Gabe Newell Told Hollywood No Thanks To Movies Based On Half-Life And Left 4 Dead

Gabe Newell, the man responsible for much of the PC gaming landscape, was recently featured on the Nerdist podcast. In two separate episodes actually, and a variety of subject matter was touched upon.

Though most interesting of them all might be the revelation that Hollywood has knocked on the door of his company. A number of big screen renditions of various Valve properties were proposed, including Half-Life and Left 4 Dead.

But according to Polygon, it was simply not meant to be. In fact, they're the reason why Source Filmmaker was invented in the first place, in a round about fashion:

"Part of the reason we started Source Filmmaker was that the ideas were so terrible… They didn't understand why people were fans of the things that we had. They weren't capturing it, they were picking some detail that jumped out at them without ever being enthusiastic or passionate about it and saying, ‘well, we'll do this.'"

Not surprisingly, many of the ideas proposed were God-awful, and indicative of someone who had zero familiarity with the source material:

"There really were people who came to us with proposals of: ‘Okay, it's Half-Life 1, and there are horses, and it's a cavalry charge, and it's high-tech carbon armor on the horses… And we were like, ‘What the fuck are you talking about? Have you even played this?'"

Newell also mentioned how Valve is working on an official 15-minute Team Fortress 2 short film, using Source Filmmaker naturally.