Thursday, 13 November 2003
Source: Interview
HLGaming.com: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.HLGaming.com: 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.HLGaming.com: 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.
