My second Game Design/Development Grandparent is Kim Swift. She was born in 1983 and for a women in her early thirties she has accomplished quite a lot. She is most known for her work with Valve on the Portal, Half-Life, and Left 4 Dead series. The reason she is one of my Game Design/Development Grandparents is because of here work on the Portal series (mainly Portal since she left Valve for Airtight Games halfway through the development of Portal 2). She is an inspiration to me because prior to working on Portal she was a student at DigiPen Institute of Technology. For her senior project, her and group of fellow students worked as a team to create a game called Narbacular Drop. Any true Portal fan knows that Narbacular Drop is the predecessor to Portal. Gabe Newell, the then president of Valve, saw the team demo Narbacular Drop at DigiPen and asked the team then and there if they would want to develop a game for Valve. The entire team was hired by Valve directly out of college and went on to develop the extremely successful game that is Portal. This type of success story speaks very strongly to me and I'm sure it does to other aspiring game developers as well. It just goes to show that any project, even a project for a class in college, can go on to become something big if given the right attention. I would describe her influence on games to someone not familiar with the games field by saying that she worked on many of Valve's successful games and should serve as an inspiration for college students (or anyone else) that is an aspiring game developer.
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