Proto:Half-Life (Windows)/September 1997 Prototype/Company Backgrounder
This is a sub-page of Proto:Half-Life (Windows)/September 1997 Prototype.
This is a transcription of Company Backgrounder.doc. All errors are from Valve.
Company Background
OVERVIEW:
Valve was founded in 1996 by Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington who, after a combined 22 years of making the world more productive, decided to make the world more fun. In the ensuing months, Valve licensed the Quake engine from id Software, signed a publishing deal with Sierra On-Line and hired a staff of 20, all of whom have equity in the company. Members of the Valve staff come from Florida, Virginia, California, Washington, and New York, and the countries of Texas, Canada and England. They collectively define sunlight as “that which makes a computer monitor difficult to see” and free time as “when we get to play games instead of making them.” Valve is based in Kirkland, Washington.
PRODUCTS:
Valve’s debut game release, Half-Life, will be published and distributed by Sierra On-Line in November 1997. Valve has a second unannounced game in development.
ABOUT THE VALVE TEAM:
Gabe Newell
Founder/Managing Director
Gabe held a number of positions in the Systems, Applications, and Advanced Technology divisions during his 13 years at Microsoft. His responsibilities included running program management for the first two releases of Windows, starting the company's multimedia division, and, most recently, leading the company's efforts on the Information Highway PC. His most significant contribution to Half-Life was his statement “C’mon, people, you can’t show the player a really big bomb and not let them blow it up.”
Mike Harrington
Founder/Director of Development
Mike’s development career began at Dynamix, where he worked on a variety of sports titles for GameStar/ Activision. He spent the last nine years at Microsoft working as a developer or lead developer on OS/2, Windows NT and Microsoft Bob v1 and as a development manager on Microsoft Bob v2 and Microsoft News Viewer. Mike was pleased to learn that resistance is not, in fact, futile.
Harry E. Teasley III
Game Designer/Level Designer/Artist
Harry came to Valve from Shiny Entertainment, where he was working on the upcoming game Wild 9's. Prior to Shiny, Harry was at Williams Entertainment where he was lead artist and designer for PlayStation Doom, and was lead designer for Doom64. Before Williams, Harry worked with Sid Meier at Microprose on Civilization as well as Pirates Gold, among other projects.
Chuck Jones
Illustrator/3D Artist
Chuck joins Valve from Apogee/3D Realms where he was an artist and animator for Duke Nukem 3D, Rise of the Triad, Shadow Warrior and, most recently, the Duke Nukem Plutonium Pack. Formerly a tattoo artist, Chuck tagged Jerry Cantrell of rock group Alice In Chains long before he created the space aliens who invaded Los Angeles.
Ted Backman
Art Director/Conceptual Artist/Illustrator/Animator
Ted has been a freelance artist and animator in the Seattle area for the last four years. Ted developed many of the more unusual monsters for Half-Life, including the Head Crab, Mr. Friendly and Big Momma. He is also a black-belt karate instructor.
Ken Birdwell
Senior Software Development Engineer
Ken has contributed to a wide range of projects in the last 15 years. These include in-circuit emulators (CodeTap), 3D surface reconstruction (Surfgen), 3D prosthetics design tools (Shapemaker), and satellite networking (Microsoft’s Broadcast PC). He also wrote one of the first graphical shells for multiplayer on-line games for Compuserve’s Sniper. Oddly enough, Ken has a BFA from the Evergreen State University, where he studied painting, photography, and animation. Ken has designed and implemented the animation system and many other engine components for Half-Life.
Ben Morris
Tools Architect
Ben is the creator of DCK (Doom Construction Kit) and WorldCraft, the definitive Doom and Quake level creation tools. He is currently developing tool-kits for our in-house designers as well as for third party use and general release.
Gregg Coomer
Game Designer/Art Director
Gregg has worked on a variety of graphic design, multimedia, and web projects for Nintendo and Microsoft. Resident art-boy, he'll critique your shoes, interior decoration, and interface design, in that order. His secret dream is to create a game called 'Aksidenz Grotesk'. You know, for kids.
Kelly Bailey
Senior Software Development Engineer/Musician
Kelly, formerly a product unit manager at Microsoft, has a programming background that includes consumer multimedia, database engines, and networking. He created all of the music and sound effects for Half-Life. He is also lead singer for a Seattle band, Lucy’s Fishing Trip, and, therefore, shaves less than the rest of the staff.
Dario Casali
Level Designer
Joining Valve from England, Dario is a world-famous level designer. His work includes some of the most popular deathmatch levels on the Internet, as well as Final Doom, published by id Software.
Steve Bond
Game Designer/Engineer
Having made the great trek westward from Fort Walton Beach, Florida, Steve is responsible for much of Half-Life’s sophisticated monster and entity behaviors, of which the squad-level AI is his favorite. Steve worked with John Guthrie on several projects that demonstrated the power and flexibility of the QuakeC development environment, which caught John Carmack’s attention, who in turn referred him to us. Before that, Steve worked at a local Internet service provider and delivered pizza, a fact that we rarely let him forget, even in his corporate bio.
John Guthrie
Game and Level Designer
Along with Steve Bond, John started the influential and popular Internet gaming site, Quake Command. John was also the co-creator of Quake Airplane and Quake Kart. Today, he occupies Valve's darkest office, where he is hard at work constructing the chambers and corridors of Half-Life's treacherous missile base and underground train system.
Karl Deckard
Game Designer/Animator
Karl comes to Valve by way of Nintendo, where he was responsible for graphic design and production on Nintendo Power Magazine and several player’s guides, including Killer Instinct, Yoshi’s Island, and Super Mario RPG. His thorough familiarity with paper-based role-playing games, wargames, and CCGs, combined with his knowledge of PC and console video games mark him as Valve’s quintessential game fanatic.
Brett Johnson
Level Designer/Composer
Brett's craftsmanship as a musician is matched only by his ability to create traps which snare, snag and frag unwary explorers in 3D environments. Valve lured Brett mid-way through his final year at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a promising career in biochemistry. A hard-assed New Yorker, Brett continues to deny Seattle’s claim to being the birthplace of espresso.
Karen Laur
Illustrator/Texture-Maker/Artist at Large
Karen has contributed to Starwave Corporation’s Castle Infinty and Eastwood, and Activision’s Zork Nemesis. She was the sole creator of Materia Prima, a texture collection published by the Valis Group, and was head designer for Maya Romanoff, a prestigious producer of hand-made wallpaper. Karen was also owner/operator of the Washington DC restaurant, Dante’s.
Randy Lundeen
Level Designer/Graphic Designer
Randy comes to Valve by way of Microsoft, where he worked as an interface designer for the Internet Gaming Zone. Randy designs some of the most unusual and original levels in the company; he also is the most likely person to be pushing the polygon and memory limits of our engine. In his distant past, he was a key staff member at a potato processing plant (his responsibilities including peeling and potato quality oversite).
Duncan
Game/Level Designer
Duncan refuses to tell us his first name. We have suggested “Monty.” Duncan is a genuine sociopath who has collected more ears in Diablo than anyone else in the company.
Dave Riller
Level Designer
Prior to joining Valve, Dave was an active developer in the on-line Quake community, and worked with id Software on the deployment of Quake World. For his day job, Dave was a program designer/analyst at MSI, a Windows software developer located on the East Coast, and also ran their website. Dave has been a beta site for Doom 2, Hexen, Quake, and Warcraft II. In his virtually non-existent spare time, Dave is a pilot and musician.
Joe Bryant
Software Development Engineer
Joe, an Alaska native, recently joined Valve from Realtime Associates, where he was lead programmer on Magic: BattleMage. Before that, he was a programmer for the Alaska Army National Guard for 6 years (yippee COBOL!). Joe also worked on medical and oil pipeline robotics and once spent 3 days on an Arctic Ocean beach debugging code for an oil robot.
Marc Laidlaw
Writer/Game Designer
Marc is the author of half a dozen strange novels, including Dad's Nuke and The 37th Mandala. While writing a cover story about Quake for Wired Magazine, he determined that level designers had the coolest jobs on earth--although the fact that he'd been working as a legal secretary for 10 years might have warped his perceptions very slightly. In addition to building levels for upcoming projects, Marc will be working to ensure that Valve's stories and scripts are as intense and entertaining as all the other elements of its games. Oddly, he refuses to do anyone else's typing.
Louise Donaldson
Office Manager
Louise is the only person at Valve who wasn’t a hardcore gamer before joining. She is still a bit suspicious when we tell her that not only is it OK to play games at work, but that we expect her to play games at work. Her daughter thinks it is sooo cool that her mom is working at a games company, even though her mom won’t let her play Half-Life until she is ten.
