PC Gamer reports that Jay Pinkerton, a co-writer for the popular first-person puzzle game Portal 2 is back at Valve. Pinkerton left the company last summer, alongside several other high-ranking Valve employees. It’s not clear what Pinkerton is working on at the moment.
Reddit user OWLverlord spotted the return of Pinkerton on Valve’s own website, listed under “Other Experts” on Valve’s staff page. But what is the esteemed game writer doing there now?
Besides co-penning the script for Portal 2, Pinkerton has also worked on Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2. He also did non-game work for Valve, like the Team Fortess2 comics. After joining Valve ten years ago in 2008, Pinkerton left in the same year in which two other prominent writers at Valve departed. Erik Wolpaw and Chet Faliszek left Valve earlier in 2017, which sent shockwaves across the internet.
Only a year prior to the departure of these three writers who worked on legendary Valve games like the Half-Life and Portal series, legendary Valve writer Marc Laidlaw decided to leave Valve. With almost the entire writing staff who were responsible for most of Valve’s narrative-driven games gone, fans were anxious about the future direction Valve was heading towards.
After all, the early days of Valve where the small and ambitious team, spearheaded by ex-Microsoft employees Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington, strove for immersive singleplayer experiences were long gone, to the dismay of many gamers. But this doesn’t mean Valve became less successful, quite the opposite in fact. After kickstarting the digital distribution service Steam in 2003, the company achieved almost a monopoly on PC gaming.
Coupled with the ever rising trend of multiplayer games, Valve struck gold multiple times with their hit FPS Counter-Strike series, Team Fortress 2 and DOTA 2. Each of them featuring an immensely profitable in-game economy with microtransactions.
After Portal 2 released in 2011, it got quiet regards traditional singleplayer games at Valve. Fans never got a conclusion the story set up in Half-Life 2 and likewise neither Portal nor Left 4 Dead received a third game in their series. All while Steam became larger and larger, with Valve’s multiplayer games staying very high on player charts.
It was only natural that writers left the company, since there was really not much work for them to do. Keeping all this in mind, the return of Jay Pinkerton gets a whole new meaning. Could this mean Valve is actually working on a sequel to Portal 2? Or maybe a third Left 4 Dead? Or is it actually the big one, Half-Life 3? Nothing more than speculation at this time and it might very well be work on a new Team Fortress 2 comic or maybe for Valve’s unreleased card game Artifact. And there’s still the possibility of a Portal movie adaptation.
We’ll have to wait to see how this develops but if there’s one thing we learned from Valve, it’s that the wait can end up quite long.
