Gabe Newell has defended game delays with his own version of that fake Miyamoto quote.
Half-Life has just turned 25, if you can believe it, and to celebrate the original development team has been sharing its experience of working on the renowned FPS in a new documentary posted on YouTube.
As well as reminiscing about Valve's early days and the work that went into designing and implementing Half-Life's characters, levels and narrative, the team spoke of the challenges they faced getting the game out the door and the decision to delay its launch in order to do justice to their vision and make the experience as enjoyable as possible for the player.
Looking back, Valve co-founder Gabe Newell doesn't regret pushing the game's release back a year to November 1998. As he sees it, the wait for a game is finite, but releasing it before it's ready can ruin it forever. "Late is just for a little while. Suck is forever," he says. "We could try to force this thing out the door, but that's not the company we want to be, that's not the people we want to be. That's not the relationship we want to have with our customers."
If Newell's stance sounds familiar, it's because it's awfully similar to Shigeru Miyamoto's famous quote, "A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad." The story goes that Miyamoto was referring to The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time here, but there's no actual evidence to suggest the legendary designer ever uttered these words.
While it's less relevant in modern games where updates and patches can cover up all manner of sins, Newell does have a point. It's much easier to forget you had to wait an extra few months than it is to erase the feeling of disappointment if a game isn't up to scratch.
Valve also celebrated Half-Life's 25th anniversary with a massive update for the classic FPS, which restores cut content, adds new maps, and fixes old bugs. "We now consider this anniversary version of Half-Life to be the definitive version, and the one we'll continue to support going forward," Valve says.
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