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About : Half-Life 2 - Mods & Resources by the HL2 Modding Community.

Blurb

 

1998. HALF-LIFE sends a shock through the game industry with its combination of pounding action and continuous, immersive storytelling. Valve's debut title wins more than 50 game-of-the-year awards on its way to being named "Best PC Game Ever" by PC Gamer, and launches a franchise with more than eight million retail units sold worldwide.

NOW. By taking the suspense, challenge and visceral charge of the original, and adding startling new realism and responsiveness, Half-Life 2 opens the door to a world where the player's presence affects everything around him, from the physical environment to the behaviors even the emotions of both friends and enemies.

The player again picks up the crowbar of research scientist Gordon Freeman, who finds himself on an alien-infested Earth being picked to the bone, its resources depleted, its populace dwindling. Freeman is thrust into the unenviable role of rescuing the world from the wrong he unleashed back at Black Mesa. And a lot of people he cares about are counting on him.

The intense, real-time gameplay of Half-Life 2 is made possible only by Source®, Valve's new proprietary engine technology. Source provides major enhancements in:

  • Characters: Advanced facial animation system delivers the most sophisticated in-game characters ever seen. With 40 distinct facial "muscles," human characters convey the full array of human emotion, and respond to the player with fluidity and intelligence.
  • Physics: From pebbles to water to 2-ton trucks respond as expected, as they obey the laws of mass, friction, gravity, and buoyancy.
  • Graphics: Source's shader-based renderer, like the one used at Pixar to create movies such as Toy Story® and Monster's, Inc.®, creates the most beautiful and realistic environments ever seen in a video game.
  • AI: Neither friends nor enemies charge blindly into the fray. They can assess threats, navigate tricky terrain, and fashion weapons from whatever is at hand.

Credits

Ted Backman - Art Director/Conceptual Artist/Illustrator/Animator

Ted has been a freelance artist and animator in the Seattle area for the last four years. Ted developed many of the more unusual monsters for Half-Life, including the Head Crab, Mr. Friendly, and Big Momma. He is also a black-belt karate instructor

Kelly Bailey - Senior Game Designer, Sound, Music

Kelly is Valve's senior audio producer, responsible for creating sound effects & music.

Jeff Ballinger - Senior Artist

Jeff is responsible for creating Half-Life 2 world textures, prototyping levels, architectural studies and surface treatment. His background includes studying graphic design in college and working at Cavedog on the title Amen: The Awaking. In addition to working on world environments you can find him sketching, modeling, and always learning new software.

Aaron Barber - Level Designer/ 3D artist

While studying engineering at UCLA, Aaron got his first experience building 3d environments while constructing VRML websites for the University. During this time he was also actively involved in designing levels for Quake and Duke Nukem 3D with several internet mod groups. His level design eventually got him a position at Xatrix Entertainment working on titles such as Redneck Rampage, Quake 2, and Kingpin. After completing Kingpin, he took a senior design position at EA working on James Bond before coming to Valve. Outside the world of game and level design, Aaron also enjoys playing music locally around Seattle. www.nineteen5.com.

Jeep Barnett - Software Developer

Jeep quit his janitorial job at Fred Meyer to turn his programming hobby into a career. Jeep's love of video games (and fear of returning to a life of toilet scrubbing) drove him to earn a B.S. Degree from the DigiPen Institute of Technology. His Senior game project, Narbacular Drop, led to the team behind it joining Valve to create Portal.

Yahn Bernier - Software Development Engineer

Yahn was an Atlanta patent lawyer with a degree in chemistry from Harvard. So obviously he ended up in Seattle developing computer games. He taught himself to program at the age of 12 and, more recently, developed what we at Valve have called "that other level editor," BSP. Now that he's getting paid to make games, he figures he'll practice law in his spare time (little does he know). Yahn worked on Half-Life's multiplayer code and is currently hard at work on Team Fortress 2. His favorite phrase, when imbibing too freely, is "Yucca will assimilate you."

Ken Birdwell - Senior Software Development Engineer

Ken interrupted his fine art studies to join Gabe at Valve as one of their first employees. With a background mostly in simulation and medical software, Ken's primary focus at Valve has been Animation software, and is responsible for most of the acting systems that underlie the characters in Half-Life 2. Ken is the only Valve employee to actually grow up here in Bellevue, and spends countless hours regaling his office mates with tales of what the town was like "when I was a boy".

Steve Bond - Game Designer/Engineer

Having made the great trek westward from Fort Walton Beach, Florida, Steve is responsible for much of Half-Life's sophisticated monster and entity behaviors, of which the squad-level AI is his favorite. Steve worked with John Guthrie on several projects that demonstrated the power and flexibility of the QuakeC development environment, which caught John Carmack's attention, who in turn referred him to us. Before that, Steve worked at a local internet service provider and delivered pizza, a fact that we rarely let him forget, even in his corporate bio.

Charlie Brown - Software Developer

Charlie earned his reputation within the gaming industry while working for 3Dfx Interactive and, later, Ritual. A Ft. Walton Beach, Florida native, Charlie graduated from the University of Florida in the summer of 1994 and then headed for California and 3Dfx. His responsibilities there included developer support, ports of products to hardware, sample code and simple demos, and ultimately working with 3Dfx Developer Relations managing the engineering game porting effort. After a 2-year stint, Charlie left 3Dfx with college-friend Gary McTaggart to create the Uber(tm) Engine at Ritual Entertainment in Dallas, Texas. Shortly thereafter, Charlie and Gary left Ritual to start their own company. Valve subsequently contacted Charlie (and his friend Gary) with an offer "they couldn't refuse."

Julie Caldwell - Cybercafé Accounts Manager

Julie came to Valve by way of Microsoft, with over four years of administrative experience in the areas of employee benefits and recruiting. After taking a little break to become a massage therapist, she found herself missing the challenge of the high tech environment and endless supply of soda and corn nuts, so she jumped at the chance to come to Valve in 2002. Julie helps to administer and coordinate the cybercaf program, tournaments, and academic licensing for universities. In her spare time, she enjoys her part-time massage practice and reminding everyone not to hunch over their monitors.

Dario Casali - Level Designer

Joining Valve from England, Dario is a world-famous level designer. His work includes some of the most popular deathmatch levels on the Internet, as well as Final Doom, published by id Software.

Jess Cliffe - Game Designer

Cliffe joined Valve after co-creating the original Counter-Strike with Minh Le. He is known as the "voice of Counter-Strike" via the radio commands and is now busy working on Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat, and Half-Life 2: Deathmatch levels. When not obsessing over stain overlays with Riller, Cliffe can be found searching out the perfect bowl of rice pudding.

Phil Co - Level Designer

Phil Co graduated from the University of Virginia School of Architecture in 1994 and moved to the San Francisco Bay Area hoping to be a rock star. Since his first ambition wasn't very successful, Phil turned to the next best job. He found himself as a level designer at Cyclone Studios working on Requiem: Avenging Angel. Over the last ten years, he has also designed levels at Infinite Machine, Knowwonder, and Blizzard North.

John Cook - Online Development Manager

Formerly of Team Fortress software, John manages online platform development for Team Fortress 2 and other projects. Before that, John studied computer science at RMIT in Australia. John is apparently still suffering jetlag from the move to Seattle, as he doesn't seem to be able to make it in to work until past noon.

Greg Coomer - Product Design / Communications

Prior to joining Valve, Greg helped Microsoft design various software products. Before that, he worked with Nintendo, started and ran a user interface design company, and spent several years as a freelance product designer. Greg helped to name the company "Valve", and then led the first game project that Valve ever cancelled. His secret dream is to create a game called 'Akzidenz-Grotesk'. You know, for kids.

Scott Dalton - Level Designer

Scott entered the game industry in 1998 in order to pay for his long time rampant addiction to making and playing games. He came to Valve after many years creating various games with Legend Entertainment. Aside from level design and game mechanics, he delights in creating particle effects, and when not making things come to life, making them explode, crash, crumble, and burn.

Ariel Diaz - Character Modeler / 3D Artist

Originally from San Juan, Puerto Rico, Ariel came to Valve after finishing studies at the Savannah College of Art and Design. As part of the character design team, he is responsible for creating character models, facial expressions and skeleton deformations. Outside of Valve, he pursues training on traditional art skills such as drawing, painting and sculpting.

Quintin Doroquez - Graphic Designer

"Q!" brings over 10 years of multi-disciplinary graphic design experience to Valve. He has had a creative role in launching print, online, and new media endeavors as a senior art director for Incite PC Gaming magazine, art director for PC Accelerator, and associate art director for PC Gamer. At Valve, you can find Q!'s schedule filled with marketing, packaging, web design, game trailers, .dem file creation, and other visual communications tasks. In his spare time, Q! likes to reminisce about how he was training to be a competitive bodybuilder 14 years ago. Get over it, already!

Mike Dunkle - Director of Café Operations

Mike joined Valve in 2000 after spending 10 years in senior marketing and business development positions in the semiconductor test and embedded software markets. At Valve, Mike is responsible for cybercaf operations, tournaments, educational licensing, and general business development. Mike is an avid soccer player and coach so you will find him spending the few extra hours he has on a pitch somewhere in the world.

Dhabih Eng - Senior Artist

(pronounced ZA-bee)

Dhabih, who's been playing games since he was six years old, has a degree in Interdisciplinary Art from the University of Washington. He started making a name for himself by doing freelance design work for gaming magazines (Electronic Gaming Monthly, Official Playstation Magazine, PC Gaming World) while still in school. Dhabih has also done web design and worked on the Quake2 TC pack Zaero from Team Evolve. He started at Valve by doing freelance work in mid-1998, and signed on full-time in early February of 1999. Dhabih is truly a world citizen, having grown up in six different countries (Australia, Macau, Canada, China, Taiwan, and the USA). You can find out more about Dhabih and check out some of his work by visiting his website, http://www.sijun.com/.

Chet Faliszek - Mr. Awesome

We are all still trying to figure out exactly what it is that Chet does at Valve, but at the very least he occupies office space on the 10th floor as self-proclaimed Mr. Awesome.

Adrian Finol - Software Development Engineer

Prior to joining Valve, Adrian contributed to several popular Half-Life MODs and was a founding member of the Front Line Force Team. He landed in Venezuela from Krypton, and began programming at an early age. After years of fighting Lex Luthor, he came to America in search of the perfect donut. He finally achieved what some call "Donut Nirvana," and has successfully acquired the physique of a veteran games programmer.

Moby Francke - Art Director

Moby is a character designer for Half Life 2 and the art lead on Team Fortress 2. He brings to Valve academic fine art training with an emphasis in illustration. After graduating from the Academy of Art San Francisco, he worked at Lucas Arts as a conceptual designer, and taught figure painting at the Academy of Art SF. Hes won several prestigious awards, including 2 New York Society of Illustrators Competition Awards. He is originally from the small Caribbean island of St. Thomas, and enjoys the simple things of life.

Kathy Gehrig - Business Admin

Kathy Gehrig was born in Missouri, raised in Kansas, and received a BA in Music from Iowa's Grinnell College. Prior to joining Valve, she performed a 10-year tenure in the IT group at Preston, Gates, and Ellis. When she's not busy raising chickens (you can take the girl out of the country, but. . . ), playing out with her band, Fall City, or acting professionally, Kathy leads Valve's human resource and recruiting efforts. Please email her if you're interested in joining Valve.

Pat Goodwin - Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer

Pat joined the Valve team in 2000 and has over 15 years experience as a senior financial executive. At Valve, Pat is responsible for all accounting and finance functions including: financial reporting, tax, audits, risk management, financial planning and analysis and employee benefits. Prior to joining Valve, Pat worked as the Chief Financial Officer for several successful Seattle start-up companies including DoorToDoor Storage where he was actively involved raising private capital and was responsible for building infrastructure to support rapid growth including; accounting, finance, systems, administration, strategic planning and legal. Early in his career, he worked for Price Waterhouse performing audits of public and private companies. He received his BA in Economics from the University of Washington and earned his MBA from the Anderson School of Management at UCLA. He is a CPA in the State of Washington.

Chris Green - Software Engineer

Prior to joining Valve, Chris Green worked on such projects as the Amiga Flight Simulator II, Ultima Underworld, the Amiga OS, and Magic:The Gathering Online. He ran his own development studio, Leaping Lizard Software, for 9 years. He's enjoying his new position at Valve working on various pieces of graphics and game technology.

John Guthrie - Game and Level Designer

Along with Steve Bond, John started the influential and popular Internet gaming site, "Quake Command." John was also the co-creator of Quake Airplane and Quake Kart and constructed many of the chambers and corridors in the Black Mesa Research Center.

Leslie Hall - Cybercafé Accountant

Leslie joined Valves Cybercafé team in April 2004 computerizing the rapidly growing café business. With her arrival, Mike was able to say adios to preparing manual invoices and tracking café payments in spreadsheets! Leslie currently manages the accounts receivable and supports The Valve Store merchandise site. Her past experience includes over 8 years of corporate accounting functions in the telecommunications industry focusing on revenue management and financial reporting.

Jason Holtman - Director of Business Development / Legal Affairs

Jason is Valve's director of business development and works with outside entities pursuing Steam distribution and/or game development atop Source. When he's not playing games, he's playing rhythm guitar with a rock-n-roll outfit called Fall City. Prior to joining Valve, Jason spent a number of years practicing law but got tired of bad lawyer jokes. Plus, after playing Half-Life, he figured joining Valve was the only way to crowbar others with impunity.

Brian Jacobson - Software Developer

As a child, Brian first learned programming in order to crack all the computer games he couldn't afford. After being wracked with years of guilt, he decided to join the games industry to make up for his reprehensible childhood. At LookingGlass, he worked on Flight Unlimited, and then went on to co-found GameFX, and was a lead engineer on Sinistar Unleashed. After a brief stint out of the games industry, he came back to his senses and joined Valve, where he is currently hard at work on Team Fortress 2.

Erik Johnson - Project Manager

Erik began his career as a shoe salesman and later moved up to selling used cars. Deciding that the car business wasn't for him either, he took a job with Sierra Online in the QA department. As one of Sierra's testers for Half-Life, Erik spent a lot of time over at the Valve offices and was eventually offered a job with Valve as shipping manager. Erik's responsibilities include localization, testing, managing the build process, creating demos, and shipping products.

Jakob Jungels - 3D Artist / Animator / Game Designer

Jakob attended school in Indiana while working as the lead 3d Artist, animator and designer for Day of Defeat. In his spare time (ha!), he also had contributed work to America's Army. Eventually moving to the Northwest to work at Valve, Jakob now continues work on DoD as well as other Valve-related projects. Between long work weeks, Jakob tears it up at the local motocross track on his Honda CRF250R dirtbike.

Iikka Keranen - Level Designer

Having escaped (or been let loose?) from a secret bio-research lab in arctic Siberia, Iikka started to design and program games at an early age. However, it wasn't until he began to create levels and mods for games like Doom and Quake that he became known to the world. He left the pack of wolves that had raised him and joined the game industry in 1998 at ION Storm in Dallas, TX. After a few years and many adventures he found himself at Valve in 2001 and hasn't had the urge to bite people ever since.

Eric Kirchmer - Illustrator/3D Artist

Eric came to Valve after graduation from the Art Institute of Seattle in 2001. Originally from San Diego, Eric was a freelance illustrator who left the sun to work on more of a healthy monitor complexion. As part of the HL2 team, Eric is responsible for the game's visual density, by modeling everything from cars to broken concrete and debris. In the other few hours of Eric's life he can be found sculpting, raising bansai and working in his sketchbook.

Marc Laidlaw - Writer/Game Designer

Marc Laidlaw joined Valve in 1997, bringing his experience as an author of weird fiction to bear on creating the Half-Life storyline. He was sole writer on Half-Life and Half-Life 2, and persists as lead writer for the Half-Life 2 Episodes, although he is now accompanied by an actual literary posse in the form of Chet and Erik. His novels include Dad's Nuke, Neon Lotus, Kalifornia, The Orchid Eater, and the award-winning The 37th Mandala, as well as The Third Force (a novel set in the world of the surreal Japanese videogame, Gadget).

Jeff Lane - Level Designer

Jeff started his career doing graphic design for the print industry. In a series of leaps and bounds over more than 12 years, he moved into doing graphics for video projects, then graphics for commercial multimedia, and finally graphics for games. He hasn't looked back since. After creating 3D art at Hyperbole Studios on their Quantum Gate interactive movie projects, he spent five years at Sierra Studios, where he worked as an Art Director on Phantasmagoria 2 and, recently, as a Level Designer for SWAT3: CQB before coming to Valve.

Tom Leonard - Software Engineer

Immediately prior to joining Valve, Tom was the CTO of Buzzpad, Inc. Before that, he spent five years at Looking Glass Studios, where he was notably the lead programmer of Thief: The Dark Project, writing the AI and core architecture for the game. Tom also had spent seven years working on C++ development tools at Zortech and Symantech.

Doug Lombardi - Director of Marketing

After years in the music industry, Doug decided to get a real job. Then he came to his senses and made the decision to get into the gaming industry instead. During his time in gaming, he has worked on the launch of websites, magazines, and games. As Director of Marketing at Valve, he helps manage and coordinate third-party relations, marketing and press activities.

Randy Lundeen - Level Designer/Graphic Designer

Randy comes to Valve by way of Microsoft, where he worked as an interface designer for the Internet Gaming Zone. Randy designs some of the most unusual and original levels in the company, and he also is the most likely person to be pushing the polygon and memory limits of our engine. In his distant past, he was a key staff member at a potato processing plant (his responsibilities including peeling and potato quality oversight).

Scott Lynch - Chief Operating Officer

Prior to joining Valve, Scott was Senior Vice President at Havas Interactive where he created and managed the Sierra Studios business unit publishing a number of products, including Half-Life. During his 5-year tenure at Sierra, Scott held a number of different positions in business development, acquisitions, finance, investor relations, and product development. Before joining Sierra, Scott worked in the public accounting industry at Coopers and Lybrand where he worked in both the audit and tax departments managing a range of clients from small start-ups to Fortune 500 companies. Scott is a graduate of the University of Washington Business School with a concentration in accounting and is an inactive certified public accountant in the state of Washington.

Ido Magal - Level Designer

Ido is a UC Berkeley computer science drop-out turned professional artist. Prior to joining Valve, where he makes textures and maps for Counter-Strike, he worked at Westwood Studios, making thousands of tiny ground tiles for Red Alert 2. He enjoys photography, foreign films, and advising the President about issues of national importance. His superpower consists of knowing someone is thinking of him when his nose itches, and his weaknesses are Indian food, sharp women, and Tom Waits.

Gary McTaggart - Software Developer

Gary left the University of Florida in 1995 to pursue a career in programming at 3Dfx Interactive as employee number 11. While there, he created demos that were used to show the potential of Voodoo Graphics hardware. The most notable of these demos are the Valley of Ra and Wizard's Tower. Additionally Gary worked as developer support for other game companies wanting to get the most out of 3dfx's hardware. Gary left 3Dfx with Charlie Brown for a short stint at Ritual Entertainment. After working at Ritual, Gary and Charlie decided to start a new company and do contract work for Electronic Arts. Later, Gary decided that Valve would be the ideal place for him to be able to work on great games and technology without having to worry about the day-to-day operations of a business.

Jason Mitchell - Software Developer

After eight years at ATI, where he headed the 3D Application Research Group, Jason was finally seduced by the entertainment industry and is now putting his 3D graphics hardware knowledge to use on a top-secret project at Valve. Having owned a T-square since birth, Jason has been hard at work making pictures out of geometry ever since. While joining Valve has significantly cut down on Jason's international jet-setting, he's still your man if you're looking for a stuporous late night Tokyo karaoke escapade.

John Morello II - Animator / Game Designer

Originally from Chesapeake, Virginia, John came to Valve via the MOD community. As lead animator and designer on Day of Defeat, John has spent the majority of the past few years modeling and animating the objects and characters in the popular WWII themed online game.

Bryn Moslow - Network Administrator / Keyboard-pounding Monkey

Known as "The Man" by those that know him as The Man and "Who?" by most everyone else, Bryn's life has been usurped by the machines. He started on Usenet and IRC from a DEC VAX terminal when Usenet and IRC were useful and may be one of the last people on Earth with a VAXstation still running Ultrix. He and his friend Al built the Internet together but he became disgruntled and left to be a Rock Star when Al took all the credit for it. When the whole Rock Star thing didn't pan out he found himself once again a keyboard-pounding monkey. In the few odd hours he isn't cursing incoherently while facing Redmond he can often be found doing horrible things to his neighbors with a heavily modded Marshall JCM 900 and one of his flock of Telecasters and wondering when the whole Internet fad is going to finally die so he can have a life again.

Gabe Newell - Founder/Managing Director

Gabe held a number of positions in the Systems, Applications, and Advanced Technology divisions during his 13 years at Microsoft. His responsibilities included running program management for the first two releases of Windows, starting the companys multimedia division, and, most recently, leading the companys efforts on the Information Highway PC. His most significant contribution to Half-Life was his statement "Cmon, people, you cant show the player a really big bomb and not let them blow it up."

Martin Otten - Software Developer

Martin comes to us from Germany where he attended Dortmund University earning a masters degree in computer science. He is best known for programming Argus (for Quake) and Half-Life TV (as a contractor for Valve). Since arriving in Washington, Martin has lost all four hubcaps on his Volkswagen and has single-handedly stopped Seattle traffic by walking across the street in a bath robe while sipping a white Russian. Not bad for a "poor German boy." Martin also enjoys listening to the band Manowar since, after all, some bands play but Manowar kills.

Alfred Reynolds - Engineer

Alfred joined Valve as a software engineer in 2002. Since his arrival, he has contributed to the development of Counter-Strike, Half-Life 2, and Steam. He also does his best to maintain the Linux ports of our games. Most recently, he lead the Steam development efforts to bring third party applications to the leading online distribution platform. Prior to his arrival at Valve Alfred worked for an Australian research organization and would be forced to kill anyone who discovered the true nature of his work there. He was also to blame for starting plugins on Half-Life servers, in particular creating Admin Mod.

Dave Riller - Game Designer

Prior to joining Valve, Dave was an active developer in the online Quake community and worked with id Software on the deployment of Quake World. For his day job, Dave was a program designer/analyst at MSI, a Windows software developer located on the East Coast. He also ran their website. Dave has been a beta tester for Doom 2, Hexen, Quake, and Warcraft II. In his virtually non-existent spare time, Dave is a pilot and musician.

David Sawyer - Level Designer

A world traveller as a result of his father's job in the Foreign Service, David comes to Valve from a recent stay in the Washington D.C. area. David became a full-time employee after proving himself through contract mapmaking work on Team Fortress Classic, and is now pouring himself into Team Fortress 2. Despite a calm exterior, David has become one of Valve's most fearsome and ruthless snipers in Team Fortress Classic, and delights in the cries of "Damn you, Ramirez!" that can be heard from nearby offices. He enjoys tormenting Chuck, in particular.

Taylor Sherman - Software Developer

After college, Taylor worked on NPC AI and netcode for big, expensive video games at The Boeing Company. In 2000, fed up with the level of dysfunction at the quarter-million employee company, Taylor left for the much smaller Applied Microsystems. There, he demonstrated his versatility by utilizing what may be his two first names, or two last names (nobody is quite sure), to write lots of code that was never used by anybody. In 2001 Taylor joined Valve to work on Steam. Taylor has a Bachelors of Electrical Engineering from The Cooper Union, and, if you squint real hard, two halves of an MSEE.

Eric Smith - Software Developer

Eric has a B.S. degree from the DigiPen Institute of Technology in Redmond, WA. Programming has been Eric's obsession since he began programming in Basic on his Atari 800 when he was 12. His college career began at the University of Washington where he studied Electrical Engineering. Unhappy with Engineering, he landed a job as a Game Counselor at Nintendo. Over the years, he was promoted and ended up handling Risk Management issues for Nintendo. When DigiPen opened its doors in the U.S. in January 1998, Eric saw an opportunity to change careers and "make" games instead of just play them. Eric has lived in Washington most of his life and enjoys all the outdoor activities this area provides.

David Speyrer - Software Developer

David has a BSEE from Louisiana and six years of experience in network and serial communications software development and project management. PC games have been David's passion since he started programming at the age of 11. David was living and working in Boulder, Colorado, when he played through Half-Life: Day One. Soon he was packing his belongings and putting his house up for sale. David now says that Valve was about the only thing capable of compelling him to leave Boulder's rock climbing and 300 days of sun per year. An eternal optimist, David is convinced that the sun will come out "any day now" so that he can go climbing.

Jay Stelly - Senior Software Development Engineer

Jay joined Valve from Tetragon where he was lead engineer and 3D engine developer of Virgin's Nanotek Warrior. Before that, he developed titles for Sony Playstation & 3DO. Way before that, he wrote his first computer game (at age 9) and had a game published in a magazine (at age 15). A native of Cajun Country, Jay finds Northwest buildings too hot (what, no air conditioning?) and the food not hot enough.

Jeremy Stone - Troublemaker

Prior to joining Valve, Jeremy spent 12 years at Microsoft as a developer and manager, shipping products including Windows 3.11, Windows 95, Internet Explorer 1.0 through 4.0, Flight Simulator 2000, Combat Flight Simulator 1 and 2, and MSN Messenger. Because of his penchant for building industry-shaking and disruptive technologies, he now works on Steam. He expands to ten times his normal size when placed in water.

Kelly Thornton - Sound Engineer / Game Designer

Kelly arrived at Valve via the Half-Life mod community. While earning a Masters degree in Business at UM-St. Louis, he helped develop and did sound work for Day of Defeat. Seeing video game development and sound engineering as the obvious natural progression to come out of an MBA and an undergrad degree in biology, he packed his things and headed west to Valve. Today, you can find him in his office surrounded by WWII books and memorabilia with a fat pair of headphones on, wondering how in the world he actually landed a job he loves doing.

Bill Van Buren - Producer/Designer

Like a guest at the dinner party in Bunuels "The Exterminating Angel," Bill signed on for a short stint to help ship Half-Life and found himself unable to leave. Bills pre-Valve experience includes positions at Starwave and Microsoft where he was responsible for art and design direction, production management, and creating art, animation, and the odd bit of music.

Robin Walker - Design Manager

Robin Walker co-wrote the hugely popular Quake mod Team Fortress, before being assimilated when Valve acquired Team Fortress Software. Since that time, he has been responsible for design, code, and management on various Valve products.

Josh Weier - Software Developer

Hailing from Wisconsin, where he worked on multiple FPS titles with Raven Software, Josh now finds himself in the ever-raining Seattle. But at least it doesn't snow. Most of his days are spent holed up in an office with Steve Bond designing new encounters, creating special effects, and using his whiteboard as a canvas for a wide variety of strange and badly drawn characters. Don't get him started about "treasure games" and be sure to make fun of how young he is, because he really gets a kick out of it.

Doug Wood - Animator

Doug joined Valve in 1997 and has been working on the Half-Life series ever since. Before Valve, Doug worked at 3Drealms where he worked on Duke-Nukem 3D and Prey. He has been working in the gaming industry since 1994.

Matt T. Wood - Level Designer

Matt found his passion for making games by way of creating maps for Doom and Duke Nukem 3D. In 1997 he was hired by 3D Realms Entertainment to work as the lead level designer on their first full 3d game Prey (after the original team left). He later moved onto 3D Realms's Duke Nukem Forever as a level designer at first and soon transitioned into lead modeler/animator. At Valve, Matt is again back to level design where he (among other things) works with the 'choreo' team designing and creating scripted scenes for the Half-Life universe.