'I donate to the Guardian, so I'm paying you." So begins Chet Faliszek as we sit down to lunch in one of the San Francisco hotels that satellite around the Game Developers Conference. One of the industry's most respected comedy writers and lead developers, the 53-year-old is here to recruit developers to his new studio Stray Bombay, named after his pet cat Boris. With Riot Games veteran and AI expert Dr Kimberly Voll, he is leading a studio that will focus on smart cooperative video games, made for (they say) smart cooperative players. It quickly becomes clear just how much cooperation has been a vital part of Faliszek's life, from pivotal relationships growing up in Parma, Cleveland, to a comedy writing double-act at infamous early-internet website Old Man Murray, to his run of successful collaborations at a behemoth developer, Valve. With every key moment in his life, he cites the generosity of another person, a pattern which appears to have informed his entire approach to games development, and the sorts of games he wants to make. At 17, in the early 80s, Faliszek had dropped out of a computer-science college course. "I was taking a course in [programming language] Fortran," he explains, "and one time I tripped and dropped my punchcards.

Marc Laidlaw's departure from Valve last year was a shock. The author was responsible for single-handedly writing both Half-Life and Half-Life 2, and worked as the story lead on the latter's two episodic sequels. Chet Faliszek and Erik Wolpaw, co-writers on Half-Life 2: Episode One and Episode Two, stuck around however, meaning some of the series' writing talent still remained at Valve. In February of this year, Wolpaw departed Valve to work on Psychonauts 2, and today GamesIndustry.biz reports that Faliszek has also left the company. The pair have a long history together: they ran the highly influential gaming site Old Man Murray through the late '90s and early '00s, before both joining Valve.