Half-Life Fallout: Nachiketh - Viewing Profile

We're freaking out over here! It is so exciting to share this news with you!

• You can now Download the Black Mesa Soundtrack, courtesy of our very own Joel Nielsen, at the very generous price of whatever you want! Enjoy and share!
  
• In the near future you'll see our Website, Wiki and Forums all taken down temporarily for renovations.
  
• On September 14th you will see the first release of Black Mesa! This will include our re-envisioning of Half-Life all the way up to Lambda Core. We believe this is a great way to provide a complete-feeling 8-10 hour experience with a solid ending, make our fans happy and help us make the best overall game possible.

We are still working hard on Xen and BMDM, but instead of making you wait we are giving you Black Mesa as soon as it's ready! We're doing our best to help bring the immense vision of this project into reality, and we are very excited for what the future brings!

High-Fives Yo,
Carlos Montero - Project Leader

On wearable computers

“I can go into the room and put on the $70,000 system we’ve built, and I look around the room with the software they’ve written, and they can overlay information on objects regardless of what my head or eyes are doing. Your eyes are troublesome buggers.”

On the evolution of touch

“We think touch is short-term. The mouse and keyboard were stable for 25 years, but I think touch will be stable for 10 years. Post-touch will be stable for a really long time, longer than 25 years.

“Post touch, depending on how sci-fi you want to get, is a couple of different technologies combined together. The two problems are input and output. I haven’t had to do any presentations on this because I’m not a public company, so I don’t have any pretty slides.

Adam Foster, modder behind the superb MINERVA series, and now a Valve employee, has previously said that he found the outlands of Episode 2 far too welcoming. Gabe Newell, too, has suggested that fear needs to play a greater role.

"I feel like we've gotten away from genuinely scaring the player more than I'd like, and it's something we need to think about, in addition to broadening the emotional palette we can draw on," said Newell in one of my previous interviews with him.

I then asked him what's likely to horrify future players, now so much older than they were when they played the preceding games. "The death of their children," answered Newell. "The fading of their own abilities."

EuroGamer: Valve is 300 people. Given the number of products you do, that seems a little less than I expected. Do you scale up or down depending on what's going on?

Jason Holtman: 300 feels like the right place to be right now. Our hiring doesn't slow down or speed up or change much. We're constantly on the look our for the best people we can find. We strongly rely on localised decision-making from peers. So we're constantly trying to find those people to add to that equation.

It's not like we have a game coming out and we go hire up a bunch of people, or we have a new initiative and we have a headcount to go fill, to find 200 people to do this or that role. That's not how we function at all.

But 300 at this point feels like the right place to be. And the way those folks are made up, like who's in that group, feels right. Because we can do multiple things and work together that's sustainable. And the interest and the passion of all the people given the space to do what they want to do, that's what makes it sustainable.