Audio Interview with Gearbox Software

3rd November 2012

Single Player First Person Shooter Maps and Mods for Half-Life 1, 2 and Episodes 1, 2 and 3

Randy graciously agreed to spend some time with me to chat about the creation of Opposing Force and Blue Shift.

At the last moment, we were joined by Stephen Bahl, Matt Armstrong and Patrick Deupree.

We chat about Opposing Force and Blue Shift.

Now for the bad news. There was an issue with the recording and the sound stopped 30 minutes or so into a 45 minute recording. Please accept my apologies.

Listen to the interview

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Audio Interview with Gearbox Software: 31 minutes – 61 MB
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Brief Bios

Randy Pitchford – Joint Founder and CEO
Randy is one of three owners and founders of Gearbox software and under his guidance as President and CEO, Gearbox has grown from an idea into a leading independent game development studio with titles that have sold over 30 million units worldwide earning over $1 billion.

Stephen Bahl Joint Founder and CFO
Stephen, in addition to being Gearbox’s chief financial officer, is a power-house of 3d game content development. Primarily focusing on weapon design and creation, Stephen has modeled, textured and animated a large majority of the weapons seen in Gearbox’s first person action titles.
Did you know he used to be a professional magician?

Matt Armstrong – Franchise Director
Twenty years ago Matthew Armstrong was banned from his homeland. He was classed as a madman — a charlatan — outlawed in the world of science which previously honored him as a genius. Now here in this forsaken jungle hell, Mr. Armstrong has proven that he is alright.

Patrick Deupree – Lead Programmer
Patrick came to Gearbox Software in 1998 after working previously at Ion Storm on Anachronox. Prior to that he has contributed to many titles including Dominion, Monty Python And The Quest For The Holy Grail, and Arcade America. He started down the path of a game developer by programming home games on the Apple II in 1982. Before getting into professional game programming Patrick worked on two non-game commercial products: Actor, an object oriented programming language for Windows, and PyWare 3D, a tool to choreograph marching band drills in a 2D/3D environment…

7 Comments

  1. That was a really cool interview, it’s great that people in the industry will take part in sites like this one. It’s a shame about the sound problems but these things happen.

  2. Thanks for the interview Phillip,
    I always find these fascinating,,
    “I just rang Gabe and asked”
    I laughed out loud at that!

  3. Unq

    Yep, very cool interview. The Gearbox guys are really good sports, glad they did this interview.

    Also glad they mentioned how a couple of the guys were hired – I remember Matt Armstrong releasing a couple of very cool TFC maps (Darkness & Darkness 2). And it’s also nice to hear how they tracked down Sean Cavanaugh (“Zoner” of Zoner’s Half-Life Tools) and hired him.

    Too bad the sound cut out, hope we didn’t miss too much.

  4. Barnz

    Great work, Phillip.

    1. Thank you, but I feel this was one of my worst interviews. I really didn’t ask great questions or follow up some points. Lucky, the interviewees had lots of interesting things to say.

  5. VCD Konex

    It was a great interview, I love knowing what happens in the behind the scenes of development

  6. Herr_Alien

    Loved the interview. It is quite surprising to see somebody as Gabe or Randy doing interviews for dedicated sites as Podcast 17 or PlanetPhillip. Good for them, and lucky us.

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