Interview: We - finally! - continue our chat with Valve's Doug Lombardi, and cover humour in games, the importance of DLC, and Gabe Newell's dad.
If you haven’t done so already, we suggest that you have a gander at the first part of our interview with Doug Lombardi here. In the second half of our interview, we discuss the Valve sense of humour, downloadable content and the Valve play-testing process. Read on for enlightenment.
Atomic: Where does the Valve sense of humour come from? It’s something that’s across all of your products.
Doug: Oh, yeah. Well, y’know, part of that is from Gabe. I don’t know if you remember in Half-Life 1, there was a scene just after the opening of the game, right after the shit hits the fan, and you find, like, the crowbar off of Barney and you go to call for an elevator, and two scientists go whisking down, and they’re like, ‘AHHHHHHH!’ That. Gabe wrote that part, right. So, I mean, part of it is his own... he has a very twisted sense of humour.
Atomic: An awesome sense of humour.
Doug: Yeah, an awesome sense of humour. I remember definitely, like, that moment telling him about it the first time I played it. That scene on the elevator, and he sorta got this chuckle and was like, ‘That was mine.’ But it’s like... so it starts with him and definitely we got a huge pickup when we hired Chet and Erik, the old marine guys. Erik Wolpaw, the writer of Portal 1 and Portal 2. Chet was the writer on Left 4 Dead 1 and 2. Those guys, I mean, [Marc] Laidlaw and Gabe brought a lot of good humour and dark humour in the Half-Life games and stuff. But then we really turned the nob up a ton when Chet and Erik came; Chet also worked on TF2. So you can see there’s sort of dark humour used, y’know, for comic relief in these very serious Half-Life games. And then there’s the TF2, Portal, Left 4 Dead stuff that takes humour to a whole different place.
And that’s Chet and Erik all day long. And they’ve now been joined by Jay Pinkerton, who was at National Lampoons before he came here, and he’s a really great writer. And a lot of the stuff that you see with [Stephen] Merchant was Jay and Erik collaborating quite a bit. And Merchant himself took charge of some of his own lines and he would go in and read our scripts, he’d take a break and have a coffee or whatever and he’d make notes on the script and ask us if he could go back in and do another take with his edits. And we were like, ‘Oh, well, let’s see, you’ve written a few things, why don’t we let you go ahead and do that.’ So he actually took some ownership of his own character. So it’s like everything else at Valve; everybody contributes to it a bit. But I’d say, originally, Gabe and Mark Leibler were a lot of the drivers in the early days and then we got this huge shot in the arm when Chet and Erik joined us in 05. Yeah, somewhere around 05, 06 they joined us in time for TF2, Portal 1 and obviously the Left 4 Dead stuff.
Atomic: What about you? Any of your sense of humour in there?
Doug: No, not really. Maybe in weirder, outside places. But I can’t say that I wrote this part or that part. And if I did, I certainly don’t remember. I tend to be more of the person... I’m sort of the guinea pig, right. They get stuff to a place and they say, ‘Oh, let’s get Doug to have a play and see how he reacts to it.’ And then they take it away from me and I don’t see it for six months. I get to be more reactionary than more of the origin of it. And I get to respond to stuff rather than create it.
Atomic: If you don’t laugh, they get upset.
Doug: Yeah, yeah. My laugh is definitely a signal. I’ve been told a billion times that if I didn’t make it doing this, I could get a job sitting in bad funny movies being the guy who laughs to try and get everyone else to laugh.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012