G fields that they would get stuck in.
And we had ripping off the machines off the walls.
All that stuff all came together
within an incredibly short period of time.
Just a day or a couple days.
Very shortly after that people were like,
"Eh, we're having a real hard time with the AR2's alt fire.
So maybe we'll just steal this 'cause it's kind of cool
and we'll bring it earlier in the game."
Game development never does this,
it never just materializes out of nothing
in that short of time and is just something
that everybody's excited and happy about,
and it just felt really good to be a part of that.
(curious music)
(curious music continues)
- I started working on trying to find
another source of funding to keep Valve going.
I started working on a deal with a big publisher
that was for "Counter-Strike 2."
So we're right there, ready to sign,
we're really kind of running on fumes at that point.
And then get a phone call and they're like,
"Yeah, we changed our mind. We're not doing the deal."
I remember one conversation with Gabe,
which is he was like, "So how fucked are we?"
And I was like, "Yeah, we're kind of screwed.
We could probably reformat everything that we're doing,
but it means we lay off people."
And we still had the huge uncertainty
of what is gonna happen in the lawsuit.
Immediately started chasing another publisher
and were able to get a deal done with another publisher
for "Counter-Strike 2."
When we got the deal done,
Gabe at that point was super into knives
and as the deal gift for the parties,
he built a knife that was inscribed "Counter-Strike 2."
And so the deal structure was, "After we ship 'Half-Life 2,'
if you decide that you don't want to keep moving forward,
then you can just decide to terminate the deal
and we'll pay the money back."
That ended up happening.
So maybe a good choice because it took us a long time
to ship "Counter-Strike 2."
So that we got done in probably May of 2003.
And then through some more depositions,
Vivendi figured out that we had gotten
this new infusion of capital
and kind of lost their mind
trying to figure out how did that happen?
Because clearly part of their strategy
was running us outta money.
- But what we decided was,
"Hey, let's focus on the real nub of this
and the thing that's going to lead to a resolution.
Getting the judge to decide that we were right
about the cyber cafe business,
and also to decide that we were right
that if you were distributing these properties
without a license, that that's copyright infringement."
We had asked for the information
about what they were doing in Asia, including Korea,
and they, I think to try to make our lives more difficult,
produced a big chunk of documents in Korean.
They were in Korean.
I mean, everything from email to contracts to you name it.
- And one of the things they were doing
is just dumping huge amounts of discovery on it
to force us to go and just have somebody
go and look through it.
It's like, "Oh, look, they ordered sandwiches again," right?
It has nothing to do with the lawsuit,
it's just an attempt to overwhelm us
with tens of millions of pages of documents
on the assumption that there's nothing in it
that will be particularly problematic for their case,
that we'll eventually just either spend a bunch of money,
which plays into their hands,
or we'll just eventually give up
because it's finding a needle in the haystack.
And then we found the needle in the haystack,
and that changed things quite dramatically.
- [Karl] It just so happened that there was an intern,
summer associate, who was a native Korean speaker,
and I said, "Andrew, hey, can you look at this pile here
and can you just tell me what's in there?"
- I would guess that that particular intern
probably went through a couple thousand documents that day
and only one was consequential.
- And then they said, "Well, there's these other emails
between these vice presidents,
where one says something like,
'Hey, we destroyed those Valve documents like you asked.'"
And I said, "Are you sure it says that?"
And he said, "Yeah, that's what it says."
And so of course that led to a conversation
between me and the lawyer for the other side about,
"Hey, it looks like your guys are destroying evidence.
What's up with that?"
They wrote back and said, "You're outta your mind.
Whoever translated doesn't know what they're talking about."
And I talked to Andrew again, I said,
"Well, it looks like we're gonna have
kind of a fight about this.
We're gonna need an affidavit from you
about your translation.
Can you tell me a little bit about your Korean skills?"
He goes, "Well, I'm a native speaker.
At UCLA, I majored in Korean language studies."
(producer laughing)
And I said, "That's good.
That sounds like we're in good shape."
- The Assistant General Manager in Korea
sending the letter to the General Manager of Korea saying,
"I have destroyed those documents
related to the Valve case, as directed,"
which I think is one of Karl's happiest moments as a lawyer
in his entire career.
Just stuff like this never, ever happens.
- I did a lot of lawsuits for a long time,
I never saw anything like that.
Never.
Maybe there was document destruction
that couldn't be proved,
but that was like, "We're talking about it in writing."
I'd never seen that before.
- At that point, Judge Zilly said,
"All matters of fact are now according to Valve.
You don't get to contest any of those.
Now we're just discussing the settle,
how much you're gonna have to pay and what the damages are."
- And Gabe was still pretty mad.
He was mad.
He really didn't want to settle.
He was mad enough that he wanted to keep going.
But I remember sitting down with Karl
and having a conversation with Karl,
and I was like, "So Karl, what do you think?
Should we settle at this point?
Is (static) the right number?"
And he was like, "Well, there's this old saying,
'There's a difference between being a pig and a hog.'"
(Scott Lynch laughs)
- Karl was done with the deposition
and that was the only question I asked him to ask
that particular witness was, "Is 'Half-Life 2'
being replicated and shipped to retailers?"
He said yes, and the relief was,
"Hey, no matter what,
at least the game's gonna get out to people,"
which is kind of a...
That's a pretty unusual way to find out from your publisher
that they're shipping your game to retail.
(gentle music)
(gentle music continues)
- I've kind of been thinking about this
for the last few days,
and if there was one thing that I can point to
that made us successful over that development period,
and I think that it was really
this culture that Gabe created where we were hiring people
that were senior enough to be managers,
but also passionate enough
to still be individual contributors.
They were willing to stake their credibility
and their name on these big features
and sometimes spend years working on those features.
- Yeah and it was six, seven days a week,
10 to 14 hours a day.
- It wasn't always, I would say a good 18 months at least.
But a lot of good memories though.
I mean, everyone in that room had such great sense of humor.
We all, we knew each other's sense of humor,
we trusted each other, we respected each other enough
that we could rib each other
without stepping on each other's toes and stuff,
and it just worked pretty well.
- It was just bigger, more pressure.
And I think that seriousness in some ways,
there was still humor,
but that seriousness kind of infuses into the game.
You feel it's a heavier game.
- It's the most cohesive product feeling I can think of
at scale that we've done as a company.
The whole company was just aligned and got it done.
- I think back on this experience,
and it was a really hard time, but I feel super grateful
because we were supported to make
the very best game that we possibly could.
And given the time to do it,
we're gonna ship it when it's done,
even when we made unreasonable promises
about when that might be in advance.
And it was also at a time before the game industry
was quite as specialized as it is now,
where people got to wear multiple hats
and contribute in all these different ways.
So it was a rare life experience
and I'm really grateful to have been part of it.
(gentle music fades)
(eerie music)
(eerie music continues)
- Yeah, I mean part of the fallout of "Half-Life 2" shipping
was the realization that we can't do six-year long
bet the whole company bets over and over again.
And if we get it wrong one time,
we're a big crater in the ground, as Gabe would say.
And so we started to think about episodic releases.
- The first idea when they pitched it to us,
like, "We're gonna do this episodic content,
we'll do one every," how much, 12 months?
- Yeah, we were gonna have alternating teams
come out every year and a half, something like that.
- [Douglas] So I was like, "Yeah, this is neat,"
but then it just got outta hand.
- [David S] So when they decided to start
playing with episodic content,
the promise for me that I felt was,
"We can build smaller pieces, denser pieces faster,
and we know what we're doing,
we're gonna be really good at this."
- So a lot of it was like,
"Do more with less, keep a bunch of the existing stuff
and retweak it to make some new interesting scenario."
Like probably the biggest real new thing for episode one
as far as technology was just having Alyx with you
throughout the entire thing
and having her behave in a way that was believable and fun.
She's with you for a few distinct parts in "Half-Life 2,"
but they're always pretty heavily scripted
and not really in combat.
Having her there and able to actually be a useful companion.
so there's a lot of little tricks that we did
to try to make that as fun as possible for players.
She doesn't have supernatural knowledge,
she's not just finding things without you lighting them up,
but if you throw a flare out
or you look at 'em with a flashlight, it's like,
"Okay, she's gonna go for that target
because she can see it."
- [Douglas] We were cranking on that, and it took forever.
We were not just partying, hanging out.
- No, I was pretty much crunched
that whole project, I think.
- Yeah, we were crunch mode.
And then same thing with episode two.
- We started at the same time as episode one,
and so we ran for an extra year that way,
which allowed us to stretch and push more.
- So the Hunters were initially something
that we wanted to have a more sort of frenetic pursuit
built into the design of the character.
So it was really focused on, at the time,
creating a creature that could follow the player
into more types of spaces.
- One of the questions was,
how do we keep Alyx outta your way
during this really intense high action scene
where the player has agency to make
whatever decision they want about where they want to be
inside the house and that sort of thing,
and that's when we got the idea to have her sort of camp out
by a window and she would fire out the window
and let you know if she saw
any Hunters or soldiers out that window.
And if the player started to spend time at that window,
she would find another one to go be at.
- I mean, so Dario Casali was trying to create
this final fight in episode two.
- The Striders always reminded me of AT-ATs
in "Empire Strikes Back."
And of course we wanted something fresh
because just rocketing a ton of Striders
was gonna be a repetitive after a while.
So that's when we started collaborating,
talking about the Magnusson device and the Hunters
and how would those all come together
to make this sort of an overwhelming
25, 30 minute battle set piece.
(loud shot) (sci-fi laser whirring)
(loud laser shots)
(loud explosion)
- The citizens and the Hunters,
and to a lesser extent the Strider,
are all secretly in cahoots to create this tension.
Because what we always wanted was,
"Gotten the Magnusson device on the last guy,
are you gonna be able to shoot it?
Oh my God, the rocket's gonna be destroyed."
And then like, boom, you hit it
so that when everyone comes out running,
you really feel heroic.
- [Dario] You have the car and you have a big space
and you're not guided anyway.
You have to go and take care of this threat
in a way that you think is best.
I think it pays off, it makes the player feel like,
"I did this myself.
I wasn't guided by level designer at all,"
because we give them so many options, right?
You can kill the Hunters with driving the car into them,
you can pick up the log and throw at them,
you can pick up a Magnusson device
and throw it too soon and they'll shoot it down.
You have to learn, "Oh, yeah,
I have to kill the Hunters first."
You can use rockets to kill the Hunters.
You have options and you have time and you have space,
but we dial the tension
and the pacing up pretty slowly over time.
(loud shot) (intense crashing)
- [Jay] Yeah, it is pretty cool,
all of of cinematic destruction stuff that happens in there.
- It was so hideously faked
because basically he would send a Strider
who would do that sort of low scuttling run,
and he would just sit there and wait,
just staring at this building
until the player could see the Strider
plus the building. - Yeah, till it was
framed up correctly. - He would literally
sit there forever.
(loud explosion)
But we dial the tension and the pacing up
pretty slowly over time.
The play tests we like the most is when the Strider's,
he's getting ready to shoot the rocket,
and then the last Magnusson device goes off,
and then he's down.
(sci-fi whirring)
(loud explosion)
(people celebrating)
- Nice one, Freeman! - We did it!
We held them off!
- [Tom] People were failing left and right,
and the team was calling for the map to be cut.
- [Dario] Well, I took a lot of heat for that.
Both of us did. - Yeah, we just
had to see it through.
- We were gonna do an arc of three, of course,
because that's just how you think of stories in those terms.
And then you want the high point
to come at the end of the second one,
and Gabe at one point saying,
"Who's the important character you're gonna kill?"
I'm like, "Lamar is going down.
This is gonna be it.
I want episode two to end with Lamar floating into space
and everyone cries."
And Gabe's like, "That's not good enough."
- No! No!
- The episodes were, a lot of that was an experiment
on what's the right amount of episode.
Episode two was longer than episode one and bigger,
and people like that better, but-
- It also took longer.
- It took longer to make and people didn't like it
as much as they liked "Half-Life" or "Half-Life 2"
kind of scope, right?
- Yeah. - So by saying episode,
are we solving a lot of problems here or are we just
making a sideways trade off?
I think that's maybe the way I felt about it.
- Even into episode three, I still don't know
what that would've been if we'd built it,
because it hadn't been built.
That was the feeling of excitement
of something I can't even imagine
is gonna happen with as a team.
I was not imposing a top-down,
"This is what we must do to tell our very important tale."
It's like, "Oh, we have new features?
What kind of story can we do with these now?"
- Well, I worked on episode three
and I was working on this gun called the Ice Gun
that basically let you create amorphous shapes out of ice,
so you could raise a little ice wall in front of yourself.
It would be attached to the floor,
and then the Combine soldiers could shoot holes in it
and it would shatter and break kinda like glass, I guess.
So that was the primary mode,
of you could build ledges for yourself
to get down cliff faces.
It another mode that was kind of like a Silver Surfer mode,
where you would extrude the ice in front of yourself
and then run along it and use it to cross gaps,
go over chasms and things like that.
What else do we have?
It was set in the Arctic 'cause it was set around Borealis.
- [Jay] I remember the little blobby, squishy.
- [David S] Oh, yeah, yeah. Brian was working on the blobs.
So we had the iso surfaces
that we ended up using in "Portal" for the paint.
So we had that as an enemy.
It was a blob enemy, and it could change its shape
and you could choreograph its shapes
with some content tools.
And then it could also split into little hoppy blobs
that were almost like little Headcrab-y things,
but they were little splats that would hop around.
And we were doing all kinds of stuff with that.
It could pass through grates.
- [Jay] You could get more gameplay out of something
where you had maybe a couple of creatures
with simpler behaviors.
- Oh, yeah, yeah. - And then you would
spend time combining them
and combining them with other game mechanics.
- Story was never the boss of anything.
It was always, we worked on a peer-to-peer thing.
We were, "What can we do? What do you think would be cool?"
- It was still a collection of playable levels
in no particular order
and a collection of story beats and story concepts.
And we were still like,
probably another six months we would've had
a critical mass of mechanics
and then start putting them in a timeline.
I think probably a year and a half easily,
depending on how ambitious we got.
Could have been two and a half more years.
- Yeah.
It's hard to be a lot less than two years.
- Yeah, yeah. - Yeah.
- Yeah, I think we were six months in on it
when we moved to "Left 4 Dead."
I don't know, we were moving at a pretty brisk pace too.
- I thought that we needed to go much bigger
on episode three or do something else,
because I don't know if this is the right way
to describe it, but element fatigue?
I think we had really explored a lot of what made sense
in the "Half-Life" universe and setting.
- Arkane was building the "Ravenholm" game,
and even they were having trouble
doing cool new stuff with this tool set.
And if those guys can't figure out
a bunch of cool stuff to do with this,
I think we're running out of fuel.
- Episode three's coming along,
it's like, "Well, what's the no big thing here.
It's gotta be bigger than all the stuff we just did,
even episode two."
And it's like, "Oh my God," you know?
- It just becomes this- - Are we allowed to cry
in this documentary?
That's what I wanna know.
- "Left 4 Dead" needed kind of an all hands on
sort of an effort to ship.
And so we put down ep three to go help "Left 4 Dead,"
and it was a really tight shipping schedule
and it required a lot of work from everybody
to get out the door, and it was worth it.
- Yeah, "Left 4 Dead" came out...
- "Left 4 Dead" came out great, but it took long enough,
and this is the tragic and almost comical thing about it,
was it took long enough that then by the time
we considered going back to episode three,
the argument was made like,
"Well, we missed it. It's too late now."
(both chuckling)
And we really need to make a new engine
to continue the "Half-Life" series and all that.
And now that just seems, in hindsight, so wrong.
We could have definitely gone back
and spent two years to make episode three.
- And you can't get lazy and say,
"Oh, we're moving the story forward."
That's copping out of your obligation to gamers, right?
Yes, of course they love the story.
They love many, many aspects of it,
but sort of saying that your reason to do it
is because people wanna know what happens next.
We could have shipped it.
It wouldn't have been that hard.
The failure was...
My personal failure was being stumped.
I couldn't figure out why doing episode three
was pushing anything forward.
- But yeah, I mean, some of those people
made "Left 4 Dead 2" and then "Portal 2."
- Yeah, we did other things instead.
- It's not like that choice would've been free.
- Right. - In terms of the players,
they may have gotten that and not-
- And given up something else. - Not something else, yeah.
So it's hard to say.
- [Kelly] But a lot of us have been doing "Half-Life"
for eight plus years.
- We saw a bunch of really compelling reasons
to go explore more multiplayer based projects too,
because not only just what customers were doing,
but internally, we found ourselves
wanting to play a lot of multiplayers.
- It sounds silly to say it
'cause we're a relatively big company
that has a bunch of stuff, but we're not that many people.
There's 300-something people here.
And so we're working on a bunch of different projects
and it's like, people are passionate about "Portal,"
people are passionate about "TF,"
people are passionate about "Left 4 Dead" and "Half-Life"
and "CS" and "Dota, "Deadlock."
I mean, there's a lot of things there.
And I also work on our hardware,
so I've worked on Steam Deck
and the original Steam controller and a tiny bit on VR.
Unfortunately for any decision we make,
somebody is gonna be unhappy,
but hopefully we're making a bunch of people happy
with the choices we do make.
- If it weren't for the episodes,
there'd be no such thing as "Dota,"
and I know that sounds really weird,
but it was the things that we learned
in developing the episodes that led to
"Team Fortress" to more rapid updates.
- I think everybody that worked on "Half-Life"
misses the working on that thing,
but it's also hard not to be like,
"Man, I've kind of seen every way
that you can fight an Antlion," or whatever.
And so you wanna get some space away from it
until you can come back to it with fresh eyes.
- It was easy to think about VR
being a vehicle for "Half-Life"
because that was a big technological innovation
and kind of a core reason for that product's existence.
And I think like one of the things
we have internally tended to attach to the "Half-Life" IP
is innovation.
Gameplay innovation is oftentimes
enabled by a technological innovation.
Clearly there was a ton in "Half-Life" 1 and 2,
and so yeah, it's an interesting challenge moving forward
to think about what that means
for future "Half-Life" stuff, for sure.
- The ending of "Half-Life Alyx"
is somewhat a self-critical realization,
so that was super satisfying and all credit to the people
who were specifically involved in that decision
and those sets of designs.
I think that "Half-Life" represents a tool we have
and promises made to customers
to capitalize on innovation and opportunities
to build game experiences
that haven't been involved previously,
and I think that there are no shortage
of those opportunities facing us as an industry right now.
(gentle music)
(music fading out)
- [Kleiner] Oh, fiddlesticks. What now?
(glitchy audio SFX)