Page 10: Try, Try Again
Once the initial disappointment subsided, some of the team realized that they may have overreacted to the failed proof of concept. "In retrospect we crammed a lot of technology into that demo," Guthrie says. He was particularly happy that striders, massive 60-foot robots with gazellelike legs, were now technically possible. Others at Valve were even more philosophical about the disappointment. "I find that in any creative process you say, 'I've forgotten why I'm doing this,' about halfway through," Laidlaw says. "The key is that you just have to keep plowing through and eventually you end up with the thing you pictured originally and that much more."
So that's exactly what the team did: They put their heads down and worked on a new proof-of-concept reel during the summer of 2002. The team definitely felt internal pressure to get the project back on track but there was absolutely no pressure from the outside. There were no publishers threatening to cut off funding or marketing executives demanding that the game be announced on a certain date. Valve was free to do as it pleased.
In a way, the failed proof-of-concept reel mirrored another failure in Valve's past. In the fall of 1997, Newell played through an early version of Half-Life, only to realize that the game wasn't any fun to play. So Valve scrapped the game and almost completely redesigned it in 12 months. Choices like these are often the difference between a good game and an exceptional one. Newell says Valve will always err on the side of redoing things if a game isn't up to snuff. "We don't have some producer from the packaged-foods industry coming in here and saying, 'Ship this in six weeks or else!" he says.
True. But most game developers also aren't in Valve's position, where Newell has enough money to fund a game's development out of his pocket, if he so pleases. So is it really fair to hold other developers to the same standard as Valve? Ask Newell this question and he grows agitated. "Any developer who bitches about, 'Oh, our publisher cut off our money,' or, 'The publisher made us ship the game early,' doesn't get it," he says. "That's the interesting problem you have to solve as a developer. If you don't, well, you'll be perpetually screwed." But how do you solve the problem? Newell cites the development of Counter-Strike, where a young college kid in Vancouver made a Half-Life add-on, as a prime example. "You bootstrap," Newell suggests. "The Counter-Strike guys didn't have some sugar daddy show up and drop a huge wad of cash in their lap. You have to be creative."
Valve wasn't beholden to a game publisher, but it did feel beholden to the fans. And by the summer of 2002, the team began to realize that Newell was right--the March proof-of-concept reel probably would have disappointed the fans. "The whole Dr. Kleiner's lab sequence way too long and boring," Van Buren admits. Laidlaw says that back in March the team had yet to strike the right balance between dialogue and gameplay. "It's like what Hitchcock said: 'Pictures of people talking is not a movie,'" he says. "We are building a game with interactivity and gameplay. The dramatic scenes with the characters are important, but they have to be in service of the interactivity and gameplay."
Now the question was if Valve could learn from its mistakes and get the project back on track.
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