Old Man Murray Expounds on the Portal Cake

Rock, Paper, Shotgun published an in-depth, probing and philosophical interview with Valve's new king of comedy and the writer of Portal, Erik Wolpaw.

In the interview with RPS' John Walker, Wolpaw refers to the complete works of August Strindberg as "100% pure crap," wonders why he wasn't fired from Valve in the first two weeks of his employment, and takes measures to explain the deep, almost Jungian beginnings of Portal's cake payoff:

At the beginning of the Portal development process, we sat down as a group to decide what philosopher or school of philosophy our game would be based on. That was followed by about fifteen minutes of silence and then someone mentioned that a lot of people like cake.

Earlier in the interview he meditates on the current crop of games boasting in-depth story lines:

"There are lots of message games coming out now. Like they've got something really important to get off their chest about the war in Iraq or the player is forced to make some dicey underwater moral choices."

Portal is the first game Wolpaw has written for Valve. He co-founded the now defunct game review website Old Man Murray.