Page 23: The Home Stretch
It's a late-July morning at Valve, and designer John Guthrie walks into the lobby to start another long day at work. The team is still deep in crunch mode, but there are signs the pressure is abating. As Guthrie picks up his mail, he starts talking to another employee about how it will soon be time to cancel the laundry service provided by Valve. (Time spent washing clothing is apparently time that could be spent working on the game.) "It looks like we should be slowing down here pretty soon," Guthrie tells the other Valver.
By now all the game content has been locked down. Minor changes are being made, but the majority of the work involves bug testing and play testing the game again and again. Guthrie currently spends at least eight hours a day playing through the game. Based on the number of bugs in the system--around 1,000--Newell predicts they could be done by sometime in mid-August. But he's quick to equivocate on that date because the physics gameplay is proving difficult to test. It's a huge step forward for the genre but a nightmare from a bug-testing perspective.
Still, the writing is on the wall: Half-Life 2 will be done in a matter of weeks. The thought of finishing the game clearly excites Newell. But on this July afternoon he also seems deeply concerned about his team. "We absolutely have chewed people up on this project," he admits while walking through the lobby. "You can really burn people out on projects like this." Then he adds a rather ominous footnote: "Sometimes they never come back." Today Newell should be hanging from the rafters with glee because the game is a thousand bugs away from being finished. Instead he seems almost miserable, quickly walking into his office and shutting the door tight after walking through the office. Newell is clearly worried about the well-being of his team.
He also had something else on his mind: an expansive lawsuit between Valve and its publisher, VU Games, that has been going on for nearly two years. In late 2002 Valve sued VU Games over claims that VU Games illegally sold Counter-Strike licenses to cybercafés around the world. Later VU Games countersued Newell and Valve COO Scott Lynch (plus their wives), asserting, among other things, that Valve wasn't diligently developing Half-Life 2 and that Newell had once threatened to slow down the game's development unless Vivendi paid Valve millions of dollars. But the crux of Vivendi's lawsuit related to Steam, Valve's digital distribution network. VU Games claims that Steam undermines its rights to publish and distribute Valve games.
The technicalities of the case fill thousands of pages of claims, counterclaims, and depositions. (Valve has a team of seven lawyers working on the case every day; Newell says he's spent millions in legal fees.) But what worries Newell today is that VU Games might not ship Half-Life 2 until up to six months after it goes gold. "They've threatened us with holding Half-Life 2 for six months already," Newell confirms.
The lawsuit against VU Games had clearly caused great consternation inside of Valve. But the team knew it had to push forward and finish Half-Life 2. And by late September, it looked like the game's development was finally coming to a close.
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