The Valve team

Mike Ambinder - UX Design
Mike has a B.A. in Computer Science and Psychology from Yale and a PhD in Psychology from the University of Illinois. His job description is vague, but he thinks it probably has something to do with applying both psychological knowledge and methodologies to game design. Essentially this means he gets to play with data, perform research, and act as an in-house consultant of sorts. He is really happy that you took the time read his paragraph.

Ted Backman - Conceptual Artist / Illustrator / Animator
Prior to joining Valve in the summer of 1996, Ted studied painting at the University of Washington. During his time at Valve, Ted has been responsible for designing and building many of the people, places and things that inhabit Black Mesa, City 17, and the outlying environments. A Seattle native, Ted finds drizzle comforting and insists Paynes grey is his favorite color.

Kelly Bailey - Sound / Music
Kelly is Valve's senior audio producer, responsible for creating sound effects & music.

Jeff Ballinger - Artist
Jeff's projects include Half-Life 2, Lost-Coast, Day of Defeat and Team Fortress 2. He is responsible for concepts, world textures, prototyping levels, architectural studies and model making. In addition to working on world environments you can find him sketching, modeling, and learning new art techniques.

Aaron Barber - Level Designer / 3D artist
While studying engineering at UCLA, Aaron got his first experience building 3d environments while constructing VRML websites for the University. During this time he was also actively involved in designing levels for Quake and Duke Nukem 3D with several internet mod groups. His level design eventually got him a position at Xatrix Entertainment working on titles such as Redneck Rampage, Quake 2, and Kingpin. After completing Kingpin, he took a senior design position at EA working on James Bond before coming to Valve. Outside the world of game and level design, Aaron also enjoys playing music locally around Seattle. www.nineteen5.com.

Jeep Barnett - Software Developer
Jeep quit his janitorial job at Fred Meyer to turn his programming hobby into a career. Jeep's love of video games (and fear of returning to a life of toilet scrubbing) drove him to earn a B.S. Degree from the DigiPen Institute of Technology. His Senior game project, Narbacular Drop, led to the team behind it joining Valve to create Portal.

Dan Berger - Software Developer
Prior to joining Valve, Dan shipped a bunch of products and consumer services and managed development teams - none of which was nearly as cool as what he's doing now. Despite his complete lack of game-industry qualifications - unless 20-odd years of pen-and-paper role-playing count - he made his save vs. interview and got invited to join the party. Dan works on Steam, happy to be back in a role where he's only responsible for his own mistakes.

Yahn Bernier - Software Developer
Yahn was an Atlanta patent lawyer with a degree in chemistry from Harvard. So obviously he ended up in Seattle developing computer games. He taught himself to program at the age of 12 and, more recently, developed what we at Valve have called "that other level editor," BSP. Now that he's getting paid to make games, he figures he'll practice law in his spare time (little does he know). Yahn worked on Half-Life's multiplayer code and is currently hard at work on Team Fortress 2. His favorite phrase, when imbibing too freely, is "Yucca will assimilate you."

Ken Birdwell - Software Developer
Ken interrupted his fine art studies to join Gabe at Valve as one of their first employees. With a background mostly in simulation and medical software, Ken's primary focus at Valve has been Animation software, and is responsible for most of the acting systems that underlie the characters in Half-Life 2. Ken is the only Valve employee to actually grow up here in Bellevue, and spends countless hours regaling his office mates with tales of what the town was like "when I was a boy".

Mike Blaszczak - Software Developer
Before coming to Valve, Mike spent 15 years at Microsoft working on products like Visual C++ and SQL Server. He has written several books, dozens of magazine articles, has applied for three patents, and presented at conferences for audiences of 15 to 1500 people. An avid motorsports enthusiast, Mike enjoys participating in automobile racing, floating around on his boat, and working on his house. In his spare time, Mike dabbles with distributed computing, studies large-scale databases, works on Steam, and poses for the covers of department store catalogs.

Steve Bond - Software Developer
Having made the great trek westward from Fort Walton Beach, Florida, Steve is responsible for much of Half-Life's sophisticated monster and entity behaviors, of which the squad-level AI is his favorite. Steve worked with John Guthrie on several projects that demonstrated the power and flexibility of the QuakeC development environment, which caught John Carmack's attention, who in turn referred him to us. Before that, Steve worked at a local internet service provider and delivered pizza, a fact that we rarely let him forget, even in his corporate bio.

Antoine Bourdon - French-speaking Community Support
Antoine comes from the heart of the Champagne region in France, where he majored in law and yet focused on his minor: computer science. After working as a contrator for a major Redmond-based software company supporting LiveMeeting, he started at Valve supporting the French community, localizing and leading the French Café program.

Charlie Brown - Software Developer
Charlie earned his reputation within the gaming industry while working for 3Dfx Interactive and, later, Ritual. A Ft. Walton Beach, Florida native, Charlie graduated from the University of Florida in the summer of 1994 and then headed for California and 3Dfx. His responsibilities there included developer support, ports of products to hardware, sample code and simple demos, and ultimately working with 3Dfx Developer Relations managing the engineering game porting effort. After a 2-year stint, Charlie left 3Dfx with college-friend Gary McTaggart to create the Uber(tm) Engine at Ritual Entertainment in Dallas, Texas. Shortly thereafter, Charlie and Gary left Ritual to start their own company. Valve subsequently contacted Charlie (and his friend Gary) with an offer "they couldn't refuse."

Dario Casali - Level Designer
Joining Valve from England, Dario is a world-famous level designer. His work includes some of the most popular deathmatch levels on the Internet, as well as Final Doom, published by id Software.

Greg Cherlin - Level Designer
Greg got his first taste of design making levels for the Descent community in 1997. He enjoys pesto, Richard Dawkins, blue cheese, and pwning newbs.

Jess Cliffe - Level Designer / Artist
Cliffe co-created the original Counter-Strike with Minh Le. Since joining Valve, he has worked on Counter-Strike: Source, Day of Defeat: Source, Half-Life 2: Deathmatch, Team Fortress 2, and Half-Life 2: Episode Two levels. In his spare time, Cliffe enjoys photographing concrete walls, rust stains, and his two cats.

Phil Co - Level Designer
Phil Co graduated from the University of Virginia School of Architecture in 1994 and moved to the San Francisco Bay Area hoping to be a rock star. Since his first ambition wasn't very successful, Phil turned to the next best job. He found himself as a level designer at Cyclone Studios working on Requiem: Avenging Angel. Over the last ten years, he has also designed levels at Infinite Machine, Knowwonder, and Blizzard North.

John Cook - Software Developer
Formerly of Team Fortress software, John manages online platform development for Team Fortress 2 and other projects. Before that, John studied computer science at RMIT in Australia. John is apparently still suffering jetlag from the move to Seattle, as he doesn't seem to be able to make it in to work until past noon.

Greg Coomer - Product Design / Communications
Prior to joining Valve, Greg helped Microsoft design various software products. Before that, he worked with Nintendo, started and ran a user interface design company, and spent several years as a freelance product designer. Greg helped to name the company "Valve", and then led the first game project that Valve ever cancelled. His secret dream is to create a game called 'Akzidenz-Grotesk'. You know, for kids.

Scott Dalton - Level Designer
Scott began playing and making games at an early age on an Atari 800. After working his way through a variety of machines, he eventually realized it'd be a lot easier to maintain that habit if he was getting paid to do it. He came to Valve after many years creating various games with Legend Entertainment. Aside from level design and game mechanics, he delights in creating particle effects and programming the system that makes them go. When not making worlds come to life, he's usually making them explode, collapse, and burn.

Ariel Diaz - Character Modeler / 3D Artist
Originally from San Juan, Puerto Rico, Ariel came to Valve after finishing studies at the Savannah College of Art and Design. As part of the character design team, he is responsible for creating character models, facial expressions and skeleton deformations. Outside of Valve, he pursues training on traditional art skills such as drawing, painting and sculpting.

Quintin Doroquez - Graphic Designer
"Q!" brings over 10 years of multi-disciplinary graphic design experience to Valve. He has had a creative role in launching print, online, and new media endeavors as a senior art director for Incite PC Gaming magazine, art director for PC Accelerator, and associate art director for PC Gamer. At Valve, you can find Q!'s schedule filled with marketing, packaging, web design, game trailers, .dem file creation, and other visual communications tasks. In his spare time, Q! likes to reminisce about how he was training to be a competitive bodybuilder 14 years ago. Get over it, already!

Mike Dunkle - Source Licensing
Mike joined Valve in 2000 after spending 10 years in senior marketing and business development positions in the semiconductor test and embedded software markets. At Valve, Mike is responsible for Source Engine licensing, Asian distribution, tournament licensing, and general business development. During his spare time Mike likes to play soccer and coaches for a local premier club. Mike’s dream came true when he was able to marry his ideal women, someone who also thinks a soccer game and Guinness make for a great afternoon.

Dhabih Eng - Artist
(pronounced ZA-bee)
Dhabih, who's been playing games since he was six years old, has a degree in Interdisciplinary Art from the University of Washington. He started making a name for himself by doing freelance design work for gaming magazines (Electronic Gaming Monthly, Official Playstation Magazine, PC Gaming World) while still in school. Dhabih has also done web design and worked on the Quake2 TC pack Zaero from Team Evolve. He started at Valve by doing freelance work in mid-1998, and signed on full-time in early February of 1999. Dhabih is truly a world citizen, having grown up in six different countries (Australia, Macau, Canada, China, Taiwan, and the USA). You can find out more about Dhabih and check out some of his work by visiting his website, http://www.sijun.com/.

Katie Engel – Office Manager
Katie immigrated to Valve from the real estate industry. She has a Bachelor's degree in Interdisciplinary Studies from the University of Washington, which makes her uniquely qualified to handle the Interdisciplinary Personnel here at Valve. In addition to managing the office, Katie also assists with most every aspect of administration – and plans damn fine parties.

Chet Faliszek - Writer
We are all still trying to figure out exactly what it is that Chet does at Valve, but at the very least he occupies office space on the 11th floor as self-proclaimed Mr. Awesome.

Adrian Finol - Software Developer
Prior to joining Valve, Adrian contributed to several popular Half-Life MODs and was a founding member of the Front Line Force Team. He landed in Venezuela from Krypton, and began programming at an early age. After years of fighting Lex Luthor, he came to America in search of the perfect donut. He finally achieved what some call "Donut Nirvana," and has successfully acquired the physique of a veteran games programmer.

Moby Francke - Artist
Moby is a character designer for Half Life 2 and the art lead on Team Fortress 2. He brings to Valve academic fine art training with an emphasis in illustration. After graduating from the Academy of Art San Francisco, he worked at Lucas Arts as a conceptual designer, and taught figure painting at the Academy of Art SF. Hes won several prestigious awards, including 2 New York Society of Illustrators Competition Awards. He is originally from the small Caribbean island of St. Thomas, and enjoys the simple things of life.

Kathy Gehrig - Human Resources/Recruiting
Kathy Gehrig was born in Missouri, raised in Kansas, and received a BA in Music from Iowa's Grinnell College. Prior to joining Valve, she performed a 10-year tenure in the IT group at Preston, Gates, and Ellis (now K&L Gates). When she's not busy raising chickens (you can take the girl out of the country, but. . ), playing out with her band, Fall City, or acting professionally, Kathy leads Valve's human resource and recruiting efforts. Please email her if you're interested in joining Valve.

Vitaliy A. Genkin - Software Developer
Having been raised in the vast expanses of the Soviet Union, having lived in Russia, Lithuania and Ukraine, having received a couple of Master's degrees with honors and a lieutenant rank, having architected and implemented software that processed petabytes of binary data by now, having solved thousands of differential equations systems and having played numerous hours of Counter-Strike, Vitaliy went to sunny Santa Monica to help Sony lay the foundation for its PlayStation-3. Afterwards, Valve, amidst miraculous mountains and forests of the State of Washington, became Vitaliy's new home where nowadays he is architechting more code to handle more terabytes of next-gen stuff every day.

Chris Green - Software Developer
Prior to joining Valve, Chris Green worked on such projects as the Amiga Flight Simulator II, Ultima Underworld, the Amiga OS, and Magic:The Gathering Online. He ran his own development studio, Leaping Lizard Software, for 9 years. He's enjoying his new position at Valve working on various pieces of graphics and game technology.

John Guthrie - Level Designer
Along with Steve Bond, John started the influential and popular Internet gaming site, "Quake Command." John was also the co-creator of Quake Airplane and Quake Kart and constructed many of the chambers and corridors in the Black Mesa Research Center.

Jason Holtman - Director of Business Development / Legal Affairs
Jason is Valve's director of business development and works with outside entities pursuing Steam distribution and/or game development atop Source. When he's not playing games, he's playing rhythm guitar with a rock-n-roll outfit called Fall City. Prior to joining Valve, Jason spent a number of years practicing law but got tired of bad lawyer jokes. Plus, after playing Half-Life, he figured joining Valve was the only way to crowbar others with impunity.

Gray Horsfield - Visual Effects Artist
Gray Horsfield started writing in BASIC at age 10 on arguably the first home computer, the Texas Instruments TI99/4a. Gray has since made a decided effort to spend as little time coding as possible, and instead use the tools that better developers turn out. Starting with 3D computer graphics in 1988 for a commercial house in Australia, Gray then moved on to spend 4 years in south east Asia, taking on freelance computer graphics work all over the region. in 1994 Gray joined up with Peter Jackson's new company, Weta, as the 4th employee, and worked on a dozen films in as many years, including The Frighteners, Heavenly Creatures, Contact, Lord of the Rings 1, 2, and 3, Valiant and King Kong. Vindication of his addiction still remains a primary cause for leaving the film industry and joining the ranks at Valve. Hobbies include: blowing stuff up, and blowing other stuff up.

Keith Huggins - Animator
Keith joined Valve from the feature film effects world, having most recently worked on King Kong. He spent two and half years at Weta contributing towards Kong and the last two films of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, with a brief stint at ILM in between projects. Prior to that, he spent five and a half years at Digital Domain in LA. Other films he worked on include: Star Wars: Episode III, How the Grinch Stole Christmas and The Fifth Element, as well as several commercials and music videos. Keith has the unique distinction of being the only person in the world to have animated dialogue for both Gollum and Yoda. When not working on projects at Valve, he can often be found in a casino, wondering aloud about what's with kids these days, putting in a moderate effort to remain fit, or spending time with his wife.

Brandon Idol - Level Designer/Artist
As a child in Appalachia North Carolina, Brandon often receded to the cool embrace of his family’s basement for video gaming, guitar playing, and dreaming of getting paid to do either. In 1996 he began his career after graduating with a degree in computer animation, and has since helped establish the visual style of various games including Final Fantasy IX, Warcraft III, and World of Warcraft. Brandon now spends most of his time at Valve creating backgrounds, pointing spotlights at extreme angles, and being slightly irresponsible with color. He still plays guitar.

Brian Jacobson - Software Developer
As a child, Brian first learned programming in order to crack all the computer games he couldn't afford. After being wracked with years of guilt, he decided to join the games industry to make up for his reprehensible childhood. At LookingGlass, he worked on Flight Unlimited, and then went on to co-found GameFX, and was a lead engineer on Sinistar Unleashed. After a brief stint out of the games industry, he came back to his senses and joined Valve, where he is currently hard at work on Team Fortress 2.

Erik Johnson - Project Manager
Erik began his career as a shoe salesman and later moved up to selling used cars. Deciding that the car business wasn't for him either, he took a job with Sierra Online in the QA department. As one of Sierra's testers for Half-Life, Erik spent a lot of time over at the Valve offices and was eventually offered a job with Valve as shipping manager. Erik's responsibilities include localization, testing, managing the build process, creating demos, and shipping products.

Jakob Jungels - 3D Artist / Animator
Jakob attended school in Indiana while working as the lead 3d Artist, animator and designer for Day of Defeat. In his spare time (ha!), he also had contributed work to America's Army. Eventually moving to the Northwest to work at Valve, Jakob now continues work on DoD as well as other Valve-related projects. Between long work weeks, Jakob tears it up at the local motocross track on his Honda CRF250R dirtbike.

Iikka Keranen - Level Designer
Having escaped (or been let loose?) from a secret bio-research lab in arctic Siberia, Iikka started to design and program games at an early age. However, it wasn't until he began to create levels and mods for games like Doom and Quake that he became known to the world. He left the pack of wolves that had raised him and joined the game industry in 1998 at ION Storm in Dallas, TX. After a few years and many adventures he found himself at Valve in 2001 and hasn't had the urge to bite people ever since.

Dave Kircher - Software Developer
Dave came to Valve as part of the team working on Portal shortly after his graduation from the DigiPen Institute of Technology in 2005. His primary areas of work so far have been Portal physics, Portal graphical effects, and helping with Xbox 360 porting of the source engine. Even though Dave takes pride in his work when it's flawless, he gets his affirmation that he's really in the games industry from the occasional 'breaks every game using the source engine' bug.

Eric Kirchmer - Illustrator / 3D Artist
Eric came to Valve after graduation from the Art Institute of Seattle in 2001. Originally from San Diego, Eric was a freelance illustrator who left the sun to work on more of a healthy monitor complexion. As part of the HL2 team, Eric is responsible for the game's visual density, by modeling everything from cars to broken concrete and debris. In the other few hours of Eric's life he can be found sculpting, raising bansai and working in his sketchbook.

Alden Kroll - Designer
Alden has a habit of ending up in the middle of everything. If he isn't getting in the way of Steam game releases, then he is probably working on UI design for Valve's games or the Steam store. Alden came to Valve after working on design and production for the Xbox 360 Dashboard. Prior to that, he spent his days studying design at the University of Washington and working on various freelance design projects. Outside of work, Alden can usually be found chasing his competitive ambitions in cycling and swimming. Alden commutes to work by swimming across Lake Washington every day. And on most weekends, he relaxes by riding his bike to Portland. Twice.

Marc Laidlaw - Writer
Marc Laidlaw joined Valve in 1997, bringing his experience as an author of weird fiction to bear on creating the Half-Life storyline. He was sole writer on Half-Life and Half-Life 2, and persists as lead writer for the Half-Life 2 Episodes, although he is now accompanied by an actual literary posse in the form of Chet and Erik. His novels include Dad's Nuke, Neon Lotus, Kalifornia, The Orchid Eater, and the award-winning The 37th Mandala, as well as The Third Force (a novel set in the world of the surreal Japanese videogame, Gadget). www.marclaidlaw.com

Jeff Lane - Level Designer
Jeff started his career doing graphic design for the print industry. In a series of leaps and bounds over more than 12 years, he moved into doing graphics for video projects, then graphics for commercial multimedia, and finally graphics for games. He hasn't looked back since. After creating 3D art at Hyperbole Studios on their Quantum Gate interactive movie projects, he spent five years at Sierra Studios, where he worked as an Art Director on Phantasmagoria 2 and, recently, as a Level Designer for SWAT3: CQB before coming to Valve.

Tom Leonard - Software Developer
Immediately prior to joining Valve, Tom was the CTO of Buzzpad, Inc. Before that, he spent five years at Looking Glass Studios, where he was notably the lead programmer of Thief: The Dark Project, writing the AI and core architecture for the game. Tom also had spent seven years working on C++ development tools at Zortech and Symantech.

Doug Lombardi - VP of Marketing
After years in the music industry, Doug decided to get a real job. Then he came to his senses and made the decision to get into the gaming industry instead. During his time in gaming, he has worked on the launch of websites, magazines, and games. As VP of Marketing at Valve, he helps manage and coordinate third-party relations, marketing and press activities.

Randy Lundeen - Level Designer / Graphic Designer
Randy comes to Valve by way of Microsoft, where he worked as an interface designer for the Internet Gaming Zone. Randy designs some of the most unusual and original levels in the company, and he also is the most likely person to be pushing the polygon and memory limits of our engine. In his distant past, he was a key staff member at a potato processing plant (his responsibilities including peeling and potato quality oversight).

Scott Lynch - Chief Operating Officer
Prior to joining Valve, Scott was Senior Vice President at Havas Interactive where he created and managed the Sierra Studios business unit publishing a number of products, including Half-Life. During his 5-year tenure at Sierra, Scott held a number of different positions in business development, acquisitions, finance, investor relations, and product development. Before joining Sierra, Scott worked in the public accounting industry at Coopers and Lybrand where he worked in both the audit and tax departments managing a range of clients from small start-ups to Fortune 500 companies. Scott is a graduate of the University of Washington Business School with a concentration in accounting and is an inactive certified public accountant in the state of Washington.

Ido Magal - Level Designer
Ido is a UC Berkeley computer science drop-out turned professional artist. Prior to joining Valve, where he makes textures and maps for Counter-Strike, he worked at Westwood Studios, making thousands of tiny ground tiles for Red Alert 2. He enjoys photography, foreign films, and advising the President about issues of national importance. His superpower consists of knowing someone is thinking of him when his nose itches, and his weaknesses are Indian food, sharp women, and Tom Waits. To increase your odds of beating Ido's monstrous, all consuming spam filter, include the word WHIPPERSNAPPER in your subject line.

Hamish McKenzie - Technical Artist
What do you get when you give a really lazy animator a computer science class (many, many years ago)? A whole bunch of buttons that make being an animator just a little bit less tedious — or at least so he likes to think. Hamish has worked in both games and film in both the US and Australia, and pretty much loves making stuff move — and pressing buttons.

Gary McTaggart - Software Developer
Gary left the University of Florida in 1995 to pursue a career in programming at 3Dfx Interactive as employee number 11. While there, he created demos that were used to show the potential of Voodoo Graphics hardware. The most notable of these demos are the Valley of Ra and Wizard's Tower. Additionally Gary worked as developer support for other game companies wanting to get the most out of 3dfx's hardware. Gary left 3Dfx with Charlie Brown for a short stint at Ritual Entertainment. After working at Ritual, Gary and Charlie decided to start a new company and do contract work for Electronic Arts. Later, Gary decided that Valve would be the ideal place for him to be able to work on great games and technology without having to worry about the day-to-day operations of a business.

Jason Mitchell - Software Developer
After eight years at ATI, where he headed the 3D Application Research Group, Jason was finally seduced by the entertainment industry and is now putting his 3D graphics hardware knowledge to use on a top-secret project at Valve. Having owned a T-square since birth, Jason has been hard at work making pictures out of geometry ever since. While joining Valve has significantly cut down on Jason's international jet-setting, he's still your man if you're looking for a stuporous late night Tokyo karaoke escapade. http://www.pixelmaven.com/jason/

John Morello II - Animator
Originally from Chesapeake, Virginia, John came to Valve via the MOD community. As lead animator and designer on Day of Defeat, John has spent the majority of the past few years modeling and animating the objects and characters in the popular WWII themed online game.

Bryn Moslow - Network Administrator
Known as "The Man" by those that know him as The Man and "Who?" by most everyone else, Bryn's life has been usurped by the machines. He started on Usenet and IRC from a DEC VAX terminal when Usenet and IRC were useful and may be one of the last people on Earth with a VAXstation still running Ultrix. He and his friend Al built the Internet together but he became disgruntled and left to be a Rock Star when Al took all the credit for it. When the whole Rock Star thing didn't pan out he found himself once again a keyboard-pounding monkey. In the few odd hours he isn't cursing incoherently while facing Redmond he can often be found doing horrible things to his neighbors with a heavily modded Marshall JCM 900 and one of his flock of Telecasters and wondering when the whole Internet fad is going to finally die so he can have a life again.

Marc Nagel - Quality Assurance
Marc started playing games at an early age and then began his career in games as a Game Counselor at Nintendo of America at 19 years old. After years of helping people play games, he wanted to be a part of creating them. After gaining some experience as a tester, he ended up at Sierra Entertainment for 6 years as a Test Lead – the highlight, of course, being the lead on the Half-Life series for 3.5 years as well as the lead on Opposing Forces, Half-Life PS2, Counter-Strike, Blue Shift and many patches, to name a few. After Sierra shut down, he went to work for Microsoft in IT. Then, EJ kicked him – hard. Now he’s back in the world of the living making sure the Zombie you kill blows up real good.

Arsenio N. Navarro II - Cyber Café Program
Arsenio has achieved bliss managing and administering Cybercafé, Academic, and Tournament licensing for Valve. In his spare time he brings the noise.