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It's Four O'clock
While walking down the hall, Newell provides an update on the game's progress. "Mike Harrington has about 80 percent of the outstanding work items," he says. "Everyone else is just playing through the game time and again searching for the bugs." They hope they don't find many. Half-Life, already delayed for nearly a year, must be on store shelves for Thanksgiving. Only a matter of days remain to get the game finished. Time is of the essence.
Valve co-founder Mike Harrington, the occupant of the office to the right. |
That pressure and lack of sleep dictate that Newell keep the meeting short. There's no time for funny anecdotes or long-winded speeches. "What's left to do?" he asks, twiddling a black pen in his right hand. Then the bad news arrives. A few of the staff have found what they call "showstopper" bugs, errors in the software that make the game unplayable at certain points. The bugs can be fixed, but no one knows just how long it will take. And there' still one major issue that has yet to be resolved. A problem that causes the game's multiplayer server to run so fast it can't talk to the player's computer. At the moment, no one knows what's causing the problem, which means it's impossible to fix.
As a showstopper bug is found in Half-Life, Harrington and Programmer Yahn Bernier try to determine the cause. |
As the meeting draws to a close, all the developers look up to an object hanging two feet below the ceiling. This sort of dangling carrot is a piņata of a Headcrab, a vicious flesh-colored monster in the game. Made out of paper-mache by Guthrie's girlfriend Jamie, it hangs motionless, silently awaiting its fate.
No one knows what's inside. "It's a surprise," says Jamie, with a look that says she'll really be happy to have her boyfriend back when this is all finally done.
A group of Head Crabs attack in Half-Life. |
On the desk below the crab, there's a yard-long black crowbar. Newell looks down at it for a second. You can tell he wants to pick it up, swing it, and bust the crab to smithereens. But that's not how things work. The piñata can't be touched until the team "goes gold" - industry slang for the moment when a game is finished and sent off to manufacturing. Only then does the crab meet its fate.
A white-board lists the multitude of issues that still need to be addressed before Half-Life goes gold. |
As the meeting ends, the developers leave the conference area and head back to their offices. They're a rag-tag bunch. One used to be a patent lawyer in Atlanta. A couple of them were pizza delivery boys who dropped out of college to join Valve. One was a Guardian Angel in New York. Then there's the tattoo artist, the Harley-riding-prosthetic-limb-software-creating genius, and a lead singer in a Seattle rock band called Lucy's Fishing Trip. If you were trying to fit all this bunch into the typical game developer archetype - high-school nerds cum software geniuses - you'd be dead wrong.
They've been through a lot together. The story of Half-Life is two-year epic, with plenty of twists and turns. And they had it to do it all from scratch. As Newell, who along with partner Mike Harrington left a successful career at Microsoft to start Valve, reminds us, "Within the domain of where Mike and I were coming from at Microsoft, we were pretty damn good with operating systems and Windows. But in our minds, coming into this industry, we had a lot to prove." And prove themselves is exactly what they did.
Next:
Part 2 - The Microsoft Millionaires
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