Gabe Newell Interview

Trepidation Software has scored an interview with Gabe Newell, who is the Managing Director at Valve these days. If you are looking for new info on Valve's future products, this interview is not for you. However, Gabe does answers questions about his time at Microsoft, how Valve got involved with Sierra, if there were any particular features in Half-Life that were hard to implement and what he is particularly proud of in the game. They also ask him if his life has been affected in any way after the release of the game, what his opinion of bunny hopping is, if Valve plans to make games outside of the Half-Life/Team Fortress world, if there's any TF2 info he can share (no) and a few other things.

How did Valve become involved with Sierra? We were going around talking to publishers about the ideas we had for Half-Life. It turns out that most of them thought we were on crack, although they were polite enough at the time. I had a friend who knew Ken Williams, the founder of Sierra, and he kept telling me that we should go pitch Sierra. I was skeptical that Sierra would be interested, but it turned out that Ken had just barely failed to get the publishing rights to Doom and was really interested in making up for that mistake. He had been around enough Microsoft people to realize that we weren't as insane as we came across to other game publishers, and he pretty much signed up Half-Life on the spot.