Codename:Gordon

Codename:Gordon ... what can I say this is a sentimental favorite of mine. Since I played Super Mario on my GameBoy as a small child I always wanted to make a 2D jump and run game. When I met Paul "X-Tender" Kamma in Braunschweig and saw how well versed he was with flash I asked him if he could write a simple jump and run engine for me. He volunteered to write the entire game instead we had big struggles at first deciding on the theme of the game but we quickly new we wanted the gameplay to be in the vein of "Prince of Persia", "Flashback", "Another World" and "Abes Oddysee". roughly a week later the first Half-Life 2 videos got released after that enigmatic crowbar teaser shot in Edge magazine. Paul and me being huge Half-Life fans we could barely contain ourselves and pretty much in sync we both said "I know what the theme of our game is going to be". Of course it was a risky situation using the intellectual property from someone else and really we stretched the term "mod" here to its fullest extend. We generated an overwhelming amount of interest in the community with the release of a teaser screenshot which kept us pushing forward with this title. At the "Games-Convention" in Leipzig we showed a playable prototype of the game to people at Vivendi who we figured would own the Half-Life ip. they said that they liked it but we would have to take it to valve since they own all the rights and are basically completely independent from Vivendi. So we prepared a pitch package that we send to valve including a disc with playable prototype a "life-size" pixelated Gordon cardboard-cutout and several other goodies. The people at valve seamed to love it and gave us the official "go" to continue development ... that was a huge relieve. In the following weeks they bombarded us with feature requests like reload animations a usable flashlight and more accuracy when it came to the enemy sprites. For the later they provided us with character sheets and ingame screenshots of all sorts of "Half-Life 2" assets. Stuff that wasn't publicly available yet ... Paul and I were excited beyond measure to get all this exclusive inside look into Half-Life 2 and all the trust valve put into us giving us all this material without having to sign any NDAs or similiar. Eventually the game got released on steam and got downloaded over a million times during the first month. The only thing I regret is that we could not figure out a way to enable hardware acceleration for flash so the entire game depended on the CPU which lead to low frame-rate for a lot of people.