Interview: Doug Lombardi is a real dude - and he's dude who's responsible for the likes of Portal, Portal 2, Half Life and the inception of Steam. And we've had a looong chat.
While visiting Valve headquarters earlier this year, we took the time to sit down with Doug Lombardi, vice president of marketing at Valve Corporation, and get his extensive thoughts on a whole bunch of topics in the weeks leading up to the release of Portal 2. How extensive? We’re talking half an hour of talk time and around 6,000 words of transcription: epic! Read on for the first part of the interview where we discuss Steam, Valve’s creative process and a whole bunch of fascinating history.
Atomic: I was asking Jeep [Barnett] before about the PS3 and PC link via Steam. Are there any plans in the future for Steam on consoles?
Doug: A little bit, yeah. I mean, last year we put out the Mac version of Steam and now we’re taking a baby step onto the PS3 with Portal 2 and we’ll see how it goes. I mean, philosophically, our goal is that you buy a game and then you can access it on whatever machine you’re on. So that was the idea with the Steam play concept of if you already own this on the PC on Steam and there’s a Mac version out, you can play it on a Mac. Just go get a Mac or go to your brother’s house or whatever and play it on the Mac. And so we announced that a while ago with the PS3 version that either you will have Steam Play access if you buy the PS3 version you’ll be able to link your Steam account with your PSN account and you’ll be able to access the game on your Mac or the PC. We think that’s fantastic. Y’know, when you buy music you’re not restricted on where you can play it back. So why is that the case with your games?
Atomic: So for the Xbox 360, was there a particular reason why it wasn’t done for that?
Doug: You should ask Microsoft.
Atomic: Yeah, I figured that would be the answer. That’s really bad. So you can’t talk more about that at all?
Atomic: Okay. And they’ll say, you should ask Valve, right?
Doug: *Laughs* I can repeat my art philosophy that you should be able to access a game anywhere statement or I can repeat that you should ask Microsoft.
Atomic: I get the point. So you’ve got some big memorably franchises, obviously: Half-Life, Left 4 Dead and now Portal, which is obviously something quite big. How are these sort of things conceived and where do they come from?
Doug: *Laughs* All different places, y’know. One of my most favourite jokes that I have written is the only thing Valve ever thought of was Half-Life, everything else is bought or hired, right? Counter-Strike was a mod. Team Fortress was a mod. Portal was a student project. Left 4 Dead was Mike Booth’s idea when he was starting up Turtle Rock studios and then we acquired them because we couldn’t talk them into moving to Seattle. But since we acquired them, Mike has moved to Seattle, so it’s a twisted world. *Laughs* But, I mean, it’s really true, right? Gabe has never met someone with a good idea or a great project that he didn’t want to bring into Valve and make it something that we put the Valve machine behind, if you will. And we sort of learned how to do all of that stuff through Half-Life 1 and through Half-Life 2. Even the paint stuff you see in Portal 2 came from Tag: The Power of Paint, which is another Digipen team of four or five guys that we hired at GDC about two years ago now.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012