My first interview with Yahn Bernier from Valve Software.
[13 November 2003 - 17:55 PDT GMT-8]
Company Website
Half-Life Gaming: What inspired you to create Half-Life? (setting/game play/characters)
Yahn Bernier: The original concept for HL came from folks here thinking about
Stephen King's short story "The Mist", along with a healthy dose of X-Files style
conspiracy thrown in.
Half-Life Gaming: Who or what got you into gaming?
Yahn Bernier: I was really into all of the classic arcade games when I was
a kid (Centipede, Defender, Donkey Kong, etc.). It never occurred to me that you
could make a living making games. I continued to play computer games through the
years on various systems (Colecovision, TI/99, Atari 800, Macintosh, and finally
PCs). At some point I got interested in 3d graphics and that eventually led to a
little side project I was doing working on a Quake editor called BSP. The editor
became popular in the Quake community and that led to a job offer at Valve, which
is where I've been for the last 6 years now. Before that I was practicing patent
law in Atlanta, so it has definitely been an interesting ride.
Half-Life Gaming: When you look back on Half-Life, what do you wish you had
done differently?
Yahn Bernier: That's a hard question, because time has dulled the pain of
actually shipping that project. I think all projects have their own list of issues,
the major ones that we had to struggle with were determining what the quality bar
should be on the title -- i.e., figuring out when the title was "good enough". It's
something we continue to struggle with as a company.
Half-Life Gaming: Why did you choose to use the quake engine and not just
write your own for the original Half-Life?
Yahn Bernier: Despite the fact that lots of folks have decided that they
can write they're own engine, we were much more pragmatic about that. An engine
is, at its core, a toolset for making a game. In that respect, it contains a lot
of things like file system code, winsock networking code, rendering code, a frame
loop, sound code, etc. Sure, we could have written these systems, but it would have
taken a much longer time to get these core things in place, and they all needed
to be in place before we could even think about working on the game itself. So licensing
made a lot of sense for Valve, that way we could leverage all of the good decisions
made by John Carmack and id in the original Quake engine, and just focus on the
parts we needed to improve on or change in order to deliver the game we wanted to
make. The other factor was that Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington, the co-founders
of Valve, were good friends with Michael Abrash who was at id at that time, and
that was a major reason for us going with the Quake engine as a company.
Half-Life Gaming: Did you ever think it would be such a popular game and
spawn such famous modifications?
Yahn Bernier: It wasn't until just before shipping HL that we realized that
the game was probably going to do pretty well. As for the MODs, we certainly were
very intentional about releasing and improving the tools for the community. Our
strategy then was the same as it is now 1) foster an active community excited about
extending the game and 2) use the MOD work as a recruiting tool for potential employees
or business partners. It has worked out better than any of us could have guessed
on both of those fronts.
For me, personally, it was great to work on a product that fans wanted and appreciated.
Actually making something and putting it out there is very satisfying.
Half-Life Gaming: What is your favorite half-life mod and why?
Yahn Bernier: There are many, many good ones. I really like the direction
the Natural Selection guys took, trying to do a totally different style of game
on our engine. That was pretty cool. Of the more traditional MODs, TFC and CS are
still my favorites, and DoD is fun, too. I don't get to play much these days, busy
on other projects.
Half-Life Gaming: What is your favorite thing about working for Valve?
Yahn Bernier: I really like working with this group of people, I've learned
a lot from everyone here. I look forward to coming to work every day.