Gabe Newell: No Half-Life Movie Unless Valve Makes It
Author: Arthur Ricky // Category: Games and Players, Popular Games
Half-Life is one of the most popular franchises in videogames, so why hasn’t the world seen it adapted into a movie yet? According to Valve CEO and co-founder Gabe Newell, it’s because they don’t trust anyone to do it but themselves.
Speaking to PC Gamer, Newell revealed that they’ve actually gotten tons of studio offers in the past. “There was a whole bunch of meetings with people from Hollywood [after Half-Life 1 shipped],” Newell explained. “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.”
And that, Newell said, is when they decided only one company could get it right: Valve. “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,’” he said. “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.”
Those “Meet the Team” videos were certainly a big hit with gamers, so the thought that they could potentially be a small-scale test for a potentially bigger feature-length movie is definitely exciting.
Tags: Game Movie, Half-Life