A player shoots an enemy, who's blown to pieces. The premise is that Combine soldiers from Half-Life have different chips on their uniforms that activate abilities like flying and super-speed. Next, longtime Valve employees John Guthrie, Tom Leonard, and Steve Bond demonstrate their idea of modular artificial intelligence. Birdwell and the team showcase blobs of a mercury-like substance that can procedurally attack the player, run over and drown enemies, and re-assemble like the T-1000 in Terminator 2. The "blobulator" demo as it's now known isn't just about technology. Team Shirley Temple is one of the first to present Ken Birdwell, the man credited with the lifelike facial-expression technology for the female character Alyx Vance in Half-Life 2, has focused this team on the idea of introducing liquid simulation into the Half Life 2 engine. Within these four walls, Valve will showcase more innovation in 60 minutes than most game companies will see in a lifetime. They're here for an internal science fair of the design experiments. It's mid-afternoon in February 2008 and the employees of Valve are filing into a local movie theater in Bellevue, Washington. Two Bols, One Wrench was deep into production. Was it Half-Life 2: Episode 3? Portal 2? Counter-Strike 2? Not exactly. With little news out of Valve headquarters, fans on message boards incessantly speculated about what the almighty Valve was working on. A spectacular failure would be just as important as the next big thing.īrainstorming commenced. Employees were told to assemble small groups and try whatever they thought was cool or interesting. The "Directed Design Experiments" as he called them would hopefully lead to a creative renaissance.
Newell assembled the team in the main conference room and outlined his plan. And most important, the entire process would be a secret to the outside world. Concerned that Valve was spending far too much time making games and not enough time pushing its designs in bold new directions, Newell showed up one morning with a radical idea: What if he effectively shut down Valve's production pipeline for a few months and turned the company into one big creative playground? There would be no deadlines, no milestones, and little accountability. That is, until what employees dub the "Gabe Fiat" is invoked to shake things up. The invisible hand of curiosity is what guides the company. Privately owned by Newell and the employees, there are no outside shareholders or a board of directors to please.
Valve has the blessing of being in the catbird seal - or the curse. Please note that I removed some paragraphs (for example about the prequel idea with the Cave Johnson antagonist - that was leaked to the press) from the original text:
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