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TVTranscript
00:01We've been rather busy in your absence.
00:06Their first game nearly failed.
00:09Nothing will go wrong.
00:12The year before we shipped Half-Life 1,
00:15people in the company looked at what we had and said,
00:18this isn't good enough.
00:19We made some pretty big mistakes.
00:23And their second was stolen right out of their own offices.
00:27At the time, it was shocking.
00:28That was a dark day for us at Valve.
00:32People in the company coming to me and saying,
00:35you know, are we going to go out of business?
00:37But they took the world of gaming to the next level.
00:41It's just amazing now what we can do.
00:43It was more than just a video game.
00:45It's more and more possible for more people to look at games
00:48as not just entertainment but an art form.
00:51This is the amazing story of Valve and Half-Life.
00:56Hopiers.
00:57Wake up and smell the ashes.
01:19In 1996, a software developer at Microsoft named Gabe Newell is struck with a new idea.
01:25I got to know the guys at id, and the more I thought about what they were doing and the
01:29successes they were having with their distribution models as well as their technology, the more it seemed to me that
01:35that would be a lot more fun than working on operating systems.
01:38Gabe isn't the only person at Microsoft thinking about getting into gaming.
01:42Mike Harrington and myself met while we were working at Microsoft. We were both working in the operating systems group.
01:48We both worked with a guy named Michael A. Brash, who was pretty famous as a game writer, and who
01:55also went over to id.
01:56Mike and I started thinking about possibly starting a game company.
02:00In 1996, Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington leave Microsoft to form Valve Software in Kirkland, Washington.
02:08Valve is really all about controlling the flow of an entertaining experience.
02:13Having your hand on that knob, deciding when to turn it up, turn it down, that was a compelling metaphor.
02:20We signed the LLC agreement the same day that I got married. I was standing there all dressed up to
02:27go off and do my wedding vows, and Mike is frantically shoving papers under my pen so that we can
02:34get that taken care of.
02:35It certainly makes it easier to remember the company's anniversary and my wedding anniversary since they're on the same day.
02:42It was a novice game company and guys from Microsoft. He worked with games and worked with software, but not
02:47put together a game project.
02:48Michael A. Brash was one of the first people we contacted and said, you know, can you give us advice?
02:53Michael A. Brash was like, rather than going off and doing your own engine, you should come down to Texas
02:58and see what John Carmack and he were working on.
03:01Mike and Gabe and a couple other people went down to Texas. They had the code on a CD on
03:07the plane on the way home. They were just convinced this was the way to go.
03:10Valve has an engine. Now they need to figure out what to do with it.
03:14We were originally working on two projects simultaneously. One was a first person action game.
03:20The other one was Prospero, which is a very different game. It was much more of a fantasy epic.
03:28That when we had played Doom, there seemed to be sort of two directions. One was this sense of very
03:35fast paced, sort of a blaster, being in a shooting gallery.
03:39But Mike and I weren't as good as a lot of the people playing. So our sense of Doom was
03:44much more like, this is a really scary place. This is a very dangerous place.
03:48We're not in a shooting gallery. We're a target in a shooting gallery. And it was that sense of being
03:52in this world that we thought was really interesting.
03:55Valve ultimately decides to do a first person shooter called Half-Life.
04:00Good morning and welcome to the Black Mesa transit system.
04:04Half-Life 1 started with something which was sort of revolutionary at the time, which was we started you off
04:10on an ordinary day at work with no weapons and no sense of peril.
04:14You were just a scientist named Gordon Freeman.
04:17Morning, Mr. Freeman. Looks like you're running late.
04:19He was showing up for a day at work at the Black Mesa Research Facilities.
04:24What?
04:25Aren't you supposed to be in the test chamber half an hour ago?
04:28Seed yours today, Gordon.
04:29He started the day involved in an experiment that went badly wrong.
04:34Oh, hell literally broke loose.
04:37It's not going to count. It's not going to count.
04:40All of a sudden, for a mild-mannered scientist, you become a crowbar-wielding savior of the universe.
04:48It's a perfect sort of story set up for what then becomes a fight for survival.
04:53Really, it was just the momentum of Half-Life that caused the production of Prospero to stop.
04:59It's not long before Valve realizes the pieces of Half-Life aren't fitting together.
05:04About a year before we shipped Half-Life 1, people in the company looked at what we had and said,
05:10this isn't good enough.
05:11We looked at what we had accomplished so far and realized that we made some pretty big mistakes
05:18in terms of how we were going to achieve these effects.
05:21So, we seemed to, at that point, be at a juncture.
05:24The team must decide to either ship the game as it is or to throw out everything and start fresh.
05:29Oh, my God, we're good!
05:37It's about to go critical.
05:39Aren't you supposed to be in the test chamber?
05:41By 1997, after an entire year spent in development, Valve decides that Half-Life is missing the mark
05:48and gives the game a complete redesign.
05:51You know, we really believed that the right thing to do was to focus on building something that's really good
05:57in spite of the fact that it was going to cost us a lot of time and cost us a
06:01lot of money.
06:01And also, it's just very stressful to have been working, you know, at that point for a year
06:05and say, okay, well, we haven't really gotten as close as we would have hoped by now to the thing
06:10that we were wanting to create.
06:11The decision has an unexpected effect on the team.
06:14So, rather than demoralizing everybody, we were dealing with our situation honestly,
06:19that we were admitting that things weren't up to par yet
06:22and that they were really glad to see our commitment to building a really good game.
06:27Surprisingly, I think that morale actually got better.
06:30To get Half-Life done right, Valve adopts a unique approach to game development.
06:34So, as we designed the games here at Valve, a lot of the design teams tend to break off into
06:39subgroups known as cabals.
06:40Which was a more collaborative process, sort of allowed people to participate in an additive way
06:46without having to be hypercritical or argumentative.
06:51It was most productive working through all the details of building the game design.
06:56And that was enormously successful.
06:58What we ended up doing was build cabals around different pieces of functionality,
07:01like Half-Life multiplayer had its own cabal towards the end.
07:05It doesn't take long to get Half-Life back on track.
07:09One of the most important things about Half-Life is that we kept a really immersive first-person experience
07:15and we never broke it.
07:18We had talked about going away to a third-person camera at times
07:21and we decided that was a bad idea, that we wanted to keep the pressure on for the whole time.
07:27so that you're in this character and these things are happening to you
07:31and we don't let the pressure up.
07:34In creating the character of Gordon Freeman,
07:36we wanted to do someone who was quite a bit apart from the typical action game hero.
07:44We wanted to do a character who was really transparent in every man,
07:48not your typical action hero.
07:50We decided that we wanted to do something that hadn't really been done in a first-person shooter.
07:54And have these characters that were allies that made it more fun to move through the game with.
08:03Lead the way.
08:04We'd done the scientists and Barney who would talk to you.
08:07Let's get the hell out of here.
08:08Follow you and they had some behavior.
08:10They would reveal bits of the story as you went through the levels.
08:12Don't count on Captain reclining us down here.
08:14You paid for the service.
08:15You know, we were really excited at that point that we had made, you know,
08:19a character whose mouth could move while they were playing.
08:22Destroy the damn thing before it grows any larger.
08:25Stop!
08:27That ended up being a really good assumption to make.
08:30People talk a lot about how much they loved Barney
08:32and would drag several Barneys through the game with them
08:34and really protect them and not let them get killed.
08:37The different thing that Val did with AI
08:40was really just the amount of attention we pay to it.
08:44Soon, the gaming world starts paying attention to this new first-person shooter.
08:48In 1997, when we went to our first E3, we were off the main hall.
08:54Initially, people weren't very aware of us.
08:56And then the word of Mal started to pick up.
09:00We got a lot of support and ended up winning, you know, the best action game of the show.
09:05Valve finally releases Half-Life in November 1998
09:08and it takes the industry by storm.
09:11It was more than just a video game.
09:13It actually was almost like a movie in the way that it played out.
09:16Valve was able to do something that had never really been done before with a video game.
09:24It makes science fiction and horror in this really boiled down intense way.
09:30We weren't really expecting anything like the kind of response we got after it was released.
09:35Half-Life is named Game of the Year by 50 different publications.
09:39It makes $22 million in sales in its first year.
09:43And will go on to sell 8 million copies worldwide, bringing in more than $100 million.
09:50Two best-selling expansion packs are also released for the game.
09:55A large part of Half-Life's success is also due to user-created modifications, such as Counter-Strike.
10:02The mod phenomenon with Half-Life was a major boon to the entire PC industry.
10:08The mod community kept Half-Life at the top of the sales charts for years.
10:12Go! Get it off me! Get it off!
10:14I was really interested in the whole theme of military warfare and terrorism and counter-terrorist units.
10:20To me, that just made sense to make a game out of that.
10:22As Counter-Strike got more and more popular by about the fourth or fifth beta,
10:27we had surpassed Valve's games in terms of player numbers.
10:31Counter-Strike will go on to become the most played online game in America.
10:36Meanwhile, plans for Half-Life 2 start up right away.
10:40Rise and shine, Mr. Rise and shine.
10:52Half-Life is a worldwide phenomenon, but Valve Software isn't done yet.
10:56Development on Half-Life 2 starts in 1998.
10:59There was a meeting early on with the Half-Life 2 team where I said,
11:02you don't have to worry about how long it's going to take,
11:05you don't have to worry about how much money you're going to spend.
11:07The only thing you have to worry about is making it the best game of all time.
11:11Here in the Art War Room, as we call it,
11:13the artists went out on location to find a lot of references for Half-Life 2.
11:18Half-Life 2 will take full advantage of all the latest technological innovations.
11:24In Half-Life 2, the technologies in the Source Engine really grew out of our desire to create these things
11:29when we were working on Half-Life.
11:30And we've really gotten to a point now where we can do pretty much whatever we want to with animation,
11:35with modeling,
11:36so that the shortcomings that people were working in in the game industry before aren't acceptable anymore.
11:43So we're having to hire a lot of people from the film industry.
11:45It's just amazing now that what we can do.
11:51We can have scenes where people animate and respond.
11:54Don't do the water. They put something in it.
11:56The player can be any location in the room and the characters will still play out the scene and animate
12:01toward him,
12:01gesture at the player, look at the player, follow him.
12:04All the time, all revealing the bits of the story.
12:10We found that we needed to really make much stronger demands on our voice actors
12:14and go to some traditional Hollywood actors to get the level of acting that we wanted to have.
12:18Are you sure you don't want me to swap out the polarizer?
12:20When we started to get these great animators working on the game,
12:23we realized how much farther we could bring our acting.
12:26The inspiration for our facial animation system was the work of Dr. Paul Ekman.
12:31He's a researcher that came up with a catalog of facial movements and expressions.
12:36So we went to his system and came up with a set of 34 different facial muscle groups
12:41that we modeled on all of our characters that can then be animated
12:44so that you get very realistic facial expressions and the face is always in motion.
12:50The difference between being animated for film and for games
12:54is really in games you don't have close-ups and such like that.
12:58What a director does when they're blocking out a movie,
13:00they're like, this actor needs to move here and deliver this line and look at this other actor.
13:04In film, you know exactly what angle you're animating for.
13:07In games you have no idea, especially in Half-Life 2.
13:10It's all an interactive experience, we don't go to cutscenes or anything like that.
13:13Our camera is constantly moving because it's the player.
13:16To get the player to have an emotion reactive, these characters are really like acting out a scene.
13:20So all our animations, gestures and movements need to be more broad
13:23so that it can read from almost any angle.
13:26The same amount of detail that goes into creating the character models
13:30also goes into creating the characters' personalities.
13:33We found that players really got emotionally attached to our characters
13:35and so we made a huge, huge investment in character acting.
13:39Remember when we felt like Mason was as bad as it could get?
13:42We had to come up with very solid personalities and characterizations for the characters so we could stay with that.
13:47I can't take it anymore.
13:49We created character profiles for all of the major characters
13:52and went through a deep series of questions like about their heritage,
13:56where they're born, what their parents were like, their religion, sexual preferences, etc.
13:59We'd go through this litany of questions so that we'd really get a pretty good feel for who the character
14:03was.
14:03And then we tried to find the face that worked with that
14:06and then it really gave us great grounding for casting the voice because we really knew who the person was.
14:11Pay attention, Mr. Freeman.
14:14While Valve works on making Half-Life 2, the public is kept in the dark.
14:18So we kept waiting until they finally were able to show something,
14:21showed some technology of what they were working on.
14:24It's not until E3 2003 that Half-Life is finally revealed to the world.
14:31The reaction we got when we first showed Half-Life 2 at E3 was tremendous.
14:35Right off the bat it was like,
14:36Whoa.
14:37Wow.
14:38Look at that.
14:41People instantly start planning the upgrade of their PCs.
14:45It was just great for the whole team to know how much the audience out there was waiting for this
14:49game
14:49and how excited they were with just the PCs that we showed.
14:52When we initially announced the game, we also were pretty bold about announcing a release date.
14:58Gabe Newell walks into the room, sits down and said,
15:00Half-Life 2 is coming out on September 30th.
15:05Really? Is it? No. Say it ain't so.
15:07And we also said, surprise, you haven't heard about it until now
15:10and you're going to be able to be playing it in just a few months.
15:13Well, as it turns out, it wasn't so. And a year later, it's just about heading out.
15:17I'd like to thank you all for coming. And when the game's out, I hope you enjoy it.
15:21The anticipation for that one game is just absolutely incredible.
15:24Half-Life 2 is a huge hit at E3 and Valve is riding high.
15:28But in just a few months, everything will come crashing down.
15:37The Source engine gives us the wide variety of visual effects that are possible.
15:41After a hugely successful E3 showing in 2003...
15:44And of course, what tech demo would be complete without a giant pachinko machine?
15:49Valve promises gamers that Half-Life 2 will be ready in September of that year.
15:54Thank you very much.
15:55But Valve won't make that date.
15:58Instead, they will become the victim of one of the biggest hacks in gaming history.
16:02One of the biggest challenges we've had in developing Half-Life 2
16:05was the theft and release of the source code of the game on the internet.
16:09Somehow, a hacker was able to set up some sort of code recording software on Valve's machines
16:17so it was able to actually steal the Half-Life 2 source code
16:20and then distribute it across the internet.
16:24At the time, it was shocking.
16:25That was a dark day for us at Valve.
16:29We started seeing screenshots of our game show up online
16:32and even source code for the game engine itself.
16:35We had people in the company coming to me and saying,
16:38you know, are we going to go out of business?
16:40Still reeling from the break-in, Valve turns to a surprising place for help.
16:45The FBI was not giving us warm fuzzies that this issue was going to get resolved.
16:50They were like, well, no, almost nobody ever gets caught
16:52and, you know, that's just the way it is.
16:55We appealed to the gamer community for help with this problem.
16:59So we sent out a message saying, look, our stuff has been stolen.
17:03We know that you're anxious to play it just as much as we're anxious to release it.
17:07This hurts, so we could use all the help we can get.
17:10The response to that was amazing.
17:13Tens of thousands of email messages were sent to us with tips about
17:17possible sources of the leak or where people were seeing stuff show up online.
17:21People were being called in for questions by the FBI,
17:24and the word started to go out that they're closing in on this guy in Germany.
17:28And that's when that person in Germany contacted me saying,
17:31uh, uh, please, I'm not such a bad guy after all.
17:37They were arrested and prosecution is ongoing.
17:42Captain.
17:44With the source code theft behind them, Valve goes back to finishing Half-Life 2,
17:49from the storyline to the gameplay.
17:50You start off the game again, figuring out your whereabouts in the world.
17:55Welcome. Welcome to City 17.
17:59You're deposited in City 17, which is a mysterious city created out of the ruins of other cities.
18:06You're surrounded by a populace that's totally beaten down,
18:10and is waiting for some reason to strike back, sort of a depressed powder keg.
18:15And Gordon Freeman, the usual situation for him is he's a catalyst for change.
18:19Half-Life 1 was really known for having pretty advanced AI,
18:22and we knew that going forward we were going to have to make additional investments in the AI.
18:27We spent a lot of time thinking about the squad AI and stuff like that.
18:32We really had just tons of gameplay, physics and simulation as ideas.
18:38We can put you in a situation where you can use your wits, use your environment,
18:42to really give you a really rich gameplay experience with lots of freedom.
18:46Half-Life 2 will also expand Valve's relationship with the gaming community.
18:51Modding's changed a lot, going from sort of the old school days of where people were just sort of,
18:56here's an engine, see what you can do with it, to today where we have a thing called a software
18:59development kit,
19:00which we deliberately build and give the mod makers for them to go and build the mods for.
19:05Valve also introduces a new content distribution system.
19:08Steam is a new type of distribution model that Valve has come up with where you're able to purchase your
19:14games completely online.
19:15Steam is letting us have a much more direct relationship with our customers.
19:20We can use Steam to communicate about our games, deliver updates immediately to a huge number of people.
19:26Half-Life 2 is finally released on November 16, 2004.
19:30We were terrified that we weren't going to be able to pull it off.
19:33And for the people at Valve Software, the game is worth the wait.
19:40Ten years from now, people look back at Valve and see a company that really genuinely cared about the games
19:49and the people who play games.
19:50They didn't cut corners, and yeah, they may have never shipped on time, but they at least lived up to
19:57its responsibilities to moving things forward.
20:03When people evaluate Half-Life 2, they'll be able to look at it as not just entertainment, but an art
20:09form in a way that comic books and movies and books have come into their own as art forms, as
20:15well as being entertaining.
20:20That's all for now.
20:26One point two megapixel camera and holds five thousand MP3s.
20:31Wow, that's that's really impressive.
20:34Hold on a second, sorry.
20:36Hello?
20:37Yeah, I'm in the middle of lunch. Can I call you back?
20:40All right, cool, thanks.
20:42So that's a lot of MP3s.
20:43Yeah.
20:43See the best, greatest, biggest, shiniest, coolest, and blinkiest new stuff coming next year when the Screensavers goes live at
20:50the Consumer Electronics Show tomorrow at 7 Eastern.
20:53Hold on, let me put you on speakerphone.
20:55Hold on, let me do this.
20:55Yeah.
20:56Hold on.
20:58And you ...
20:58Hold on.
20:58Hold on.
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