Planet Half-Life

Planet Half-Life

LoginClick to login with your site account | RegisterClick to create a site account
Half-Life 2
Half-Life
Counter-Strike
Day of Defeat
Team Fortress

Planet Half-Life Home | Interviews Planet Half-Life

Portal Team


Pratt and Chief interview the Portal team at VALVe headquarters
By Pratt | Sep. 30, 2007

This month, Planet Half-Life was invited out to VALVe headquarters to preview the three new games in the Orange Box. After playing each game for a couple of hours, we sat down with each different team to talk about what we had just played. For this particular interview, we decided to give you a taste of what it was like to be in the room as it happened. The following is an exact transcription of our interview with Kim Swift and Jeep Barnett of the Portal team. These kids have an youthful energy and enthusiasm that is positively infectious, and it was a joy to talk to them. Along with this information-packed interview can be found some new, never-before seen screen shots, and yes, even an exclusive gameplay video! So, without further ado, we join our interview already in progress ...

Pratt: So tell us about the origins of Portal.

Kim: Well, we kind of have an interesting story. Basically, all of us on the team with the exception of our writer, Eric, were all seniors at DigiPen Institute of Technology. I guess that was about two years ago ...

Jeep: Two years and three months.

Kim: ... and we all made a game together called Narbacular Drop - every year at DigiPen you need to make a game as part of the curriculum. Also, every year DigiPen holds an expo for graduating seniors and they bring in a bunch of developers in from all over the place - California, Chicago and Washington - come in to take a look at the students' projects. And a couple of people from VALVe stopped by and took a look at Narbacular Drop and thought it was "interesting". So this was the precursor to Portal. And they invited us to come in to VALVe and show off our game.

And we thought we were just coming in for, you know, feedback and what we did wrong and what we did right. After about 15 minutes of us demoing our game, Gabe stops everyone from talking in the room, looks at us and asks us all what we're doing after we graduate. And we're like "well, getting a job ... hopefully ..." And he offered us a job on the spot to come and work at VALVe and create Portal using the Source engine.

Pratt: So the original team was how many people?

Kim: Seven: three artists and four programmers.


Pratt: And how many came here?

Kim and Jeep: All of us (laughing).

Pratt: How long did it take to develop the original game Narbacular Drop?

Kim: Eight months. Of course, we were doing classes at this time too, so we maybe worked on it a few hours a day over two semesters ...

Jeep: ... it wasn't a full-time shift working on it.

Chief: That's still a very impressive timeline ...

Kim: Well, it was only a 15-minute game. We just wanted to get the idea out there and hopefully have something good in our portfolio, and we were very surprised how far it took us.

Pratt: Were you using someone else's engine?

Kim: No, our engine was completely from scratch, with the exception of using DirectX 9 and FMOD for our sound. It was part of the requirement of the project that we needed to do this from scratch.

Jeep: The only requirements were "from scratch" and "3D". From that you could do whatever you want.

Pratt: Did you get an "A" (laughs)?

Jeep: (laughing) Yeah, we got an "A".

Kim: (laughing) Yeah.

Pratt: What amount of time did it take from when you realized Narbacular Drop until it became what we are about to know as Portal?

Jeep: It was kind of over the course of several months. We had started some of the design ideas over the summer before the next semester. And not all of those ideas were Narbacular Drop; there were probably about 30 different ideas that we were kind of tossing around, weaving into each other until we came up with something we liked. Over that summer we did a little bit of design work, and then we really picked up production at the beginning of the school year.

Next: Page 2 »
Page: 1 2 3 4


Comments (0):

You must be Logged In to post comments in this section.



Most recent posts on the Planet Half-Life Forums

Want to Build Your Counter-Stri...Want to Build Your Counter-Strike Abilities?
- last reply by Westenra on Jan 15, 2008 12:21 PM
Spotlight Mod: Fistful of Frags
- last reply by Westenra on Jan 15, 2008 12:18 PM
Why live in YXUR wxrld?. When y...Why live in YXUR wxrld?. When you can buxld oxe in MINE.
- last reply by Aratoast on Jan 15, 2008 12:13 PM
Most hated Half-Life Character
- last reply by ks4rs on Jan 15, 2008 12:03 PM
THE OZ SERIES:Chapter 1: Why ar...THE OZ SERIES:Chapter 1: Why are videogames so short and why are gamers accepting there beheading?.
- last reply by otothez on Jan 15, 2008 10:37 AM
(x posting) Finding TF2 icons t...(x posting) Finding TF2 icons through gcfscape? (Fist icon, scattergun icon, etc)
- last reply by obsyourmom on Jan 15, 2008 07:50 AM
Halo 3 versus Half-LIfe 2: How ...Halo 3 versus Half-LIfe 2: How to handle it.
- last reply by palarious on Jan 15, 2008 06:48 AM
Are you going to...(EP2, MINOR ...Are you going to...(EP2, MINOR Spoiler?)
- last reply by Snake[CDN] on Jan 14, 2008 10:16 PM
Finding Team Fortress 2 icons t...Finding Team Fortress 2 icons thru gcfscape
- last reply by obsyourmom on Jan 14, 2008 03:53 PM
Some Help Please.
- last reply by Scrumpus on Jan 14, 2008 01:06 PM


FILES

New Half-Life 2 Maps

New Half-Life 2 Media

New Half-Life 2 Files

New Half-Life Maps

New Half-Life Media

New Half-Life Files