Chris - "Half-Life: Short Stories - who came up with the idea for this and what was the driving factor behind setting it up?"

Yorick: It was actually Heppa who came up with the idea, and I've often kicked myself for never actually having thought of it, because it's so damn brilliant for a mod. We always wanted to tell stories, Samon and I, but they often ended up being too ambitious for mods. I was pretty close to giving up on modding and sticking with fiction, when he and Heppa got this thing rolling. The opportunity to tell a whole set of small stories was just too perfect to pass up.

Samon: His original idea was to provide small, concentrated Episodes in the Half-life universe and it happened to coincide with something Yorick and I had been discussing at the time. The idea of a series of episodes played from different perspectives and connected by an overall storyline was something we were very interested in getting into. So when he proposed to combine the two projects we jumped on it.

Au-heppa: Now that I think of it the original idea wasn't so specific. Mostly I just wanted to create a mod with several different characters with different perspectives. This is basically why I chose a Civil Protection player character.

I also wanted to create new NPCs, to have a bigger variation of NPCs to use. I really love creating new NPCs in Source, not just design them, but to create all the different parts. See the creature come alive... and then shoot them...

But there wasn't any firm story in my head at first. At one point the idea I had was a bit like Smod, but instead of new weapons and so on, I would have new NPCs. But no real story. That changed kind of quickly when I joined with Samon and Yorick.