HalfLife 2 developer eyes off Wii

Mike Bantick
Tuesday, 26 February 2008 10:38

Your IT - Entertainment

Developer Valve, creator of HalfLife and Portal would like to bring some of their expertise to the Nintendo Wii.

Speaking at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Doug Lombardi from Valve expressed a desire to get more involved with gaming consoles.

Long known for there fantastic offerings on the PC, with the HalfLife series amongst others Lombadi has confirmed that the upcoming zombie battling game Left 4 Dead will be only available on PC and Xbox 360, and that the Wii was an intriguing target to tackle next.

Speaking to videogaming247.com ; “We were really crappy at bringing games to consoles,” Lombardi said. He cited the time it took to move the original Half-Life games to console formats as an example of how the company had come “really late” to console development. He said that while the focus had always been on PC, the company had now moved up a gear to produce games simultaneously on Xbox 360 and PC, but that it had limited interest in developing for Playstation 3.

“EA wanted to do Orange Box on PS3 and they handled it,” said Lombardi. “Left 4 Dead isn’t coming out on PS3 because we’ve not had that call. If the phone rang we would have the conversation, certainly, but it hasn’t happened.”

But what of the Nintendo Wii?

“If Valve were to develop in-house for another format, it would be the Wii. It’s growing, there’s already a huge user-base, and it’s fun. Source [Valve’s main development engine] is really scaleable. We can do that.” he said.