The Origin of “Cake”: Rock, Paper, Shotgun Interviews Valve Writer, Erik Wolpaw
By Jonathan on Wednesday, October 31st, 2007 at 3:38 PM PST In Computer, Gamer Life, Games, Games Industry, Half-Life, Microsoft, Sony, Valve
There’s a hilarious interview over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun right now with Erik Wolpaw, co-writer of Psychonauts and writer or Portal. As you might expect, he’s a pretty funny guy even when he’s not behind the writing desk. In the interview, he gives a great explanation for how they came up with the “cake” in Portal:
“Well, there are lots of message games coming out now. Like they’ve got something really important to get off their chest about the war in Iraq or the player is forced to make some dicey underwater moral choices. Really, just a whole heck of a lot of stuff to think about. With that in mind, at the beginning of the Portal development process, we sat down as a group to decide what philosopher or school of philosophy our game would be based on. That was followed by about fifteen minutes of silence and then someone mentioned that a lot of people like cake.”
Not to mention his take on why the “Weighted Companion Cube” has become so popular with fans:
“That was all our project lead, Kim Swift. It was her idea to put a heart on it. Boom - instantly likeable.”
It’s really a hilarious interview and definitely worth a read. You can check out the whole thing here.
“If you think reading a book is hard, you should try writing one. Because it’s even harder. It’s still not as hard as writing a game, though. If you discount the purely visual pop-up parts, a book is made almost entirely of words. ”
Dear God, I love this man.
The man is a genius.