Grubbing around for some original content to post on Kotaku this week, I came across some interviews I wrote for the now-defunct Videogamedesign.com – which, odd fact fans, was acquired by previous Kotaku guest blogger Geoff Keighley, and then seems to have blinked out of existence.

Luckily, I still have copies of the 1997-1998 chats with interesting game developers archived somewhere obscure, and I thought it might be fun to reprint highlights here on Kotaku, and compare and contrast them to what’s happened to their careers since then – and how their statements have held up over time.

We’ll start out with sci-fi author and Half-Life series guru Marc Laidlaw, whom I chatted to in late 1997, significantly before the game’s November 1998 debut, and a few months after the writer got hired at Valve.