Mike Ambinder
Experimental Psychologist
Mike has a B.A. in Computer Science and Psychology from Yale and a PhD in Psychology from the University of Illinois. His job
description is vague, but he thinks it probably has something to do with applying both psychological knowledge and methodologies to game design. Essentially this means he gets to play with data, perform
research, and act as an in-house consultant of sorts. He is really happy that you took the time to read his paragraph.
Ted Backman
Conceptual Artist / Illustrator / Animator
Prior to joining Valve in the summer of 1996, Ted studied
painting at the University of Washington. During his time at Valve, Ted has been responsible for designing and building many of the people, places and things that inhabit Black Mesa, City 17, and the
outlying environments. A Seattle native, Ted finds drizzle comforting and insists Paynes grey is his favorite color.
Jeff Ballinger
Artist
Jeff's projects include Half-Life 2, Lost-Coast, Day of Defeat and Team Fortress 2.
He is responsible for concepts, world textures, prototyping levels, architectural studies and model making. In addition to working on world environments you can find him sketching, modeling, and learning
new art techniques.
Aaron Barber
Level Designer / 3D artist
While studying engineering at UCLA, Aaron got his first experience
building 3d environments while constructing VRML websites for the University. During this time he was also actively involved in designing levels for Quake and Duke Nukem 3D with several internet mod
groups. His level design eventually got him a position at Xatrix Entertainment working on titles such as Redneck Rampage, Quake 2, and Kingpin. After completing Kingpin, he took a senior design position
at EA working on James Bond before coming to Valve. Outside the world of game and level design, Aaron also enjoys playing music locally around Seattle.
www.nineteen5.com.
Jeep Barnett
Software Developer
Jeep quit his janitorial job at Fred Meyer to turn his programming hobby into a career. Jeep's love of video games (and fear of returning to a
life of toilet scrubbing) drove him to earn a B.S. Degree from the DigiPen Institute of Technology. His Senior game project, Narbacular Drop, led to the team behind it joining Valve to create Portal.
Mike Belzer
Animator
Playing with G.I. Joes and video games as a kid payed off for Mike. First, he made a career in stop motion animating such icons as Gumby and the Pillsbury Doughboy, as well as such films as "Nightmare Before Christmas" and "James and the Giant Peach." Then, in 1993, he got his first taste of CGI at Pixar and LIKED IT!! For almost 12 years, he worked at the Walt Disney Animation Studios on such projects as "Walt Disney's Dinosaur", "Kangaroo Jack" , "Meet the Robinsons", and "Boltâ€. Now, he’s working at the coolest game studio on the planet making games. When he’s not playing with pixels, the only thing he enjoys more in life is spending time with his wife and children.
Jeremy Bennet
Artist
Prior to joining Valve, Jeremy worked at Weta in New Zealand as the Visual Effects Art Director (winning the Visual Effects Societies award for Best Art Direction in a Motion Picture) on The Lord of the Rings and was the Conceptual Designer on King Kong. Since joining Valve he has worked on Half Life ep2, Left4Dead 1\2, Portal2 and several to be announced titles. When not at work he can be found surfing the many breaks on the Olympic peninsula and building Lego space ships with his two boys.
Dan Berger
Software Developer
Prior to joining Valve, Dan shipped a bunch of products and consumer services and
managed development teams - none of which was nearly as cool as what he's doing now. Despite his complete lack of game-industry qualifications - unless 20-odd years of pen-and-paper role-playing count -
he made his save vs. interview and got invited to join the party. Dan works on Steam, happy to be back in a role where he's only responsible for his own mistakes.
Yahn Bernier
Software Developer
Yahn was an Atlanta patent lawyer with a degree in chemistry from Harvard. So
obviously he ended up in Seattle developing computer games. He taught himself to program at the age of 12 and, more recently, developed what we at Valve have called "that other level editor," BSP. Now
that he's getting paid to make games, he figures he'll practice law in his spare time (little does he know). Yahn worked on Half-Life's multiplayer code and is currently hard at work on Team Fortress
2. His favorite phrase, when imbibing too freely, is "Yucca will assimilate you."
Ken Birdwell
Software Developer
Ken interrupted his fine art studies to join Gabe at Valve as one of their first employees. With a background mostly in simulation and medical
software, Ken's primary focus at Valve has been Animation software, and is responsible for most of the acting systems that underlie the characters in Half-Life 2. Ken is the only Valve employee to
actually grow up here in Bellevue, and spends countless hours regaling his office mates with tales of what the town was like "when I was a boy".
Mike Blaszczak
Software Developer
Before coming to Valve, Mike spent 15 years at Microsoft working on
products like Visual C++ and SQL Server. He has written several books, dozens of magazine articles, has applied for three patents, and presented at conferences for audiences of 15 to 1500 people. An avid
motorsports enthusiast, Mike enjoys participating in automobile racing, floating around on his boat, and working on his house. In his spare time, Mike dabbles with distributed computing, studies large-
scale databases, works on Steam, and poses for the covers of department store catalogs.
Steve Bond
Software Developer
Having made the great trek westward from Fort Walton Beach, Florida, Steve is responsible for much of Half-Life's sophisticated monster and entity
behaviors, of which the squad-level AI is his favorite. Steve worked with John Guthrie on several projects that demonstrated the power and flexibility of the QuakeC development environment, which caught
John Carmack's attention, who in turn referred him to us. Before that, Steve worked at a local internet service provider and delivered pizza, a fact that we rarely let him forget, even in his corporate
bio.
Michael Booth
Software Developer
Mike is currently building new technologies at Valve to explore how behavioral and procedural algorithms can create new kinds of game
experiences. Prior to joining Valve staff, Mike’s studio (Turtle Rock Studios) collaborated with Valve for many years on Counter-Strike (The CS Bot, CZ, CS:Xbox, CS:Source) and to led the creation of the
zombie-riffic Left 4 Dead. Mike’s earlier work includes Nox, Nox Quest, Red Alert II: Yuri's Revenge, and Command & Conquer: Generals.
Antoine Bourdon
French-speaking Community Support
Antoine comes from the heart of the Champagne region in France, where he majored in law and yet focused on his minor:
computer science. After working as a contractor for a major Redmond-based software company supporting LiveMeeting, he started at Valve supporting the French community, localizing and leading the French
Café program.
Charlie Brown
Software Developer
Charlie earned his reputation within the gaming industry while working for 3Dfx
Interactive and, later, Ritual. A Ft. Walton Beach, Florida native, Charlie graduated from the University of Florida in the summer of 1994 and then headed for California and 3Dfx. His responsibilities
there included developer support, ports of products to hardware, sample code and simple demos, and ultimately working with 3Dfx Developer Relations managing the engineering game porting effort. After a
2-year stint, Charlie left 3Dfx with college-friend Gary McTaggart to create the Uber(tm) Engine at Ritual Entertainment in Dallas, Texas. Shortly thereafter, Charlie and Gary left Ritual to start their
own company. Valve subsequently contacted Charlie (and his friend Gary) with an offer "they couldn't refuse."
Bill Van Buren
Producer / Designer
Like a guest at the dinner party in Bunuels "The Exterminating Angel," Bill
signed on for a short stint to help ship Half-Life and found himself unable to leave. Bills pre-Valve experience includes positions at Starwave and Microsoft where he was responsible for art and design
direction, production management, and creating art, animation, and the odd bit of music.
Chris Carollo
Software Developer
Chris spent his college years working on Quest, a Quake level editor that competed with Yahn's BSP editor. His first real job was at Looking Glass Studios where he worked on sound and physics for Thief, including the revolutionary and tragically forgotten "sphere hat" primitive. After a few sweaty years in Texas working at Ion Storm Austin on the sequel to Deus Ex, he joined Valve and continues to enjoy being able to step out of doors without bursting into flame. Rather the opposite, in fact.
Dario Casali
Level Designer
Dario started his career designing levels for Doom while studying Economics at University in Oxford, England. After building Final Doom (The Plutonia Experiment) with his brother, he decided his career in the finance world would have to take a back seat. Soon after graduating in 1996, he was invited to make the trip to Valve and found out it was actually possible to have a career in games. Stubbornly refusing to give up his accent over the years, Dario happily endures being the subject of a repertoire of British jokes on a daily basis.
Matt Charlesworth
Artist
Originally from Nottingham in the UK, Matt started making videogames 14 years ago when he got his first break at Core Design helping to create a new game called Tomb Raider. Many sequels later he made the move to Canada where he worked on Mass Effect with Bioware followed by a few years with Blizzard/Activision in Vancouver. Matt joined Valve in 2008 and got straight to work crafting characters for Left 4 Dead 2 where he managed to help make the Spitter more gross than was previously thought possible with the addition of a simple lacey under garment. If he ever offers to show you his reference images, REFUSE.
Greg Cherlin
Level Designer
Greg got his first taste of design making levels for the Descent community in 1997. He enjoys pesto, Richard Dawkins, blue cheese, and pwning
newbs.
Jess Cliffe
Level Designer / Artist
While attending Virginia Tech Jess co-created the original Counter-Strike. You may have heard his voice say “Counter-Terrorists Win!” once or twice. Ask him to say it, he loves that. These days Jess can be found working on Left 4 Dead 2 and attempting to toilet train his cat “Gonk.” He’s this close.
Phil Co
Level Designer
Phil Co graduated from the University of Virginia School of Architecture in 1994 and moved to the San Francisco Bay Area hoping to be a rock star. Since his
first ambition wasn't very successful, Phil turned to the next best job. He found himself as a level designer at Cyclone Studios working on Requiem: Avenging Angel. Over the last ten years, he has also
designed levels at Infinite Machine, Knowwonder, and Blizzard North.
John Cook
Software Developer
Formerly of Team Fortress software, John manages online platform development for Team
Fortress 2 and other projects. Before that, John studied computer science at RMIT in Australia. John is apparently still suffering jetlag from the move to Seattle, as he doesn't seem to be able to make
it in to work until past noon.
Greg Coomer
Product Design / Communications
Prior to joining Valve, Greg helped Microsoft design various software
products. Before that, he worked with Nintendo, started and ran a user interface design company, and spent several years as a freelance product designer. Greg helped to name the company "Valve", and then
led the first game project that Valve ever cancelled. His secret dream is to create a game called 'Akzidenz-Grotesk'. You know, for kids.
Christen Coomer
UI Design
Christen joined Valve after serving ten years as a designer at Microsoft, where she worked on consumer products and platforms ranging from Windows Mobile to Windows Media Center. Her background designing consumer products has made her a great addition to the Steam team, where she designs, produces, tests, ships and markets new features with our team of engineers. And her brother. Really. (We love it when their parents come to visit. So proud!)
Have feedback or suggestions about Steam?
Send 'em her way!!
Scott Dalton
Designer / Special FX
Scott began playing and designing games at an early age on an Atari 800 and never looked back. He came to Valve after many years creating various games with Legend Entertainment. Aside from level design and game mechanics, he delights in creating particle effects and programming the system that drives them. When not making worlds come to life, he's usually making them explode, bleed, and burn.
Ariel Diaz
Character Modeler / 3D Artist
Originally from San Juan, Puerto Rico, Ariel came to Valve after finishing studies at the Savannah College of Art and Design. As part of
the character design team, he is responsible for creating character models, facial expressions and skeleton deformations. Outside of Valve, he pursues training on traditional art skills such as drawing,
painting and sculpting.
Quintin Doroquez
Graphic Designer
"Q!" brings over 10 years of multi-disciplinary graphic design experience
to Valve. He has had a creative role in launching print, online, and new media endeavors as a senior art director for Incite PC Gaming magazine, art director for PC Accelerator, and associate art
director for PC Gamer. At Valve, you can find Q!'s schedule filled with marketing, packaging, web design, game trailers, .dem file creation, and other visual communications tasks. In his spare time, Q!
likes to reminisce about how he was training to be a competitive bodybuilder 14 years ago. Get over it, already!
Mike Dunkle
Source Licensing/Business Development
Mike joined Valve in 2000 after spending 10 years in senior marketing and business development positions in the semiconductor test and embedded software markets. At Valve, Mike is responsible for general business development including Source Engine licensing, Steam content distribution, Asian distribution, and tournament licensing. During his spare time, he enjoys coaching high school and premier club soccer teams. Mike’s ideal Sunday afternoon is spending time at a soccer game with his wife and son.
Dhabih Eng
Artist
(pronounced ZA-bee)
Dhabih, who's been playing games since he was six years old, has a degree in Interdisciplinary Art from the University of Washington. He started making a name for himself by doing freelance design work for gaming magazines (
Electronic Gaming Monthly,
Official Playstation Magazine,
PC Gaming World) while still in school. Dhabih has also done web design and worked on the
Quake2 TC pack Zaero from Team Evolve. He started at Valve by doing freelance work in mid-1998, and signed on full-time in early February of 1999. Dhabih is truly a world citizen, having grown up in six different countries (Australia, Macau, Canada, China, Taiwan, and the USA). You can find out more about Dhabih and check out some of his work by visiting his website,
http://www.sijun.com/.
Chet Faliszek
Writer
We are all still trying to figure out exactly what it is that Chet does at Valve, but at the very least he occupies office space on the 11th floor as
self-proclaimed Mr. Awesome.
Dave Feise
Sound Designer
Originally from Seattle, Dave came to Valve in July of 2009 after 5 years at EA's Redwood Shores studio where he worked on games like Dead Space and the Godfather series. When he’s not rattling the walls at Valve creating dangerously loud sound effects, Dave enjoys playing music, Polaroid photography, fly fishing, and cooking. Dave is a graduate of Ex'pression College.
Adrian Finol
Software Developer
Prior to joining Valve, Adrian contributed to several popular Half-Life MODs and was a founding member of the Front Line Force Team. He landed in
Venezuela from Krypton, and began programming at an early age. After years of fighting Lex Luthor, he came to America in search of the perfect donut. He finally achieved what some call "Donut Nirvana,"
and has successfully acquired the physique of a veteran games programmer.
Moby Francke
Artist
Moby is a character designer for Half Life 2 and the art lead on Team Fortress 2. He brings
to Valve academic fine art training with an emphasis in illustration. After graduating from the Academy of Art San Francisco, he worked at Lucas Arts as a conceptual designer, and taught figure painting
at the Academy of Art SF. Hes won several prestigious awards, including 2 New York Society of Illustrators Competition Awards. He is originally from the small Caribbean island of St. Thomas, and enjoys
the simple things of life.
Vitaliy A. Genkin
Software Developer
Having been raised in the vast expanses of the Soviet Union, having
lived in Russia, Lithuania and Ukraine, having received a couple of Master's degrees with honors and a lieutenant rank, having architected and implemented software that processed petabytes of binary
data by now, having solved thousands of differential equations systems and having played numerous hours of Counter-Strike, Vitaliy went to sunny Santa Monica to help Sony lay the foundation for its
PlayStation-3. Afterwards, Valve, amidst miraculous mountains and forests of the State of Washington, became Vitaliy's new home where nowadays he is architechting more code to handle more terabytes of
next-gen stuff every day.
Chris Green
Software Developer
Prior to joining Valve, Chris Green worked on such projects as the Amiga Flight Simulator II, Ultima Underworld, the Amiga OS, and Magic:The
Gathering Online. He ran his own development studio, Leaping Lizard Software, for 9 years. He's enjoying his new position at Valve working on various pieces of graphics and game technology.
John Guthrie
Level Designer
Along with Steve Bond, John started the influential and popular Internet gaming site, "Quake Command." John was also the co-creator of Quake
Airplane and Quake Kart and constructed many of the chambers and corridors in the Black Mesa Research Center.
Don Holden
Engineer
While studying computer science at Cornell University’s College of Engineering, Don would disappear for months at a time to his dorm room and to “The SUG” (Cornell alums UNITE!) making computer games and graphics demos. This helped him land a couple of temporary gigs at Valve between school years, where he worked under Ken Birdwell and Chris Green on making vrad.exe faster. After getting his Master’s degree, Don went to Valve to work on more graphics stuff, which he does currently.
Jason Holtman
Director of Business Development / Legal Affairs
As, Valve's director of business development, Jason works with outside entities pursuing Steam distribution, Steamworks integration, and game development on the Source engine. Prior to joining Valve, he spent a number of years practicing law, focusing on intellectual property and technology issues. Having travelled all over world to meet with current and potential partners, Jason can tell you the best place to park at SeaTac Airport, knows exactly where you should get coffee in over 15 major airports, and has perfected the art of the "airport gift".
Eric Hope
UI Design
Before joining Valve, Eric worked as a designer for Apple – working on products like Apple's iPod Classic, iPod Nano, Developer Forums, and WWDC iPhone app. These days, when he isn't designing at Valve, he can be found, sandpaper in hand, feverishly rounding the sharp corners off of anything within reach. If you happen to drop by one day and catch him doing so, perhaps in the wee hours of the morning, he will guiltily offer you a tract detailing the life and work of Dieter Rams
Gray Horsfield
Visual Effects Artist
Gray Horsfield started writing in BASIC at age 10 on arguably the first home computer, the Texas Instruments TI99/4a. Gray has since
made a decided effort to spend as little time coding as possible, and instead use the tools that better developers turn out. Starting with 3D computer graphics in 1988 for a commercial house in
Australia, Gray then moved on to spend 4 years in south east Asia, taking on freelance computer graphics work all over the region. in 1994 Gray joined up with Peter Jackson's new company, Weta, as the
4th employee, and worked on a dozen films in as many years, including The Frighteners, Heavenly Creatures, Contact, Lord of the Rings 1, 2, and 3, Valiant and King Kong. Vindication of his addiction
still remains a primary cause for leaving the film industry and joining the ranks at Valve. Hobbies include: blowing stuff up, and blowing other stuff up.
Keith Huggins
Animator
Keith joined Valve from the feature film effects world, having most recently worked on King Kong. He spent two and half years at Weta
contributing towards Kong and the last two films of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, with a brief stint at ILM in between projects. Prior to that, he spent five and a half years at Digital Domain in
LA. Other films he worked on include: Star Wars: Episode III, How the Grinch Stole Christmas and The Fifth Element, as well as several commercials and music videos. Keith has the unique distinction of
being the only person in the world to have animated dialogue for both Gollum and Yoda. When not working on projects at Valve, he can often be found in a casino, wondering aloud about what's with kids
these days, putting in a moderate effort to remain fit, or spending time with his wife.
Brandon Idol
Level Designer/Artist
As a child in Appalachia North Carolina, Brandon often receded to the cool embrace of his family’s basement for video gaming, guitar playing,
and dreaming of getting paid to do either. In 1996 he began his career after graduating with a degree in computer animation, and has since helped establish the visual style of various games including
Final Fantasy IX, Warcraft III, and World of Warcraft. Brandon now spends most of his time at Valve creating backgrounds, pointing spotlights at extreme angles, and being slightly irresponsible with
color. He still plays guitar.
Brian Jacobson
Engineer
As a child, Brian first learned programming in order to crack all the computer games he couldn't afford. After being wracked with years of guilt, he decided to join the games industry to make up for his reprehensible childhood. At LookingGlass, he worked on Flight Unlimited, and then went on to co-found GameFX, and was a lead engineer on Sinistar Unleashed. He joined Valve in late 2000 and has since contributed to most of the titles the company has shipped since then, working mostly on engine and graphics technology with the occasional stint in game design.
Erik Johnson
Project Manager
Erik began his career as a shoe salesman and later moved up to selling used cars.
Deciding that the car business wasn't for him either, he took a job with Sierra Online in the QA department. As one of Sierra's testers for Half-Life, Erik spent a lot of time over at the Valve offices
and was eventually offered a job with Valve as shipping manager. Erik's responsibilities include localization, testing, managing the build process, creating demos, and shipping products.
Iikka Keranen
Level Designer
Having escaped (or been let loose?) from a secret bio-research lab in arctic Siberia, Iikka started to design and program games at an early age.
However, it wasn't until he began to create levels and mods for games like Doom and Quake that he became known to the world. He left the pack of wolves that had raised him and joined the game industry
in 1998 at ION Storm in Dallas, TX. After a few years and many adventures he found himself at Valve in 2001 and hasn't had the urge to bite people ever since.
Dave Kircher
Software Developer
Dave came to Valve as part of the team working on Portal shortly after his graduation from the DigiPen Institute of Technology in 2005. His
primary areas of work so far have been Portal physics, Portal graphical effects, and helping with Xbox 360 porting of the source engine. Even though Dave takes pride in his work when it's flawless, he
gets his affirmation that he's really in the games industry from the occasional 'breaks every game using the source engine' bug.
Eric Kirchmer
Artist
Eric has been an artist with Valve since 2002, in that time he has helped with the
visual design on projects such as Half Life2, Team Fortress 2, Day of Defeat and most recently Left 4 Dead 2. Originally from Southern California, after 10 years and a few thousand coffees, Eric now
calls the Pacific Northwest home.
Peter Konig
Artist
Peter is a concept artist, modeler and texture artist who joined Valve in 2009 and has since contributed to Left 4 Dead 2. Previously, he spent 20 years working in the film visual effects industry, the majority of that time at Tippett Studio in Berkeley California. During his special effects career, Peter has been a sculptor, animator, animation supervisor, concept artist and art director and has over 30 film and TV credits including Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey, Tales From the Crypt, Jurassic Park, Starship Troopers, Cloverfield, and Drag Me To Hell, to name a few. Peter was born with a prehensile tale, but had it removed at a young age, but not before appearing on the Mike Douglas TV show to show it off at the age of three.
Ted Kosmatka
Writer
Ted saved up to buy his first video game console at age twelve. He then immediately set out to write games for a living. This mostly involved having all his writing rejected, pursuing a biology degree, dropping out before graduation, and becoming a steel worker like his father and grandfather. Then the mill went bankrupt. After that he worked various lab jobs where friendships were born and fire departments were called. Eventually, Ted finished college and worked in a research lab with electron microscopes. Then came the final logical step: ditching all that to write video games. Ted’s fiction has been widely reprinted and nominated for both the Nebula and Theodore Sturgeon awards.
Alden Kroll
Designer
Alden has a habit of ending up in the middle of everything. If he isn't getting in the way of Steam game releases, then he is probably working on UI design
for Valve's games or the Steam store. Alden came to Valve after working on design and production for the Xbox 360 Dashboard. Prior to that, he spent his days studying design at the University of
Washington and working on various freelance design projects. Outside of work, Alden can usually be found chasing his competitive ambitions in cycling and swimming. Alden commutes to work by swimming
across Lake Washington every day. And on most weekends, he relaxes by riding his bike to Portland. Twice.
Marc Laidlaw
Writer
Marc Laidlaw joined Valve in 1997, bringing his experience as an author of weird fiction to bear on creating the Half-Life storyline. He was sole writer on Half-Life and Half-Life 2, and lead writer for the Half-Life 2 Episodes. As the writing team has expanded to include Erik Wolpaw, Chet Faliszek, Jay Pinkerton and Ted Kosmatka, Laidlaw remains the lead writer of emails declining to supply information about the G-Man. His novels include Dad's Nuke, Neon Lotus, Kalifornia, The Orchid Eater, and the award-winning The 37th Mandala, as well as The Third Force: A Novel of Gadget.
www.marclaidlaw.com
Jeff Lane
Level Designer
Jeff started his career doing graphic design for the print industry. In a series of leaps and
bounds over more than 12 years, he moved into doing graphics for video projects, then graphics for commercial multimedia, and finally graphics for games. He hasn't looked back since. After creating 3D
art at Hyperbole Studios on their Quantum Gate interactive movie projects, he spent five years at Sierra Studios, where he worked as an Art Director on Phantasmagoria 2 and, recently, as a Level Designer
for SWAT3: CQB before coming to Valve.
Tom Leonard
Software Developer
Immediately prior to joining Valve, Tom was the CTO of Buzzpad, Inc. Before that, he spent five years at Looking Glass Studios, where he was
notably the lead programmer of Thief: The Dark Project, writing the AI and core architecture for the game. Tom also had spent seven years working on C++ development tools at Zortech and Symantech.
Doug Lombardi
VP of Marketing
After years in the music industry, Doug decided to get a real job. Then he came
to his senses and made the decision to get into the gaming industry instead. During his time in gaming, he has worked on the launch of websites, magazines, and games. As VP of Marketing at Valve, he
helps manage and coordinate third-party relations, marketing and press activities.
Realm Lovejoy
2D and 3D Artist
Realm grew up in the snowy mountains of Nagano, Japan, later moving to the state of Washington. Her father is a Japanese ex-monk and her mother
an English teacher from Rhode Island. Interested in the future of visual story-telling, she went to DigiPen Institute of Technology, got an AAA in 3D Computer Animation, and created the student project
Narbacular Drop with her team. She interned at Nintendo Software Technology before moving on to Valve Software to become a member of the Portal team. Now, she works on videogames full-time
and spends her free time writing and illustrating.
Randy Lundeen
Level Designer / Graphic Designer
Randy comes to Valve by way of Microsoft, where he worked as an
interface designer for the Internet Gaming Zone. Randy designs some of the most unusual and original levels in the company, and he also is the most likely person to be pushing the polygon and memory
limits of our engine. In his distant past, he was a key staff member at a potato processing plant (his responsibilities including peeling and potato quality oversight).
Scott Lynch
Chief Operating Officer
Prior to joining Valve, Scott was Senior Vice President at Havas Interactive
where he created and managed the Sierra Studios business unit publishing a number of products, including Half-Life. During his 5-year tenure at Sierra, Scott held a number of different positions in
business development, acquisitions, finance, investor relations, and product development. Before joining Sierra, Scott worked in the public accounting industry at Coopers and Lybrand where he worked in
both the audit and tax departments managing a range of clients from small start-ups to Fortune 500 companies. Scott is a graduate of the University of Washington Business School with a concentration in
accounting and is an inactive certified public accountant in the state of Washington.
Ido Magal
Level Design
In 2001, Ido joined Valve to do art and design levels. He also enjoys photography, foreign films, and advising the President about issues of national importance.
John McCaskey
Software Developer
Prior to joining Valve, John spent his post college graduate years at a struggling Web 2.0 startup, lured in by the illusion of stock option riches. Since arriving at Valve, he's landed on the Steam team and has worked on a little bit of everything from Shopping Carts to the in-game Overlay. His favorite thing about being at Valve is having a huge energetic user base that benefits from the work we do on Steam.
Hamish McKenzie
Technical Artist
What do you get when you give a really lazy animator a computer science class (many, many years ago)? A whole bunch of buttons that make
being an animator just a little bit less tedious — or at least so he likes to think. Hamish has worked in both games and film in both the US and Australia, and pretty much loves making stuff move — and
pressing buttons.
Gary McTaggart
Software Developer
Gary left the University of Florida in 1995 to pursue a career in
programming at 3Dfx Interactive as employee number 11. While there, he created demos that were used to show the potential of Voodoo Graphics hardware. The most notable of these demos are the Valley of Ra
and Wizard's Tower. Additionally Gary worked as developer support for other game companies wanting to get the most out of 3dfx's hardware. Gary left 3Dfx with Charlie Brown for a short stint at Ritual
Entertainment. After working at Ritual, Gary and Charlie decided to start a new company and do contract work for Electronic Arts. Later, Gary decided that Valve would be the ideal place for him to be
able to work on great games and technology without having to worry about the day-to-day operations of a business.
Sergiy Migdalskiy
Software Developer
A bit of an odd-ball, Sergiy joined Valve to do weird low-level stuff and squeeze more blood... um, juice out of the silicone in your gaming machines. Sergiy specializes in systems programming, physics, and applied math. According to him, some games pretend to be simulating physicsy-looking motion somewhat resembling of physics. He made the physics engine behind Uncharted: Drake's Fortune during his tenure in Naughty Dog, the animation system in Far Cry during his lazy years at Crytek, and some other odd jobs here and there – the list is long, boring, and mostly lost in the eons passed.
Jason Mitchell
Software Developer
After eight years leading ATI's 3D Application Research Group, Jason was finally seduced by the entertainment industry and is now putting his 3D graphics hardware knowledge to use on just about every project at Valve. Jason frequently publishes on a variety of topics in real-time rendering and periodically speaks at graphics and game development conferences around the world. While joining Valve has significantly cut down on Jason's international jet-setting, he's still your man if you're looking for a stuporous late night Tokyo karaoke escapade.
http://www.pixelmaven.com/jason/
Mike Morasky
Composer
Morasky's life and career looks alot like one of the post-modern audio collages he is so fond of creating. Guitar player in a full-time bar band in
Montana as a teen, award winning experimental composer in Tokyo, audio hardware programmer in Sillicon Valley, underground art rocker touring the world, 3d animator and director for television,
electronic audio collage artist in France and Japan, visual fx artist on the Lord of the Rings and Matrix Trilogies, AI animation instructor at an art college and currently he is applying some
combination of all these things to games at Valve.
John Morello II
Animator
John came to Valve via the MOD community as lead animator and designer on Day of Defeat in 2002. During business hours John can be found locked in a soundproof office called the "Temple of Volcanohead" so as not to disturb the neighborhood during internal playtests. In conjunction he is paid in mice to replace the ones he’s pulverized.
Bryn Moslow
Network Administrator
Known as "The Man" by those that know him as The Man and "Who?" by most everyone else, Bryn's life has been usurped by the machines. He
started on Usenet and IRC from a DEC VAX terminal when Usenet and IRC were useful and may be one of the last people on Earth with a VAXstation still running Ultrix. He and his friend Al built the
Internet together but he became disgruntled and left to be a Rock Star when Al took all the credit for it. When the whole Rock Star thing didn't pan out he found himself once again a keyboard-pounding
monkey. In the few odd hours he isn't cursing incoherently while facing Redmond he can often be found doing horrible things to his neighbors with a heavily modded Marshall JCM 900 and one of his flock
of Telecasters and wondering when the whole Internet fad is going to finally die so he can have a life again.
Marc Nagel
Quality Assurance
Marc started playing games at an early age and then began his career in games as a Game Counselor at Nintendo of America at 19 years old. After
years of helping people play games, he wanted to be a part of creating them. After gaining some experience as a tester, he ended up at Sierra Entertainment for 6 years as a Test Lead – the highlight, of
course, being the lead on the Half-Life series for 3.5 years as well as the lead on Opposing Forces, Half-Life PS2, Counter-Strike, Blue Shift and many patches, to name a few. After Sierra shut down, he
went to work for Microsoft in IT. Then, EJ kicked him – hard. Now he’s back in the world of the living making sure the Zombie you kill blows up real good.
Arsenio Navarro
Merchandising/The Valve Store
Here by way of the Bay Area (and West Virginia if you go really far back), Arsenio has achieved bliss managing the online Valve Store and working with artists, vendors, and licensees to create retail merchandise. In his spare time, he designs Team Fortress 2 shirts that the legal department will not let out of the building.
Dina Nelson
Human Resources
With a degree in human rehabilitation and a diverse professional background, Dina brings a unique perspective to her role in HR at Valve. She loves helping passionate, talented people succeed. Intensely curious, she has many interests and is an unapologetic foodie. That's right, now you know where to find her on Top Chef night.
Gabe Newell
Founder/Managing Director
Gabe held a number of positions in the Systems, Applications, and Advanced
Technology divisions during his 13 years at Microsoft. His responsibilities included running program management for the first two releases of Windows, starting the companys multimedia division, and, most
recently, leading the companys efforts on the Information Highway PC. His most significant contribution to Half-Life was his statement "Cmon, people, you cant show the player a really big bomb and not
let them blow it up."
Aaron Nicholls
Software Developer
Things started well enough for Aaron Nicholls. Born into a loving family, he showed tremendous promise until he discovered computers and moments later, video games. From that point on, Aaron dedicated much of his youth to either playing video games or programming them. After college, he joined Microsoft’s Windows division, where he worked until he discovered that MS had a games division and promptly moved there. Over the next several years, Aaron lived a double life as manager/coder, working on Gears of War, Halo 3, and Jade Empire, among other games. At Valve, Aaron enjoys jumping between gameplay, design, and system work. In his spare time, Aaron runs, climbs, travels, reads, and cooks, although not simultaneously.
Martin Otten
Software Developer
Martin comes to us from Germany where he attended Dortmund University earning a masters degree in computer science. He is best known for
programming Argus (for Quake) and Half-Life TV (as a contractor for Valve). Since arriving in Washington, Martin has lost all four hubcaps on his Volkswagen and has single-handedly stopped Seattle
traffic by walking across the street in a bath robe while sipping a white Russian. Not bad for a "poor German boy." Martin also enjoys listening to the band Manowar since, after all, some bands play but
Manowar kills.
Karen Prell
Animator
Karen grew up near Seattle and embarked on her first career as a puppeteer in 1980, well before some of her Valve co-workers were born. She performed
popular puppet characters on many well-known film and television productions throughout the 1980’s and 90’s. Her second career as a computer animator included work on the award-winning Pixar shorts
Geri’s Game and For the Birds as well as A Bug’s Life and Toy Story 2. She is now diving headfirst into a third career in the video game industry at Valve by doing development work, animating and honing
her n00b skillz by blasting portals and battling zombies. Karen continues to do occasional puppet performances and enjoys yoga, kayaking, biking, exploring the beautiful Northwest and telling people that
her Wii Fit age is the one that really matters.
http://www.karenprell.com/
Matt Pritchard
Software Developer
Arriving in Seattle from Michigan via a 25-year detour in Texas, Matt is a veteran programmer with 15+ years experience in the game industry. Self taught beginning at age 11, his first published games were released for the Atari 800 in 1982. After a long career detour, Matt rejoined the game industry in 1996 and was instrumental in developing the Age of Empires game series. Matt's enjoying life in the Pacific NorthWest, and when he's not working on various projects at Valve he can be found enjoying local activities and hanging out with his children.
Bay Raitt
Artist / Tool Designer
Before joining Valve, Bay lead the creation of Gollum's facial system for The Lord of the Rings trilogy. He has worked as a concept artist and sculptor at the Weta workshop and helped setup the creature pipeline at Weta Digital in New Zealand. Prior to moving down under, Bay was the product manager for the 3D modeling and animation tools Mirai and Nendo. Bay started his career working for Olyoptics as a colorist for early issues of Spawn, The Pitt and The Maxx for Image Comics. These days, Bay is getting used to being back in America by racing his ATV around in the woods of the pacific northwest looking for werewolves.
Alireza Razmpoosh
Visual Effects Artist
After moving to Canada (via Iran and Turkey, at the age of 9), Alireza's first impressions of the west were the films TRON, Die Hard, and Lawnmower Man. Inspired by this triad of Action, Art, and Science he set out on his new career path in 3D animations and visual effects. After earning his BA and post-grad degree in Animation from Sheridan Institute of Technology, Ali started on his first film in London at the age of 24. He now works at Valve driving the effort to transform visual effects into a dynamic interactive experience – oh, and blowing stuff up.
Brandon Reinhart
Software Developer
Brandon Reinhart started his career in the game industry in 1998 at Epic Games where he was a gameplay programmer on Unreal Tournament. He also spent several years at 3D Realms, Sony Online Entertainment, and Spacetime Studios working on Duke Nukem Forever, Star Wars Galaxies, and Blackstar. Brandon joined Valve in 2008 and intends to spend the rest of his life working here.
Alfred Reynolds
Software Developer
Alfred joined Valve as a software engineer in 2002. Since his arrival, he has contributed to the development of Counter-Strike, Half-Life
2, and Steam. He also does his best to maintain the Linux ports of our games. Most recently, he lead the Steam development efforts to bring third party applications to the leading online distribution
platform. Prior to his arrival at Valve Alfred worked for an Australian research organization and would be forced to kill anyone who discovered the true nature of his work there. He was also to blame for
starting plugins on Half-Life servers, in particular creating Admin Mod.
Matthew Rhoten
Engineer
Matt came to Valve from Microsoft, where he worked on stuff ranging from UI to device drivers. Like many members of the Steam team he is a generalist,
and genuinely finds just about everything interesting given enough thought. In his spare time, he enjoys hanging out with his family, and learning new things via serially acquired hobbies.
Dave Riller
Game Designer
Dave started working on games in his spare time during the days of Doom and Quake. After catching the eye of Valve, Dave was lured from the east coast to work on Half-Life. Having added code writing to his bag of tricks, Dave now works tirelessly to improve the experience of every single die hard TF2 fan – that’s right, you know who you are. It’s all for you.
Matthew Russell
Animator
Before coming to Valve, Matthew was with DNA Productions for 7 1/2 years. Starting with DNA on the Emmy nominated "Olive the Other Reindeer",
Matthew went on to be a character animator and supervising animator on the Academy Award nominated "Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius." Later he spent 2 1/2 seasons as a supervising animator on "The
Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius" before moving on to lead animator for the feature, "The Ant Bully," from DNA Productions and Warner Bros. Matthew is also an instructor for
AnimationMentor. He also likes balloons, pony rides and fruity drinks with the little umbrellas on top.
David Sawyer
Level Designer
David makes cool levels that you love to play. That is all.
Chris Shambaugh
Designer
Chris studied fine art, filmmaking and design at a mid-western liberal arts university way back in the 1980's. While it's possible he is actually good at whatever it is he does here at Valve, he remains convinced that he wouldn't be nearly as successful had it not been for the excellent people he's had the pleasure to work with along the way. In his spare time Chris is studying to be a Ninja.
Taylor Sherman
Engineer
Taylor joined Valve in 2001 to help develop Steam, and has been part of that team ever since. His previous experience ranges from DVD emulation to air combat simulators for the military. Taylor has a Bachelor's in electrical engineering from The Cooper Union. When he's not working, he can usually be found rehearsing or playing guitar with the Tuning The Air ensemble here in Seattle.
http://www.tuningtheair.com
Eric Smith
Software Developer
Eric joined Valve in 2000 after graduating from the DigiPen Institute of Technology in
Redmond, WA. Prior to attending DigiPen, Eric worked for Nintendo of America. When DigiPen opened its doors in the U.S. in January 1998, Eric saw an opportunity to change careers and make games instead
of just play them.
David Speyrer
Software Developer
Prior to joining Valve in 1999, David developed telecommunications software in
Boulder, Colorado. During his time at Valve he has been a programmer/designer and cabal lead on Half-Life 2 and Episode Two. He has also worked quite a lot on the dreaded Hammer level editor over the
years. A fan of recreational physical suffering, David goes rock climbing in his spare time and has dragged many a pale and shaking Valve employee on adventures in vertiginous terror.
Kutta Srinivasan
Software Developer
After getting his B.S. from Caltech, Kutta decided that making video games for a living was probably the next best thing to playing them
all day in his dorm room. He joined Microsoft at the age of 19 where he worked on Xbox & Xbox 360 games (Gears of War, Halo 3, Mass Effect, Lost Odyssey, Crackdown, Fable 2), interrupted by a stint in
the DirectX team working on DirectX 9 & 10 shader technologies. Now he's a systems and game programmer at Valve working on whatever happens to strike his fancy. When he's not coding, sleeping, or
cooking, Kutta spends his spare time climbing rocks, riding bikes, and snowboarding off of things he really ought not to.
Jay Stelly
Software Developer
Jay joined Valve from Tetragon where he was lead engineer and 3D engine developer of
Virgin's Nanotek Warrior. Before that, he developed titles for Sony Playstation & 3DO. Way before that, he wrote his first computer game (at age 9) and had a game published in a magazine (at age 15). A
native of Cajun Country, Jay finds Northwest buildings too hot (what, no air conditioning?) and the food not hot enough.
Ryan Thorlakson
Gameplay/AI Programmer
Ryan has a lifelong passion for game programming and design. He graduated as valedictorian from DigiPen Institute of Technology in 2006. He then worked for Snowblind Studios on Justice League Heroes and other projects. He took a nine month break from the "real world" to create Light's End on Xbox Live Indie Games. Ryan is now working for Valve and amazing his coworkers with his utter ignorance of '80s pop culture.
Kelly Thornton
Sound Engineer
Kelly arrived at Valve via the Half-Life mod community. While earning a Masters degree in Business at UM-St. Louis, he helped develop and did
sound work for Day of Defeat. Seeing video game development and sound engineering as the obvious natural progression to come out of an MBA and an undergrad degree in biology, he packed his things and
headed west to Valve. Today, you can find him in his office surrounded by WWII books and memorabilia with a fat pair of headphones on, wondering how in the world he actually landed a job he loves doing.
Alex Vlachos
Engineer
Alex focuses on graphics programming and shader development at Valve. Previously he was Lead Visual Effects Programmer at Naughty Dog during development of Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, Lead Programmer on ATI’s Demo Team, and was a software developer for the SpaceOrb 360. Alex is a graduate of Boston University.
http://alex.vlachos.com
Robin Walker
Software Developer
Robin Walker co-wrote the hugely popular Quake mod Team Fortress, before being
assimilated when Valve acquired Team Fortress Software. Since that time, he has been responsible for design, code, and management on various Valve products.
Josh Weier
Software Developer
Hailing from Wisconsin, where he worked on multiple FPS titles with Raven Software, Josh now finds himself in the ever-raining Seattle. But at
least it doesn't snow. Most of his days are spent holed up in an office with Steve Bond designing new encounters, creating special effects, and using his whiteboard as a canvas for a wide variety of
strange and badly drawn characters. Don't get him started about "treasure games" and be sure to make fun of how young he is, because he really gets a kick out of it.
Erik Wolpaw
Writer
Erik Wolpaw's father attended Yale, became a successful lawyer, got disbarred, lost everything, and went to jail for a while. Later, he and Erik lived in a
horrible ghetto apartment where Erik used the Yale Alumni magazine to smash cockroaches. From this inauspicious start, Erik eventually went on to not graduate high school. Now he writes dialog for video
games such as Psychonauts and Portal. Prior to that he was a freelance writer and before that he co-founded Old Man Murray. It's not like he's a surgeon or anything, but it's not too bad,
considering.
Doug Wood
Animator
Doug joined Valve in 1997 and has been working on the Half-Life series ever since. Before Valve, Doug worked at 3Drealms where he worked on Duke-Nukem 3D and
Prey. He has been working in the gaming industry since 1994.
Matt T. Wood
Level Designer
Matt found his passion for making games by way of creating maps for Doom and Duke Nukem 3D. In 1997 he was hired by 3D Realms Entertainment to work as
the lead level designer on their first full 3d game Prey (after the original team left). He later moved onto 3D Realms's Duke Nukem Forever as a level designer at first and soon transitioned into lead
modeler/animator. At Valve, Matt is again back to level design where he (among other things) works with the 'choreo' team designing and creating scripted scenes for the Half-Life universe.
Matt Wright
3D Artist
Matt has come to Valve after studying Industrial Design, and working in the film visual effects industry for a number of years both in his home country of England, and in the States. He was responsible for environmental models on 11 feature films, including Harry Potter, Daredevil and Master and Commander. Matt has a great love or architecture, which shows through in his work. At Valve he is responsible for creating 3d environment models, props and objects on the Half Life 2 series, DoD, TF, Counterstrike and Left4Dead. Away from the computer, Matt enjoys hanging out with his wife Danika, son Drake, and has got himself addicted to cooking and food photography which he blogs at
www.mattikaarts.com
Danika Wright
3D Artist
Danika comes from the film visual effects industry in L.A. There she created 3D environments for 5 feature films, including Master and Commander, Day After Tomorrow, and X-Men 2. As part of the Valve team she is responsible for creating environment models and props for games such as HL2, TF, DoD and Counterstrike. Outside of Valve she enjoys drawing, recreating Seattle architecture in 3d and spending time with her husband Matt and son Drake. You can find out about Danika's and her husbands personal 3d work at
www.mattikaarts.com.
Shawn Zabecki
Designer
Shawn joined Valve in 2007, after a long stint being well-raised by the best mom ever, his mom. Shawn's job is designing and implementing the Steam user experience, and he's terrific at it. At Valve, everyone's terrific at their job though, so big whoop. What we all marvel at, however, is how polite and well-groomed Shawn is. People passing through the lunchroom sometimes just stop and stare at his supernaturally excellent table manners. It's like working with David Niven. Shawn is very helpful and clever, and everyone likes him. He's doing real good, Mrs. Zabecki.
Torsten Zabka
Localizations
Torsten coordinates Valves text localizations as Steam Translation Administrator ensuring that thousands of our customers and partners around the globe think we actually have offices in Germany, Spain, Russia and France just to name a few.
Zoid
Developer
Zoid (yes, just Zoid - like Cher) really came up on the radar shortly after Quake was released. He made a modification called Threewave Capture the Flag that people seemed to really enjoy. It is mostly all his fault that most multiplayer first person games seem to include a capture the flag gameplay mode - mostly. Moving on after capturing far too many flags, he joined Retro Studios where he helped develop Metroid Prime and its sequels for the Gamecube. After a two year stint working on an MMO game for Carbine Studios, he decided to get back to his roots and join the team at Valve.
