[Originally written in 1997, some time before "Half-Life"'s release, as you may know, the game went on to become one of the most lauded, multi-award-winning titles of all time, and Valve shot up to the premier league of game developers. Next up for them is "Team Fortress 2", still due sometime later in 2001.. hopefully, and I'm guessing Harry is currently working on this..]

Game designers are the luckiest men on Earth, Confucius say. But game designers who've worked on a range of blockbusters over 6 years and several different genres? Even Confucius has trouble finding a trite saying to qualify that one. Check out this CV:

"Harry came to Valve from Shiny Entertainment, where he was working on the upcoming game Wild 9's. Prior to Shiny, Harry was at Williams Entertainment where he was lead artist and designer for PlayStation Doom, and was lead designer for Doom64. Before Williams, Harry worked with Sid Meier at Microprose on Civilization as well as Pirates Gold, among other projects."

So, not only is Harry currently working on Half-Life, quite possibly the most interesting of the crop of Quake-engine games currently in development, his previous pedigree as a game designer is pretty spectacular. How did he get to where he is today, and what are his game design philosophies? It goes like this:

h0l: Clearly, you've had a very varied game-design CV. Do you think all game designers have the ability to skip genres so easily? And if not, what makes you able to do so? :)

HET: I think a good game designer can move to new genres easily, provided s/he enjoys and can relate to the new style of game. The crucial part of taking on a new genre is understanding the metaphor of the game you're working in: how are the goals communicated to the player, what is the logical framework for directing player decisions, and what form can player decisions take within the game? If you can understand the metaphor, you can design for it. If you like the metaphor, you can do great things with it.

Going from strategy to action (by way of simulation, adventure, platform, and fight genres) was not a difficult transition for me, because I love both styles of game intensely. The most exciting thing about Half-Life for me is that it will combine my favorite elements of strategy and action games: it's more sophisticated than a simple run-and-gun scenario, yet the excitement of fast gameplay is also there in abundance.

h0l: What skills should the best game designers in this industry have?

HET: Imagination, a sense of fun, and an open, logical mind (that isn't slaved to logic). Imagination and sense of fun need no explanation, but by logical mind, I mean a designer has to intuit what belongs in a game versus what does not belong, that which is inappropriately tangential to the game. You have to be able to edit your ideas, and remember what your game is supposed to be about. Sometimes seemingly cool ideas enhance your game, sometimes they dilute it: a good designer will know the difference.

h0l: What part did you play in making Civilization? And were people surprised at its massive success?

HET: Civilization was my first game. I worked as artist on the team with Sid Meier and Bruce Shelley, and I tried to do as much "Assistant Designer" work as I could. I did things like flow-charting all of the technologies and units in the game, which ended up teaching me a lot about organization and design methodology, and how to go about structuring and testing my design ideas. Sid is the best computer game designer there is, and it was a tremendous learning experience for me, as well as a real honor working with him.

As far as being surprised by its success, there wasn't a single person in MPS Labs that was surprised. Everyone there knew it was going to be a phenomenon from the very first alpha of the game. We knew it because production on other games almost ground to a halt: you could wander the corridors, and look in peoples' offices and see Civ on every screen. It felt "right" in every way, from the beginning.

h0l: Is converting an already-massive game to another medium, as you did with Doom, more or less difficult than building a game from scratch? (clearly, there's a lot of expectations with a conversion...)

HET: Yeah, the expectations were probably the primary concern with PSX Doom. We were all big Doom fans, with nightly deathmatches that lasted for hours. No one wanted to be part of a team that made a version of Doom that sucked. So we had quite a bit of incentive to get everything right.

The Doom conversion was difficult in a number of technical ways, mostly memory issues. We had to chop a lot: textures got smaller, sprites were scaled down, there were fewer monsters in each level, and levels often got smaller. I'm proud to say that the blood we sweat in making intelligent choices when converting everything paid off, in that no review of the game when we released seemed to clue in to those aspects (at least, if folks noticed them, they didn't seem bothered by them. It got raves, and precious few criticisms.)

Each conversion has its own set of problems: if you're lucky, you don't have to develop new content, or you can easily modify the existing content, and it then becomes mostly a code issue. If the content needs to change radically, then it almost becomes more difficult than starting from scratch, as you already know what the final result must be, and you need to find the correct way to make everything fit. Starting from scratch means more flexibility in what the game can turn into.

h0l: Why did you decide to leave such an allstar company as Shiny, when most people are banging on the door to get in? And why do you think Dave Perry seems to be making such a success of the company? Or is it all good PR?

HET: Well, setting the record straight, I was only contracting to Shiny last summer: I was not a full-time employee, and only worked there a few months. I was torn between taking a full-time position there and taking my position at Valve, and it was a very tough choice. Shiny is an incredible company, doing some great things. In the end, however, I think I was a little more excited by going into a start-up as opposed to an already established game company. There's more risk, but there's also more opportunity. Valve had the right folks in charge, and Mike and Gabe both made it clear that they were interested in doing high quality games, no compromises.

Dave Perry is a great guy, and if Shiny were all PR, where did MDK and Earthworm Jim come from? I liked both games. Dave certainly didn't strike me as someone interested in making hack games for a quick buck. He markets Shiny very well, but being well-marketed doesn't mean you're covering for the fact that your games are lacking.

h0l: Why is it that Half-Life is going to do better than all the other Quake-engine games? Which game-design aspects will take it above the others?

HET: Half-Life is going to give you the best single-player experience of any first-person action game. I don't want to sound cocky, because the rhetoric surrounding these games is getting pretty thick, but of all the first-person games I know about, I'm most excited by ours. Other companies are doing some interesting things, but to me Half-Life has the best balance of graphics, action, tactics, and interaction.

The design aspects we're concentrating on are enemy AI and world interaction. The AI of enemies in previous first-person games have often made the opponents uninspiring to fight, and so we're putting a lot into making them fun. With the world interaction, we want the player to have to think outside of merely shooting everything: shoot whatever moves, shoot every slightly-different texture, shoot shoot shoot. We want you to think about things, and choose your actions carefully. I don't know anyone who's first instinct upon being handed a rocket launcher would be to start firing it all over the place: we want the player to approach our game with more thought than that.

Half-Life has been getting a lot of attention, doing really well at E3 and ECTS, bringing Valve from our position as an unknown startup to being a strong presence in the industry. There are several teams making first-person action games coming out over the next year, and each team has made a different set of decisions. We've made the technological improvements that we think are necessary for this generation of games (16-bit color, skeletal animation, enhanced environmental effects), and we've made the design decisions that will make the gameplay what we want it to be (improved enemy AI, greater interaction with the environment). From the reactions we get when we show the game off, it has become apparent that we've made good decisions in what to do to make Half-Life great. It's gratifying, and it also deepens our commitment to making the game live up to the promises.

h0l: What do you think of the cult of game developer as media star which you and the other Quake-related developers seem to be increasingly stuck in?

HET: Well, it was bound to happen as games became more mainstream, wasn't it? As industries get bigger, they become more interesting to the media. I personally don't know anyone in games because they want to be famous: people who make games tend to do it because they love making games. Inasmuch as increased media attention has brought more people into playing games, and more people into considering game development as a career, I think it's great. It's a really rewarding field to be in: I love coming into work every day. Not everyone can say that.

As long as I can keep making games unimpeded, things are cool. I don't want to spend too much time talking games, I want to make them, and keep making them. Attention from the public is sort of irrelevant.

h0l: Which game designers do you particularly admire? And which games have you particularly admired the game design on recently?

HET: As far as designers go, Sid Meier foremost, who with a couple hours talking gave me more clues about game design than I got in years some places. And Sandy Petersen, whose Call of Cthulhu I played 'til I bled out my eyes when I was in high school. When I met him at MicroProse, I nearly fell over, and knowing and working with him through the years has been a tremendous influence on me. I've never met Peter Molyneux of Bullfrog, but I've really enjoyed many of his games. Unfortunately, there are many more game designers to look at for examples of what not to do than there are good game designers to emulate.

As far as recent games go, I've been obsessed with Quake and various Quake mods for a while.... but Dungeon Keeper is a recent game that I thought was quite creative, and incredibly well executed. Age of Empires is really wonderful (this is Bruce Shelley's latest game, and Sandy Petersen is now at Ensemble, too, so I foresee incredible things coming out of there). Mario64 sucked me in for some long nights, too. Ultima Online is incredibly interesting, and I've been on quite a bit the past few days; it represents several new things for gaming. I'm looking forward to Unreal, Quake2, and Sim City 3000. I hope they're all fantastic.

h0l: The games industry deals with game designers in many different ways - some companies have no designated designers, some have 'designer' as job description but also double up as graphics artists/coders, and some employ designers who simply design and do nothing else. Which do you think works best?

HET: Oooh, I'll take the controversial position on this: it depends. With some games, you can have a designer who does no code or art, or anything mechanical regarding the game. They can write concept stuff, guide others in their implementation of game ideas, and write the manual. With some genres, it works, and is very efficient. Other genres, the designer has to be intimately tied to the technology, such that they are actively creating content. There is often no other way for the designer to know what is feasible or fun without them being hands-on throughout the whole process.

I've worked in all sorts of situations: with designers who work exclusively by writing design documents; on teams without designers, where design is supposed to be what happens when artists and programmers argue; I've been a designer that does some art, and an artist that does some design. Some have been immensely enjoyable team experiences, some have been incredibly frustrating and unrewarding.

The common thread to the enjoyable experiences is mutual respect between teammates, and the common thread to the frustrating experiences is distrust of teammates. You can do any job on a team and do design as well, and be good at it all, as long as your team communicates and works well together. It also helps if one person has veto power over all game ideas, to save everyone many hours of lengthy meetings and arguments. That person must be especially trusted by everyone, or the team will degenerate quickly.

At Valve, we have an open design environment. We have a really talented crew of folks, bringin all kinds of experience into the mix: Marc brings the experience of a horror-novel writer, Steve and John bring Quake mod experience, Chuck has done more game monsters than anyone, and pairing him up with the otherworldly ideas of Ted when creating the creatures for the game has been incredible to watch. Every member of the team contributes to all areas, however, both in large team meetings and smaller groups. If someone makes a moronic suggestion, the responses are swift and merciless, but folks are equally eager to build upon good ideas and turn them into dramatically cool gameplay scenarios. Technology, art, and design are so interrelated on a project like this, everyone must have a voice in the design process.

h0l: Finally, what genre and style will be the Xmas No.1 in the year 2000?

BL: I think first-person games will still be the number one area of experimentation and expansion. Hardware is always improving, and with CPUs and 3D rendering power getting more powerful first-person games will just keep getting visually better and better, with more ability to immerse the player. Voice recognition and adequate natural language processing will have been available for a while at that point, so players will start to see dramatic changes in how they can interact with their games. These innovations all play most strongly to first-person games and simulations. It's going to be exciting.

h0l: Thanks. :)