An Interview With The Portal Team

An interview with the Portal team from Valve is available at the [url="http://etoychest.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=5217&Itemid=33&limit=1&limitstart=0"]eToychest.org[/url] site. Here's a snip: [quote] Valve's latest acquisition seems to the be the team behind Narbacular Drop, an Independent Games Festival entry that came courtesy the DigiPen Institute of Technology, located right in Valve's backyard. From that background comes the eagerly anticipated Portal, shipping alongside Half-Life 2: Episode 2 and Team Fortress 2 early next year. Today we had a chance to sit down with the Portal team's Dave Kircher and talk a little bit about this unique action-puzzle game they're developing. First of all, how does it feel to go pretty much straight from the classrooms at DigiPen to the offices of Valve? Did you ever in a million years imagine this is how it would turn out when you were filling out your application forms? We all set our sights fairly high before we went to DigiPen, it's a school that requires determination. I had actually set my sights specifically on getting a job at Valve, but I never actually believed it could happen right out of the gate. Being here is really as awesome as you can imagine. They've given us access to great people and resources, shown us how they make their games, and then turned us loose to put it together by ourselves. It's a great feeling of complete design freedom that most of us feared we'd lose when we were ramping up to leave school and get jobs. According to Doug Lombardi's Game Informer interview, you guys hadn't even finished your Narbacular Drop presentation when Gabe Newell stopped the presentation and offered the entire group jobs on the spot. Give us the first sentence to pop in your head when you heard that. It's not even really quantifiable as a sentence. It's more closely represented as dumbfoundedness. We spent a good half-hour outside the building asking each other, "What just happened?"[/quote] Head on over to [url="http://etoychest.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=5217&Itemid=33&limit=1&limitstart=0"]eToychest.org[/url] for the full interview.