Robin Walker (game designer)

Robin Walker (born 1975) is an Australian video game designer best known for co-developing Quake Team Fortress, Team Fortress Classic, Team Fortress 2, and Half-Life: Alyx.

Robin Walker
Walker in 2013
Born	1975 or 1976 (age 48–49)[1]
Nationality	Australian
Alma mater	RMIT
Occupation	Video game designer

Career

Walker at Steam Dev Days 2014

Walker attended RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia.^[2]

Together with John Cook and Ian Caughley, Walker started working on Team Fortress as a mod for id Software's QuakeWorld in 1996. Due to the popularity of the product, the team was hired by the then-small Valve to work on Team Fortress Classic and later on Team Fortress 2.^[3][4]

Walker has played development roles in various Valve games, including Half-Life 2 and Dota 2.^[5][6] More recently, Walker has been focused on the collision of economics and game design, in an attempt to transform Team Fortress 2 into a free-to-play, microtransaction-based game.^[7] Walker worked on Valve's flagship virtual reality game, Half-Life: Alyx, released on March 23, 2020.^[8]

Influences and philosophy

Walker used Team Fortress 2 updates to research what additional features are and aren't popular. The results of which he has used for the development of Dota 2,^[6] as well as for later Team Fortress 2 updates. Walker also stated that he cannot guarantee that he would keep working on Team Fortress 2 indefinitely and that at some point, he will move on to a new project.^[9]

Walker believes in the importance of communication between players and developers of modern PC games, stating that "being close to your customers – being able to talk directly to your customers – is valuable." In his experience, successful multiplayer games "innovate in gameplay both on release, but also over time post-release, and that those innovations are significant and of interest to customers."^[10]

Walker is notably not worried about video game piracy, stating that to fight piracy, he is "looking at the things that pirates are providing and asking [himself] how [he] can provide something better than that." By releasing frequent updates of his games after launch, he constantly improves on his games in a way that pirates could not keep up with.^[10][11] Walker is a supporter of the free-to-play model, as he says that the model supports a wider variety of customers, including those with "very little money," and that such a variety of players results in greater opportunities for richer experiences.^[12][13]

Selected credits

Year	Game title
1996	Team Fortress (Quake modification)
1998	Half-Life
1999	Team Fortress Classic
2000	Counter-Strike
2000	Gunman Chronicles
2004	Half-Life 2
2005	Half-Life 2: Lost Coast
2006	Half-Life 2: Episode One
2007	Half-Life 2: Episode Two
2007	Portal
2007	Team Fortress 2
2008	Left 4 Dead
2009	Left 4 Dead 2
2011	Portal 2
2013	Dota 2
2020	Half-Life: Alyx