A new blog on the Valve Website is penned by Michael Abrash, the former Microsoft programmer that helped create QUAKE during his time at id Software (thanks Shok). Reviving the "Ramblings in Realtime" title used for his
postmortem of his work on the QUAKE engine, he explains: "Valve: How I Got Here, What It’s Like, and What I’m Doing." He talks about his prior relationship with the Valve bosses from their Microsoft days that allowed Valve a foot in the door to discuss licensing the QUAKE engine, and the long view Valve took over the years when it came to recruiting him. He outlines the company's structure-free style of management (or lack thereof), its culture of pervasive trust, and offers other insights into what makes Valve unusual. He then proceeds to discuss what he's working on right now, which is exploring the ramifications of wearable computing, which recalls
the confirmation that Valve has plans to create its own hardware. It's an interesting read, but to avoid giving the wrong impression about the state of this project, here are the caveats he lays out:
To be clear, this is R&D – it doesn’t in any way involve a product at this point, and won’t for a long while, if ever – so please, no rumors about Steam glasses being announced at E3. It’s an initial investigation into a very interesting and promising space, and falls more under the heading of research than development. The Valve approach is to do experiments and see what we learn – failure is fine, just so long as we can identify failure quickly, learn from it, and move on – and then apply it to the next experiment. The process is very fast-moving and iterative, and we’re just at the start. How far and where the investigation goes depends on what we learn.
This trailer offers "The Power of Revenge," a poignant trailer for
PROTOTYPE 2 created as a TV commercial for Radical Entertainment's upcoming open world action sequel. In sending it along, however, Activision poses the question: "Is it too provocative or too disturbing for some major TV networks to carry?"
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The
World of Warcraft Website has a "Welcome Back!" post for recipients of "the new and improved Scroll of Resurrection" who are looking for direction about what to do after reaching level 85 in Blizzard's MMORPG. Word is: "Don’t worry: between dungeons and raids, new battlegrounds, the Archeology profession, more class/race combinations, transmogrification, and the reforging feature, there's plenty of content to explore. Here's a brief overview of some cool stuff that has been added since the release of World of Warcraft: Cataclysm..."
I'm feeling that much better since my cold, but it has killed my appetite for most of this week, and it's still not right. I guess that's one way to get one's beach body (yeah right) back for the summer, but it's left me a little weakened. I was hoping to fire up the first steaks on my new grill today, but while that would certainly be a good way to restore some of that lost vigor if I could eat it, I'm worried I'll just end up picking at it, so I think I should just hold off on that.
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