For my Left 4 Dead 2 game review, I had an itch to write the whole thing about Kim Swift instead. I recognized her as soon as she sat next to me in Valve Software’s Bellevue testing room—ooh, ooh! I giggled to myself. I was sitting next to one of the creators of Portal, my fave game of the ’00s! It’s not often I get to kill zombies with a genius quite like that.
More to the point, I’d read her articles about that classic game, and I admired her forthrightness about the development process. In her short tenure in the industry, she has consistently served as ambassador for the new wave of high-impact games, whether by design, innovation, or sheer fun.
Swift has since packed up her Valve bags and taken a job at Redmond studio Airtight Games, and as a Valve postscript, an interview with Swift posted at Eurogamer today gets her right.
The interview is a bit insider-baseball when it comes to games, but the Portal story is a fun one—and Seattle-homegrown, no less. Check it out.
Games seem to be split into two categories. Either they’re kids’ games and have a low production bar and don’t have a lot there for adults to have fun with. Or they’re a big budget game with a lot of substance but a lot of violence that isn’t appropriate for kids. I think there’s a happy medium in between where there’s a little bit of something for everyone, like a good Pixar film.
