Erik Wolpaw, co-writer of Portal and Portal 2 adores Burnout Paradise and has 1,500 hours in Slay the Spire: ‘This is the perfect level of strategy’

Erik Wolpaw’s first encounter with computer gaming was on a TRS-80 in his high-school library. “It was one of the Scott Adams adventures. I don’t remember the exact name, but it’s the haunted mansion one,” Wolpaw says. “They are very crude at this point, but at the time I couldn’t believe it, and that was it. That was my goal for years after that. I wanted to get a computer.”

Wolpaw’s fascination with games would lead him to become a journalist, writing for sites like Gamespot and the legendary games website Old Man Murray, which he co-founded with Chet Faliszek. In 2004, Wolpaw joined Valve along with Faliszek, writing for games like Half-Life 2’s episodes and Team Fortress 2, as well as the brilliantly innovative Portal and its hilarious sequel.

Wolpaw took a break from penning Valve games to guide me through the white-panelled test chambers of his PC, a journey that took us from the deepest dungeons to the heights of two very popular spires.

What game are you currently playing?

I’m currently playing, exclusively, Slay the Spire 2. I’m either playing it solo … or playing it co-op with my son.

Co-op’s phenomenal. Like most of it, it may not be perfectly balanced yet. I don’t know it for a fact, [but] I think two players may be the most unbalanced. It gets harder two-player and then starts to get easier at three and four-player. This is my suspicion, and what I’ve heard from other people. We’re still having a good time, even though it’s hard. We were in Ascension 10.

There’s still a novelty factor to it, in terms of it just being Slay the Spire, but more stuff and different stuff. It’s not as balanced as Slay the Spire 1 yet. But it’s also exciting because I trust them, because they balanced Slay the Spire 1 as well as any card game has ever been balanced. I trust that they’ll do it here.

Now I’m just going to talk about them [both] … it’s the exact, perfect level of decision making and cognitive load for my brain. Games like Crusader Kings or something are too much for me. I can’t wrap my head around [them]. This is the perfect level of strategy. There’s an interesting decision to be made on a real, regular basis. But if you play Ascension, well, in Slay the Spire 1, Ascension 20 and go for heart kills, it’s a coin flip whether you’re going to get there or not.

Every run, there’s a sense of optimism that I’m gonna build something great and I’m gonna win. It’s just a very comfortable, yet mentally engaging experience.

What was the previous game you played, and is it still installed?

Before Slay the Spire 2 came out, I was playing a bunch of Nioh 3. I didn’t get all the way to the end. I probably got three quarters of the way through. And then Slay the Spire 2 came out, and that was it.

Slay the Spire is number one in my heart, but I like all the Dark Souls games, and all the Souls games. Play them all, in fact … but Nioh is my second favourite soulslike. I played the crap out of Nioh 1. Nioh 2 must have come out when something was going on, because I don’t think I ever solved Nioh 2. And I guess, technically, I haven’t solved Nioh 3 or beaten it.

It’s sort of Dark Souls mixed with a Diablo-style loot system. There’s a lot of loot. But I like it because it’s like samurai and ninja. You switch between two characters on the fly, and one of them is more manoeuvrable than the other.

By the time I stopped playing, I had basically abandoned [the samurai] the heavy weapons person … the ninja class has more ranged stuff. In Souls games, I’m a classic “Try to stand back just beyond their aggro range [and] cheese them to death.”

What is the oldest game (by release date) currently installed on your PC?

If we ignore ROMs—I mean that would be the oldest, I have some Atari 2600 games—but the actual oldest is a game I loved back in the day, which is Myth 2.

About three years ago, I was like “Man, I want to play Myth 2,” but it doesn’t run on modern systems, and then I found a whole bunch of mods and stuff, and I spent a weekend trying to get it to work. And I never did, but it stays on my system because I keep thinking I’m going to go back and figure it out.

It was such a great game, Myth 1 and Myth 2. Myth 3 they outsourced, I think, to someone else and I think it wasn’t as good. I do wish they would just sell [it]. Maybe nobody wants Myth anymore.

What is the highest number of hours you have in any given game, according to Steam?

The highest is Slay the Spire at 1,500 hours, which is undercounting it because I also play a ton of it on my phone. At first it was PC, but for the last couple of years it’s almost exclusively phone.

Number two, and I think there’s something wrong here—not that I think Steam is miscounting, but maybe I went on vacation and left it running—is Dark Souls 3, which I apparently have 571 hours in. But that can’t be right. I don’t play the multiplayer in Dark Souls, so I didn’t play it for 571 hours.

Number three—I know you haven’t asked me to run them down, but it’s only because there’s a couple of interesting ones—number three is Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen [at] 450 hours. And that, I think, may actually be just correct. I played that game on the Dark Arisen [expansion], where you had that endless dungeon you could just go through.

I enjoyed the combat. The pawn system was pretty cool. I’m a sucker for the most generic “Go into a dungeon and go through the dungeon” type of games. Love them. So it was a good version of that … I scoured every corner of that world before I finished it. But then Dark Arisen, that dungeon you could just keep playing and playing, it hooked me.

What game will you never, ever uninstall?

Again, as the outlier, never gonna uninstall Slay the Spire. But the game I probably won’t ever uninstall is Burnout Paradise.

I love that game and I play it once a year. I already did it this year. There’s something about that game that I can’t quite quantify. I know people miss the old Burnout, where it was more crash oriented, but I think it’s just a tremendous open world racing game.

There’s this thing that Burnout Paradise does, this kind of press your luck … you’re going down these city streets at just uncontrolled speed. Like you’re going to crash at any second, but if you can knock another guy off, you get a quick scene of him eating shit and then it just resets you. So there’s this risk-reward of “I am moments away from totalling this car, but if I can just rub this guy into the side wall and flip him over, I’m okay”.

There’s something about that very specific—I mean, I like a lot of other parts about the game—but that very specific thing, I never get tired of. It’s satisfying every single time.

What game will you never, ever uninstall?

Well, nowadays I probably could live without it. But there’s a database program package called FoxPro. In the ’90s I was a database programmer, and this is what we used.

It was its own thing by Fox software, but at some point Microsoft bought it. So it actually was a Microsoft product for a while, and it’s an integrated light database with a scripting language attached to it. I work with it every day. I’m getting to the age where I forget things routinely, but I have not forgotten anything about FoxPro. It’s right here on my quick launch bar.

Anytime I need something that needs to work with data or something, I would use it. Every single Valve Game I worked on from 2004—I didn’t use it on [Half-Life]: Alyx, that’s where I stopped and switched over to using Excel—but they all used FoxPro for maintaining a database of all the dialogue and everything.

How tidy is your desktop screen?

I would say the left-hand side of my desktop is very tidy looking, but it’s just a repository of neatly arranged icons. I don’t know how they got there. I don’t use them. And so instead of cleaning it up, what I do is drag things that I’m currently using over to the right side of the screen. Doesn’t look neat, but there’s more open space.

Up here on my neatly arranged left-hand side. I’ve got a shortcut for Ubisoft Connect. I don’t know why it’s there. I don’t think I’ve ever used Ubisoft Connect. There’s an icon for Battle.net. I haven’t gone on Battle.net in forever. I could probably delete that. There’s something called “TechPowerUp GPU-Z”. What’s that for? I don’t know.

It’s not horrible. I’ve seen much worse. Two years ago, maybe even more, I bought Windows Pane, or WindowBlinds or something. It’s supposed to let you organise the icons [on your screen]. It looked pretty nice, but as far as I got was buying it. I didn’t actually use it. There’s probably an icon for it.