PC Gamer: You were talking before about how it was an intentionally hard mod, it was kind of like a puzzle that you would keep trying again and again and again. PC Gamer: So when they asked, was there a unanimous yes? I was in the UK, Ivan was in Switzerland, Simon was in Australia, so we were just working on the internet at the time. Yeah, so we worked on that but when we showed the game to Valve they were so impressed that they said, “Come work for us.” And so that changed all of our plans.ĭoug Lombardi (Valve marketing director): Where were you all when you were Black Cat?

This was our attempt to to what we were doing as a full time job, rather than as a hobby. When Valve contacted us and asked us to move the game to the Source engine, one of the reasons we said yes was because we had this path with Source where we could actually release as a standalone game. Jonathan Sutton: We built the Unreal version and that was great and fun, but obviously we couldn't make any money off it, we couldn't do it full time because you can't sell a mod. PC Gamer: And that was going to be retail, wasn't it? PC Gamer: Before you joined Valve you were working on a Source version already, right? So it'll monitor your performance and if you're blasting through it'll say, “Why not turn the difficulty up?” And the game will actually recommend a difficulty level that has you retrying a few times, because if you just blast through every mission in one go, you're not really doing the puzzle. They were still hard for them, like it's easy for us, but it's still hard for them. With Valve there's a bigger spread of people, and we were able to make the game work for more people by having lower difficulty levels. I suppose the original mod, when we tested it, was with a lot of hardcore gamers.

Jonathan Sutton: Yeah, it wasn't intentional, it was more that happened from the play testing. PC Gamer: So obviously you decided to make it easier, what was the thinking there? It's that last run when you just make it through and you've done all the right things, and all of you work together as a team, is the highest high in Alien Swarm. You're meant to change your load-out, you're meant to change the position of your guys in each of the rooms, until you find this solution that you then have to execute perfectly. Jonathan Sutton: Absolutely, the game is set out like a puzzle where you have to figure out, “What do I use where to get through this mission?” And you're meant to replay it and try different things. It seemed like the original mod was intentionally hard.

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