[DH] What do you feel is going to be the most important development in gaming over the next few years?

[Doug Lombardi] It's hard to say what will be the most important. Certainly one area in which we feel there is still much room for innovation is in the online space. Obviously, the PC has been a viable format for online gaming for some time now. But only recently has that really meant anything more than deathmatching. And the majority of PC games released today still send customers chasing for a magical patch and do a horrible job of connecting players, let alone players who are evenly matched. In addition to cleaning all this up and executing more interesting game designs for large group of people, I think we'll also see subsets of games that are detachable and interoperable with handhelds and/or consoles, that can then be reconciled to the main game which is played on the PC.

[DH] As the release date nears what are the current minimum CPU/Memory and graphics card requirements in order to run Half-Life 2? Has this changed considerably between your original planned min specs or has it remained relatively close?

[Doug Lombardi] The min spec is: 1.2 GHz Processor, 256MB RAM, DirectX 7 level graphics card, Windows 2000/XP/ME/98, Mouse, Keyboard