Famed Nintendo director Shigeru Miyamoto once said, as the story goes, “Delayed play will end up being good, but rushed play will end up being bad.” Did he really say those words? Most likely no. But Valve founder Gabe Newell shares this opinion. He stated this quite openly in a new documentary dedicated to the 25th anniversary of Half-Life, which was released on YouTube.
The topic was brought up in a segment discussing Valve’s early problems with Half-Life. The game was supposed to be released in November 1997, but a few months before that the team realized that it was not working, the game had interesting ideas and individual segments, but overall it “wasn’t interesting yet.”
According to Valve co-founder Mike Harrington, the studio had a “tight schedule” with publisher Sierra, but ultimately decided to shelve the game anyway: “And we told them, ‘We’re not going to release it. And we understand that you won’t pay us to continue development, but we will do it anyway.”
And then Gabe got to the point with his possibly Miyamoto-inspired saying:
“Delay is short term. Suck is forever,” he said. “We could try to force it all out the door, but it wouldn’t be the company we want to be, it wouldn’t be the people we want to be. It wouldn’t be the relationship we want to build with our customers.”
The documentary mainly focuses on the making of Half-Life, but there are other similar nuggets of wisdom to be found throughout the documentary. Newell, for example, shared his thoughts on “realism” in video games, which he apparently doesn’t have enough time for.
“You’d be sitting in a design discussion and someone would say, ‘That’s not realistic,'” Newell says. “And you’d be like, ‘Okay?’ What does this mean – explain to me why this is interesting? Because in the real world, I have to make lists of what I should buy at the grocery store. And I never thought realism was fun. I play games to have fun.”
It’s talk like this that makes us wish Valve would stop their weird hardware experiments and get back to making new games. For now, we’ll just have to settle for the fact that the company has done a lot of work on one of its older games: Half-Life, Valve’s very first game, received a major update yesterday to celebrate its 25th anniversary, and it’s available on Steam for free until November 20 .
