As a Science Fiction and Horror writer, what were your favourite novels from these genres growing up and more recently. How strongly did they inspire you're writing?

I wish I could say I read indiscriminately, but really I avoided most books that weren’t fantasy, science fiction or horror—starting with The Journey to the Mushroom Planet and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and all the gruesome Poe I could get my hands on. I read so many it would be hard to pick a favorite…it’d be like picking your favorite cloud on a particularly cloudy day, or the best wave in a stormy sea. As soon as I think of one, another one comes along.

I had the usual Lovecraft fascination in my teens, when only fans of weird fiction knew about him…before his penetration into pop culture via the Call of Cthulhu games and Stuart Gordon’s films. It’s odd to encounter people who know so much Lovecraftian material and yet have never read a word he’s written. My science fiction interests eventually centered on Philip K. Dick. I guess the point at which I was reading SF as it was being written was a very memorable and charged time for me.

I think of neglected dystopian classics like John Brunner’s The Sheep Look Up and Stand on Zanzibar. I loved pretty much all the dystopian novels of the day. For fantasy? I plowed through the Ballentine Adult Fantasy series, and chomped down all that Dunsany and Eddings and of course more of the Weird Tales crew such as Clark Ashton Smith. At the same time, I had a strong love for satire, so writers like John Sladek and Tom Disch stood out for me--goofballs like Ron Goulart. I don’t know. It’d be easier to come up with a list of writers I hated. But I would never do that!

Don’t forget, in Half-Life, you could play as an absolute maniac, murdering your peers with crowbars and grenades, and having a great time while you did it.

What was/is the attraction for you to storytelling in games?

The attraction initially was partly that was the frontier. It’s pretty hard to find that in writing fiction—obviously a lot of talented people have been writing prose for quite a while. I thought that as a writer of prose I was probably never going to be one of the greats, I stood a better chance of making an impact in a field that hadn’t already been worked over. So, pioneering was a big attraction. I am attracted to storytelling in every form: movies, books, email…it was impossible to suppress excitement over the possibilities of telling new types of stories, or telling old stories in new ways, in the medium of games. Fifteen years of working at this, and the goal seems to recede as fast as I chase it.

Who (or what) were your inspirations for Gordon Freeman?