There are always people on the Internet who use a famous saying said by legendary Nintendo producer Shigeru Miyamoto: "A game that is delayed will eventually be a good game, but a game that is rushed will always be bad." But this sentence is not actually said by Miyamoto. However, Valve boss Gabe Newell clearly agrees with this view. Considering that G Fat can be said to be a legend of game delays (cannot count to 3), in the 25th anniversary documentary of the "Half-Life" series newly released by Valve, he repeated this sentence in his own words.
The game delay came up during a discussion about Valve's early struggles with the Half-Life project. The game was originally scheduled to be released in November 1997, but a few months before release, the team realized that the game was not as good as it could be: it did include interesting ideas and some parts, but overall it was "not interesting enough".
Valve engineers recalled in the documentary: "There were still three months before the release in 1997, and we felt that the game had not yet taken shape. The situation was very bad. The game felt like a quick imitation, a money grab, and stupid. We didn't want to do that."
"There's a big disconnect between what all the different teams are doing, what the engineers are doing, what level design is doing, and what the animation department is doing. We have a bunch of monsters that are not planned to be in the game because no one else is assigned to develop them, and we have a lot of levels where it's like, what should go here? I don't know. Everybody does this kind of thing all the time. But, no, that's not the normal way to work."
According to Valve co-founder Mike Harrington, the studio and the game's publisher Sierra had a "tight schedule" at the time, but ultimately decided to postpone the game: "We told them we were not going to release the game. We realized that you (Sierra) were not going to give us money to continue development, but we were going to do it anyway."
Then Gabe chimed in with a quip that he may have inspired by "Shigeru Miyamoto's" quote: "Delays are temporary, but bad (games) are permanent." He continued: "We can try to make this game the exception, but that's not the company we want to be, that's not the person we want to be. That's not the relationship we want to have with our customers."
In fact, the documentary mainly focuses on the production process of "Half-Life", but in addition to the above comments about the game's delay, G Fat also shared his thoughts on "reality/realism" in the game, and it is clear that he does not care about this element.
"When you go into design reviews, there's always people who say, 'That's not realistic,'" he says. "And you're like, 'So what?' What's the point—like, let me explain why that [reality] is fun. Because in the real world, I have to make a list of what I'm going to buy at the grocery store. And I've never thought of realism as being fun... I just play games for fun."