Rock, Paper, Shotgun

A really fantastic in-depth interview with Valve’s Erik Wolpaw has been posted by the NYU Game Center as part of their lecture series. During it Wolpaw plays Portal 2, talking about the process behind creating the game, the motivations behind many of the decisions, and a great deal of thought about how story and games interact. You can watch it below.

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This is something special.

If you saw Wednesday’s article about Old Man Murray’s temporary deletion from Wikipedia, you’ll know that it was originally deemed “not notable” due to a lack of references. That’s been fixed now, thanks to the very hard work of Wikipedia editors. (It’s probably wise not to dismiss one of the greatest works of humanity over a single, dodgy admin settling personal grudges. Compare and contrast with when we turned our attention to Fox News. Nothing changed. Wikipedia addresses the issue professionally within 24 hours.) And we want to help it stay that way.

Since Rock, Paper, Shotgun is regarded by Wikipedia to be a notable source for other entries, we thought it would be a good idea to ask some leading industry figures why they hold Old Man Murray in such high regard. To create the ultimate citation. So we approached people in the games industry to tell us why the site was important to them. Below you can see, in no particular order, responses from the likes of Gabe Newell, Harvey Smith, Bryan Lee O’Malley, Martin “GoldenEye” Hollis, and many others.

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Gametrailers have a lovely interview with Valve’s Eric Wolpaw, chatting about Portal 2. They cover all the territory you’ve probably already encountered, accompanied by footage you’ve already seen, but it’s succinct, and fun, discussing both the single player and co-op campaigns. And it’s always entertaining to see someone encountering the “G-Man is Gordon from the future” lie for the first time.

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While wandering the long, barren corridors of Valve HQ I stumbled upon Chet Faliszek and Erik Wolpaw, the two men who a few years ago made up the members of Old Man Murray. Bundling both of them into a big sack I carried them into a room packed with buzzing PCs and forced them to join in on a podcast to discuss the release of Left 4 Dead 2. You can listen to the results below.

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Alec suggested we do Gaming Made Me – ooh – last Friday? Being RPS, we only got around to working out anything on Monday morning. It takes until Tuesday to realise how special it feels, and we should pursue it. Also, we realise that since there’s only four of us, it totally means we’re lacking a post for Friday. So we quickly drop a mail to a number of RPS contacts in hope that some of them could say something by Friday. And some of them totally did. In fact, some said so much we’re extending the run of articles until at least Monday. But here’s a punchier panel, where developers like Soren Jonson, Paul Barnett, Rod Humble and Erik Wolpaw and journalists like Tom “Tom Bramwell” Bramwell and Quinns talk about their formative games. And, of course, more if any devs care to write in and share, do so.

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In a very special sixth edition of the very “special” Rock, Paper, Shotgun Electronic Wireless Show, not only are all four overlords of RPS united, but also joined by a proper important guest. Mr Erik Wolpaw was lovely enough to join us in one of Valve’s echoey metal rooms, so we could discuss co-op gaming memories, Left 4 Dead, and the trick behind decent voice acting. Along with all the usual excellent distractions and nonsense. Details below.

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I’ve linked to 1UP’s reprints of the departed CGW’s Tom [Chick] versus Bruce [Geryk] columns in the Sunday Papers before, but I think it’s time we stuck one on the front page. In short, the idea is they plan a versus game and document their thoughts, tactics and similar. Except this time Erik-OMM/Portal/Etc/Stuff is standing in for Bruce. And these are his thoughts, tactics and similar…

Erik: Because I lied about reading the manual, I start at a slight disadvantage. Still, I’ve played enough of these games to know the drill: Buy whatever I can as fast as possible, build a ton of one type of unit, group them together, and then send them in a big clump toward Tom’s side of the map.

Does Erik’s total lack of knowledge defeat Tom’s hotkey supremacy? Oh, c’mon. Guess. In other notes, I keep on thinking about blatantly ripping this off and doing it here. We are shameless.

Well, a tease of it anyway.

Gamasutra have posted a little of a Portal post-mortem, written by RPS-crushes Kim Swift, Erik Wolpaw and Jeep Barnett. It’s taken from the January Issue of Game Developer, which can actually be bought in a PDF format for (er) money. Man, I wish people would give us money. Anyway, the two quoted sections involve the development of the game’s fiction and overcoming the technical stuff. Since I’m feigning ignorance of tech-stuff, let’s quote from the origins of GladOS bit. That sounds like an RPSy thing to do.

“Before the writing started, we met with Erik and discussed our list of narrative constraints. Since at the time we were using some Half-Life art assets, and because we wanted to leave ourselves the option of someday using the portal gun in a Half-Life game, we decided that the story should in some way connect to the Half-Life universe.

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Erik Wolpaw is fated to only ever be refered to as “one half of Old Man Murray“, rather than “co-writer of Psychonauts and writer of Portal”. So today we bring you our interview with one half of Old Man Murray, Erik Wolpaw. We discuss what it’s like to work for Valve, how GLaDOS came about, the role of cake in games, and, of course, why all plays suck.

Can you explain the path you took from Old Man Murray to Valve?

While I was working on Old Man Murray, I wrote my first game, Alien vs. Child Predator. It remains one of just a handful of games to mix addictive Pokemon-style creature collecting with North Carolina’s sex offender registry. It was self-published and not widely distributed or played or, honestly, even really that enjoyable if you think about it. It did, however, catch the attention of some lawyers who work for Twentieth Century Fox and Tim Schafer, who hired me to help him write Psychonauts. After Psychonauts went on to be very, very popular in Europe, I got busy with my next big project: being unemployed. One day, while I was wondering where I was going to live when I couldn’t pay the rent next month, I got email from Gabe Newell asking if I’d like to be a staff writer at Valve, famous creators of Half-Life. I figured Gabe was a fan of Psychonauts, but it turned out he had absolutely no idea what Psychonauts was. I guess he just really, really liked Alien vs. Child Predator. That’s honestly pretty much how it happened.

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