My Visit to Valve!

Written by evol

Thursday, 13 August 2009 00:27

Apologies for the lack of posts and updates. Rest assured, we are still here!

I recently took a very gnarly road trip with my wife and 2 kids – from Phoenix all the way up to Seattle (3500 miles round trip...)! Isn't there some big software company up the Seattle area? One that makes video games or something? Oh that's right, VALVE! I think I've heard of them...

Seattle was amazing. The highlight of the trip was definitely my visit to Valve. We get to the outer doors of their main office, and can see in to the lobby. No one was in there, but I was already star struck by the giant golden crowbar, and giant waist-high iron valve in the middle of the room, going right into the ground. Well, the doors are locked, but there is a phone by the door. While waiting for someone to pick up, an employee coming back from the bathroom asked us if we were meeting someone. I told him “No, we're just tourists”, but I think he could tell from my giant grin that I was pretty excited to be there. He invited us in to the lobby, and went to fetch the HR lady.

So the HR lady comes out, introduces herself, chats for a few minutes, shows us around the lobby, asks us our shirt sizes (and promptly texts a friend on her iPhone), and asks if we want a tour. Of course we want a tour! She said Gabe was in, and that he could poke out for a few minutes to say hi. Gabe Newell was awesome! Aside from have the largest monitor I have ever seen (happy to report he's an XP user. Couldn't miss the giant green start button), he was very polite, funny, and indulged me in my questions and chat. He asked what I did for a living, and I told him I was actually a programmer. He inquired further if it was game development, to which I unfortunately had to reply that my game development has been all hobby work (but that I'd be sending him my resume anyway), and that my main development language is currently c# on the Microsoft .NET platform. However, I did inform him that I had created 2 very popular mods on Left 4 Dead (perhaps the 2 most popular out there), and that my 2 groups had almost 10,000 users. He seemed impressed by that, and asked me to email him links to the mods.

There offices there are amazing. The place is just BURSTING with creativity. You can't walk anywhere without seeing giant renditions of concept art for games, or giant logos and insignias from past works. The halls are literally lined with white boards, where tons of ideas and sketches are scribbled. I saw one sketch that looked very much like the Spitter that is coming in L4D2 (hard to miss that long neck and gnarly pony tails).

I wasn't able to tour the whole facility, because they are currently doing a lot of testing for upcoming releases (new DLC, L4D2, etc). I wish I had emailed ahead of time to get in contact with someone, because it would have been great to meet Chet Faliszek, but it was a busy trip as it was, and I didn't get around to it. I'm kicking myself now, of course.

So I've definitely made a decision to sharpen my c/c++ skills for good, and become much more involved in independent game development. Working for Valve has always been a dream of mine, but touring the facility gave me a whole new kind of inspiration.

Check out the pics! (click for large versions)