Valve Corporation is a video game developer that set out to make their first game, Half-Life, in 1996. The team at Valve had given themselves a year to build out the game, but 1 month before their initial target release date they realized they had a fully functioning product that felt disconnected, mediocre and was not fun to play. Instead of pushing the release back a few months and smoothing over issues, they made the difficult decision to start from the beginning and rework the game in its entirety. The resulting rework became a groundbreaking success, but not before entirely re-organizing Valve’s internal structure and development processes.
The first version of the game that Valve developed was not a complete write-off, there were still elements which were interesting in their own right. The team first began by picking these aspects out of every level and combining them into a single prototype level where everything that felt fun was expanded on and anything that stopped being so was removed. This work was done by a small subset of the team for 1 month, while everyone else remained on standby. The end result was one level of a game that met their vision and that they now needed to build 17 more of. The next step was to analyze this level and figure out exactly why it was fun to play. The team found 3 theories that likely created a good gameplay experience in their prototype level:
The team then spent the next 11 months hiring a game designer to bring all these pieces together, but soon came to the conclusion that a single person who could do this work did not exist. Instead they created their own entity composed of a cross section of the entire company, which they called the “Cabal”.
The Cabal consisted of three engineers and one level designer, writer and animator, representing all the major teams at Valve, as well as all the necessary groups needed for the project. Additionally, these members were chosen as they all had strong product experience and who could directly implement the ideas the Cabal would be pitching and refining.
Meeting four days a week, six hours a day for the next five months, the Cabal then opened up its membership to rotate between various Valve employees with two things remaining constant: every rotation still represented a cross-section of the team, and at least a few members of the previous membership would stay on to maintain continuity and direction. Throughout the process, a professional writer was assigned to follow the entire storyline and maintained the entire document which captured the new design for the game. Testing and iterative feedback collection was integrated into the Cabal process by month three allowing for a regular improvement..
The Cabal was an organizational change management protocol that helped achieve the cross-team collaboration required to produce Half-Life. It encouraged individuals to be personally invested in the design, as opposed to different aspects being owned by a single person or team. As Ken Birdwell, Valve’s senior developer at the time, writes, “the entire game design becomes ‘ours’,” resulting in an energizing collaborative process and a consistent level of ideation and polish that was not previously possible. The Cabal helped maximize individual strengths and impact, while minimizing individual weaknesses; any part of the new game could be traced back directly to at least 10 different people. Additionally, the continuous feedback and interfacing with users through a cycle of play-testing, reviewing and editing allowed the team to overcome egos and personal conflict by interfacing with reality more often. The play-testing was a form of objective feedback and as most of the design was created by the group and not just one individual, there was no central authority to take up arms with. The final result of the Cabal was a 200-page document detailing the new version of the game. Once implemented, the new Half-Life went on to win over 50 Game of the Year awards and become one of the most influential First-Person Shooter games ever made. Today, Valve employs over 250 people and still retains the ethos and agility of a small startup.
Protocols for large-scale projects with multiple moving parts and requiring diverse expertise can benefit from structured, but open and permissionless input. While this may initially result in more energy-intensive activities and increased tensions between team members, over time these concerns are offset and counteracted by greater group participation and ownership of a particular outcome.