Valve's CEO and co-founder, Gabe Newell, has told PC Gamer that the only way there'd be a Half-Life movie would be if Valve made it themselves. He also said they've been experimenting with doing just that.
Tom interviewed the living daylights out of Gabe, and came up with the whole history behind the Half-Life movie - it turns out that they were approached by lots of rubbish proposals for movie cash-ins, and felt that the only creative team that could do it justice was Valve itself. Here's the full quote from Gabe:
"As a WoW player, I would much rather that the WoW team made the movie, right? Than anybody else. I like Sam Raimi, I've been a fan ever since Evil Dead came out, but I would rather see Blizzard making the movie. We think that customers are like, 'OK, we're kind of sick and tired of the way you guys are slicing and dicing the experience of being a fan of Harry Potter, or Half-Life, or The Incredibles, and you need to fix it.' And the people that fix it will be rewarded, and the people that don't will be on the rubbish heap of history, or whatever the phrase is.
"Where we got into this direction was after Half-Life 1 had shipped. There was a whole bunch of meetings with people from Hollywood. Directors down there wanted to make a Half-Life movie and stuff, so they'd bring in a writer or some talent agency would bring in writers, and they would pitch us on their story. And their stories were just so bad. I mean, brutally, the worst. Not understanding what made the game a good game, or what made the property an interesting thing for people to be a fan of.
"That's when we started saying 'Wow, the best thing we could ever do is to just not do this as a movie, or we'd have to make it ourselves.' And I was like, 'Make it ourselves? Well that's impossible.' But the Team Fortress 2 thing, the Meet The Team shorts, is us trying to explore that."
This is just the tip of the iceberg of stuff Tom uncovered on his trip to see Valve this month. Our Valve Issue is about to hit shelves and appear in our online shop from the 1st of September - subscribers should be expecting it to materialise in their circle of deadly hero power crystals any day now.
