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Old Man Murray Vets To Make Portal Funny 49

Posted by Zonk from the i-miss-the-old-man dept.
Via Joystiq, an article at the GameInformer site generally about Valve's upcoming plans for Half-Life, Team Fortress, and Portal. In that article, they mention that some of the writing for Portal is being handled by veterans from the Old Man Murray site. From the article: "When you have that style of game it could just be very stale and very dry. It's just puzzle solving and you could put in a little techno music in the background and leave it at that. But we thought it would be much more interesting if we introduced this idea of the narrator. The original idea came from the training room in Half-Life 1 where you had that voice that was talking to you and whatnot. She was a little bit cynical, but not nearly as so as the voice in Portal. The writing for that is being done by Chet [Faliszek] and Erik [Wolpaw] who used to be Old Man Murray. They're at Valve now and one of their first projects they've been tasked with is to do the writing for Portal. So if you were a fan of Old Man Murray you're going to be a fan of that voice in Portal because it's the same wry cynicism."
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Old Man Murray Vets To Make Portal Funny More

Old Man Murray Vets To Make Portal Funny

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  • Who is Old Man Murray? Please, I want a human answer, not Google.
  • [A rant about how everything sucks.]

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by dr_dank ( 472072 )
      You'll be eating your words once they introduce Team Fortress 2: Fat Chicks in Party Hats

  • w00t! (Score:5, Informative)

    by bunions ( 970377 ) on Thursday August 31, 2006 @11:58AM (#16016371)
    OMM was 10lbs of awesome stuffed into a 5lb sack.

    Allow me to present Exhibit A: http://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/39.html [oldmanmurray.com]


    erik: Die Hard Trilogy 2 just keeps getting better. It defies logic.
    Chet: I can't believe it's so much better than Doom.
    erik: Science is not about your feelings.


    Ladies and gentlemen, I rest my case.
    • It's amazing to me that this is a six year old article, and yet I knew exactly which one it was from the quote you pulled. It's still damn funny.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by pchan- ( 118053 )
      All I can say is SWEET.

      I hope there are minigames like Alien vs. Child Predator or that you get to play Mayor Haggar on a mission from the devil.

      I can see it now:
      "Oh, a sewer level. I guess this is the point where the developers said 'fuck it, I'm out of ideas. Let's just have you go through a sewer.'"

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by sskang ( 567081 )

      So I went to check out this site, and in there I found this gem:

      Attack that, and Uncle Sam's gonna plant his submarine-lauched-missile-shaped foot up Ganesh's giant elephant ass so hard it'll make this last attack on the World Trade Center look like the first time you Arab idiots bombed it.

      So he's can't tell an Indian from an Arab from a Muslim from a Hindu from a hole in the ground. But that's ok, because bigots need to grieve too. When he's not in the throes of nationalistic (-white) symbolic pain, I'

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by bunions ( 970377 )
        (a) in the same article he states "Gaming has effectively turned me into a mummy - a motionless,dessicated South American mummy like you'd see on Nova, though, not the Egyptian kind that can climb walls and punch a hole through your chest."

        (b) sometimes on humor sites the webmasters will write articles that consists of several jokes [wikipedia.org]. It might be edifying for you to further research this phenomenon.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by sskang ( 567081 )
          Oh thank you, I feel edified. I now understand how ignorance becomes funny when it is published on a gaming jokes website.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by bunions ( 970377 )
            Glad to help. I'll do whatever I can to help those trying to overcome their crippling lack of a sense of humor. Keep reaching for the stars, sskang!

            • Re: (Score:1)

              by sskang ( 567081 )
              Excellent, then as your pupil I hope engage your services one last time. Does it count as humour to suggest that US civil engineers and architects come up with buildings with integrated AWACS and wheels? I shall consider your reply part of my ongoing education.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by bunions ( 970377 )
                I guess that would depend whether your intent was to amuse. If so, welcome to lafftown, population: YOU! If you were serious, then you're an idiot. Humor can be a wily foe!

                • Re: (Score:1)

                  by sskang ( 567081 )
                  Shame. would it have helped if I had placed the comment on an Arab gaming joke site?

                  • Re: (Score:2)

                    by bunions ( 970377 )
                    Probably. See, that's the trick: sometimes things that are offensive when said seriously can be funny when they're phrased in joke form. Or rather, they can be to people who aren't too busy being self-righteously indignant for no discernable reason.

                    • Re: (Score:1)

                      by sskang ( 567081 )

                      Well I'm taking away a different lesson - when a gentleman with a proven track record of making adolescent jokes about people's ethnicity like "Jewy Jewenstein", happens to make one that only appears, we must assume, to stem from ignorance, well then that's funny. On the other hand, when an unknown person from another country makes a joke about a landmark tragedy in a foreign country without a previous record of doing so, then that's not funny. I suppose the moral of the story is to develop a reputation for

                    • Re: (Score:2)

                      by bunions ( 970377 )
                      > On the other hand, when an unknown person from another country makes a joke about a landmark tragedy in a foreign country without a previous record of doing so, then that's not funny.

                      I don't think that's true at all.

                      But hey, don't let me get in the way of your misplaced feelings of self-righteous indignation.
  • Could be interesting. But there better be an option to turn that voice off. I can see it getting really irritating, really fast.

  • Crates! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 31, 2006 @12:05PM (#16016429)
    I wonder how Portal will do on the Time To Crate game ranking system?
  • Wow. This game just keeps getting gooder and gooderer. I'm excited.
  • Somewhere all the disembodied narrators of Infocom games of the past just heaved a collective sigh. It's also been done recently. The narrator/character banter in the most recent Bard's Tale was also pretty good. Not sure if I'm all that jazzed about this.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Frac ( 27516 ) *
      Somewhere all the disembodied narrators of Infocom games of the past just heaved a collective sigh. It's also been done recently. The narrator/character banter in the most recent Bard's Tale was also pretty good. Not sure if I'm all that jazzed about this.

      We're excited because we're big fans of Old Man Murrary, and we're happy to see Chet and Erik putting their writing talents behind a game. We don't care whether sarcastic narration is ground breaking for not, but thanks for your "this isn't new, this is no
    • I wasted 30 minutes of my life on the new Bard's Tale. It thought it was *far* more funny than it actually was, and the cutscenes took far too much time to go through (and didn't have an obivous way to skip forward while acquiring the content through textual subtitles). I have very little time to spend on gaming, so I *really* don't appreciate it when those games I do play waste my time. (Well, waste my time without providing the expected level of entertainment in return).

      That said -- if I'm looking for goo
  • of including sarcastic narration, 3D Realms will be announcing that Duke Nukem Forever will include narration by the crew from MST3K!

  • Now, from the people who brought you the Long Cut Scene - the Sarcastic Narrator.

    This could get old really fast. Especially if you have to listen to the same narration every time.

  • If at first you don't succeed, you fail.
  • Erik Wolpaw also co-wrote Double Fine's Psychonauts [psychonauts.com], and won a Game Developers Choice Award [gamespy.com] for that effort.

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