Ted Backman on HL1:

"I remember early on when Gabe had worked out what genre he wanted to do and asked me to recommend a concept artist. I remembered my friend's little 12-year-old skater punk brother who used to draw. I had always liked his work, it was really nice classical stuff, and I heard he had just graduated from the University of Washington art department. So Gabe called him and asked him to do a couple of sketches of possible monsters.

He came in, looking nothin like how I remembered him - he was no longer a little kid; he's now 6'2", all tattooed up, with various metal bits poking out of his body. He then openes up his portfolio and starts showing drawings of these really disturbing and unsettling looking creatures, not at all what I was expecting. They looked like deformed alien genitalia, except for this one that looked like a Cthulhuesque dog that had a fairly obvious phallus, and it looked like it was about to mount something. I'm thinking, 'Oh god, what have I done, this guy's a freak.'

Then in a very straightforward way Gabe asks, 'So, ahh, what's this underneath the monster, Mr. Friendly?' There's a bit of pause, then Ted comes back with 'That's his penis.' There's a longer pause, then Gabe says, 'Uh huh.'

I'm sitting there really starting to squirm but have no idea how to stop this train wreck. I'm just about to blurt out something and change the subject when Ted pipes up with, 'Well, I was thinking, what's scary to our target audience? A lot of them are 14-year-old boys, they've seen all the big brutish monsters with guns for hands already - that won't really do it - so I'm thinking what actual fears do they really have? So I decided to go with something that elicits a homophobic response.'

He then starts into a long detailed talk about how Mr. Friendly lurches about in a permanent reptiliant sexual display, grabbing the player with these long tentacled arms, and pulling them toward itself until the point of fatal copulation.

After he finishes up, there's another long pause as Gabe continues to stare at the image. Gabe then looks up at Ted and says, 'Excellent, that's exactly what I'm looking for.' He and Ted then get into this excited conversation about possible psycho-sexual alien behaviors and clinical descriptions of disturbed adolescent sexual fantasies and I sit back, sort of stunned, looking back and forth between the two of them thinking, 'Oh my god, what have I done.'

From that point on, I didn't know where it was going to go, but I knew I didn't want to miss it. For me, that was the first day of Valve."