GDC Adventures: Part II: Embarassment, Gabe Newell, Urban, and Sexiest Man Ever!
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
I was walking around the IGF games, looking and playing a few. I peek my head one of the monitors, and watch someone play Flipside for a bit. It’s a silly game, and it was making some loud noises. People were interviewing the creators of Iron Dukes, and asked us to turn it down. I botched my roll in intelligence and dexterity and pressed the contrast lower button on the monitor to try to turn down the volume, which brought up a menu dialog on the screen. When really I should have just turned the knob down on the speakers. I got all embarrassed and looked at the person playing and was like ‘oops, sorry..’ when my heart stopped. Who was playing the game?
GABE NEWELL.
He was giving the game a shot, because it’s a HL2 mod. I just froze and choked.
He stopped playing and turned to the creator of the game, shook the guys hand and said “Hi, I’m Gabe Newell.”
…the person had no idea who that was, and just replied with a bored “Hi.” Perhaps he didn’t know who he was, because he was Danish? Delicious.
“Everyone at Valve has been talking about it,” says Gabe. Still, crickets.
“Cool.” Wow. No idea. How funny is that…
So after Gabe walked away, I had to say something so I chased him down. Aaron walked up right at that moment. I stopped Gabe and introduced myself, and explained about EndgameRadio. I told him about the incident where Urban was in HL2. (THE PIX ARE DOWN, URB, MAKE IT WORK AHURR HURRRRRR :_:) and then also where we all deemed him the sexiest man alive. He was a good sport and said we should talk to Lombardi and get some interviews with Valve employees. I made sure to thank him for being radical and doing radical things. I didn’t want to take up too much of his time, so we let him go check out more games. For as big a deal as we’ve made him, and as much as I thought I’d be star struck upon ever actually getting to meet him, I was somewhat surprised I grew balls and talked to him.
It was kind of one of the most awesome things that happened to me ever. In all seriousness, it was really awesome to be able to tell him how rad I think he is, despite the teasing we gave him in the past.
