Erik Wolpaw: Still Alive
October 31st, 2007
An interview with the person responsible for Portal’s insanely good writing. (Also that Old Man Murray thing.)
Also, there is cake. Why’s that?
Well, there are lots of message games coming out now. Like they’ve got something really important to get off their chest about the war in Iraq or the player is forced to make some dicey underwater moral choices. Really, just a whole heck of a lot of stuff to think about. With that in mind, at the beginning of the Portal development process, we sat down as a group to decide what philosopher or school of philosophy our game would be based on. That was followed by about fifteen minutes of silence and then someone mentioned that a lot of people like cake.
But, the cake is a lie.
Erik Wolpaw is a keyword now? Is it expected that there will be a lot more Erik Wolpaw writing on this site in the near future?
I plan on filing at least 4 Erik Wolpaw entries next week.
“What I really mean is that game writers are the game equivalent of the guy who talks between the nude girls at strip clubs.”
I have a new hero.
While always insanely amusing, I must admit that finding out he was behind this wonderful game just convinced me that portal 2 will never ever actually happen.
“the player is forced to make some dicey underwater moral choices.”
As in KOTOR?
I was thinking as in Bioshock, but I know nothing about KOTOR…
The first time I read that I thought it was just a typo.
But there IS an entire underwater planet in KotOR filled with dicey moral choices.
IT WORKS ON MANY LEVELS!
I wouldn’t say it was insanely good, just decent enough to exceed my expectation of no plot at all. Frankly, they could’ve skipped the story to make some harder puzzles.
Now we need an update on Musashi.
Portal was a really good game.. unfortunately it was way too short. I beat it in an afternoon. :/
Also, no cake, wtf??? I had called my kid in to watch the party and my son was like ‘where’s the cake, and why are you going into the fire, dad?’
/agree with Freakazoid that there should have been a couple really hard puzzles there at the end. Even the boss fight was fairly easy.
Nice song at the end though… definitely a nice touch.
Where’s Chet?
Chet also works at Valve, and is also a staff writer along with Marc Laidlaw.
Yay! We got Lum, Chet, Erik…just have to locate Hokie Mokie and Monty Cantsin, now. it’s just a matter of time before the old forums are back and I can stop wasting my time with the rest of the internet!
Cake and lesbians.
Valve games have always been steeped in obvious sexualism. Headcrabs, what are they but leaping, screeching, head-chomping vagina dentata? And if Striders are cyborg’d alien organisms, what was their primary gun turret before they borged it?
Sometimes a headcrab is just a headcrab.
If head crabs symbolize female genitalia, being attacked by a headcrab is akin to returning to the womb…but in doing so, you are helpless, controlled like a puppet, and sucked dry of your bodily fluids until you’re barely a skeleton. Ultimately, you expire, leaving only a faceless, unidentifiable corpse behind.
Why do I suddenly have this vision of Sigmund Freud, blindfolded, white-knuckled, grasping a broomstick, gleefully beating a pinata?
It depends, does the pinata look like your mother?